Not too much of a good thing: MQ V9.0.3

After a gap of a few months I blogged earlier today about deploying MQ Queue Managers in a DMZ so it might seem a bit much to be blogging again so soon. However I will try to keep it short and snappy so you find these entries like a Japanese meal – small portions, but so many courses! And of course, delicious.

So it wasn’t long ago – just March – when I blogged about MQ V9.0.2 on MQ and MQ Advanced on distributed platforms and MQ V9.0.2 on the MQ Appliance. Remember that IBM is delivering MQ V9 as a continuous delivery release. This means that we deliver smallish amounts of hopefully easily consumable and usable function. And these functions, on the whole, will build incrementally to deliver eventually a substantial piece of new function.

 

One of these ongoing deliverables, that has been building over the last few releases is the growing REST API for administration of MQ. New capabilities in this release include read and update of the queue manager configuration, plus querying of the status.

 

Also, on top of the enhancements made to MQ Managed File Transfer, available with MQ Advanced or MQ Appliance, delivered in MQ V9.0.0, V9.0.1 and V9.0.2, there are even more usability enhancements in this release, focusing on problem determination when there may have been an issue in the completion of a file transfer. This is in addition to the license changes made recently that makes this far more attractive for deploying MQ MFT Agents widely through the business.

 

And for the MQ Appliance there was an update to allow an easier transition for some configurations to move to use the end to end encryption provided by MQ AMS when some MQ Clients may not support it, by doing the encryption on the MQ Appliance rather than the MQ Client side.

 

There are now announcement letters for MQ V9.0.3 and MQ Appliance V9.0.3 updates published but perhaps some of the most interesting updates of the MQ V9.0.3 releases was on the z/OS offering. There is already an announcement  letter about this – but this update specifically targeted the MQ Advanced for z/OS Value Unit Edition offering with a set of unique extensions for this delivered as a connector pack on top of the core MQ Advanced for z/OS VUE offering.

This connector pack included a Bridge to Blockchain, allowing MQ Advanced for z/OS VUE to query information on the Blockchain. Also there are changes to the licensing and deployment model of MQ Managed File Transfer components on z/OS. And support for MQ Advanced for z/OS VUE to publish information to the IBM Cloud Product Insights service.

 

There are some additional details on our development blog on MQ V9.0.3 here.

 

So that was a quick run through of the updates in IBM MQ V9.0.3. All you need now is some green tea to wash it down.

Tags: Blockchain, Green Tea, IBM Cloud Product Insights, IBM MQ, IBM MQ 9.0.3, IBM MQ V9, IBM System z, MQ Advanced, MQ Advanced for z/OS VUE, MQ Managed File Transfer, MQ MFT, REST API, Sushi