Nationwide Insurance
Biographical Sketch: Rick Barlow has been working with VM since 1981. He is responsible for installation, maintenance and upgrade of all of the networking tools under VM including VTAM, RSCS, Pass-Through and TCP/IP and handles all of the compilers and performance tools under VM. In addition to his focus on the communication features of VM, he works with hardware installations and configuration and is a major contributor to Disaster Recovery planning and testing for both z/OS and Linux on System z. Rick has been a participant with VM development teams working with ESP programs for RSCS, Pass-Through, TCP/IP and VM for many years beginning with VM/HPO 3.4 and including all of the VM/ESA and z/VM releases. Since 2005, Rick has been a been a part of the team at Nationwide that has implemented Linux Virtualization on IBM System z. That project has grown to two large IBM System z processors with almost 600 virtual servers running almost 2700 JVM, IHS and DB2 instances. The re-platformed and new workload and has resulted in significant cost savings compared to discrete servers. Rick is responsible for the hardware and network configurations. Rick has been a SHARE participant since 1990 and a regular speaker since 1994.