1. Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2004 No. 5
2. Free Seminars For IMS Version 9 Users
3. Google Desktop Search Tool
4. Cheryl and Tom Are Off to India
1. Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2004 No. 5
The fifty-eight-page 2004 No. 5 TUNING Letter was emailed to electronic subscribers today. The print issues will be mailed within a week. You can purchase a printed copy of the current TUNING Letter for $95 at http://www.watsonwalker.com. The following is a summary of just some of the contents of this latest TUNING Letter:
z/OS 1.6
Since our last issue, IBM has announced the availability of Release 1.6 of the z/OS operating system. As we have noted previously, this release must be run on a zSeries machine (z800, z890, z900 and z990) running in z/Architecture mode. Please see page 47 for our summary of the important features in this release. If you are running WebSphere Version 4, you must also upgrade to Version 5 before you can run z/OS 1.6. Please read our WebSphere Update on page 21 to learn about the latest version (5.1) of that product. Finally, the z/OS 1.6 announcement also included a z/OS 1.7 Preview that we have summarized starting on page 51. This material gives some good insight about what technologies IBM considers to be important or unimportant. For example, we have been warned that both the ISAM access method and JOBCAT/STEPCAT JCL statements will no longer be supported as of z/OS 1.7.
SHARE in New York City
Another event that occurred since our last issue was the SHARE user group meeting, held August 15-20 in New York City. In addition to presenting several sessions ourselves, we attended many interesting sessions and returned home with a lot of good information. See our SHARE Trip Report on page 14 for the highlights of the week. We got so much good material that it would not all fit in one issue, so expect to see tidbits from SHARE over the next several issues. Our trip report includes many APAR numbers for some of the important maintenance you should install to improve performance and avoid problems. In addition, our regular Interesting APARs section on page 5 lists other maintenance that you should investigate.
Hot Flashes
We have also included in this issue an expanded version of the Hot Flashes session that Cheryl presents on Friday mornings at every SHARE. You will find this starting on page 25. We have included the results of the survey questions that were taken at the start of the session. Although this is not scientific, it may give you a general indication of where the industry is going. Cheryl has also included some interesting information about upgrading to zSeries machines, and her position on the performance of the z990s. Some of the recent pricing options available from IBM have made upgrading to a z890 cheaper than you might think.
Another zAAP Update
There was a zAAP (zSeries Application Assist Processor) Update in the previous issue, but a lot has been happening in this arena over the past few weeks. We hope you are not tired of being zAAPed, but we really think this processor can provide significant savings if your workload is right and you implement the processor correctly. See our zAAP Update starting on page 32 for more details about the things we learned from our ongoing research, and some of the enhancements that IBM has announced since the last update. It has been a challenge to understand something this complex, but we think we can again provide explanations and recommendations that will be helpful when evaluating and implementing this new processor.
2. Free Seminars For IMS Version 9 Users
IMS users who are investigating Version 9 of that product may be interested in some seminars being held over the next few months. IBM is offering a series of free one-day seminars describing the new functionality of this product. These seminars run from the end of October through the middle of December, and are presented in 16 different cities across the US. If you use IMS and are interested in attending, check out the agenda and schedule at http://www.ibm.com/software/os/zseries/imseminar.
3. Google Desktop Search Tool
The people who brought us the Google search engine (http://www.google.com) are providing a new search program designed to find local files on your PC as well as Web content. Visit http://desktop.google.com to download a beta version of this program.
The program will support several common file types, and the designers are seeking feedback for new file types to be supported. Current supported types include email messages stored in Outlook 2000+ or Outlook Express 5+, saved America Online (AOL) Instant Messages (IMs), text files, HTML files, Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and any Web pages that were viewed with Internet Explorer.
The minimum suggested PC configuration is a 400 MHz or faster Pentium machine, 128 MB of RAM, and 500 MB of hard drive space. The supported operating systems include Windows XP and Windows 2000 running Service Pack 3 or later. English is the only language currently supported, but that could change also.
Our resident Web guru (Tom Walker) has installed the tool, and reports that it works quite well. There are other file types that we would like to see supported, but perhaps they will be added to the next version. If you have ever been frustrated trying to find something that you know is stored on your PC, you might want to give this tool a try.
4. Cheryl and Tom Are Off to India
Tom gave Cheryl her long-desired trip to India for her 60th birthday this year (last May) and so they’re leaving for India (Mumbai, Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Chittaurgarh, Udaipur and the Pushkar Camel Fair) on November 3rd (the day after the election). They’re hoping the election will be decided by the time they return on November 23rd! If you have any suggestions for things of special interest there, please send an email before they leave. While they’re gone, they will probably not be seeing any email. So please be sure to send any software or technical requests to Clark Kidd at technical at watsonwalker.com and any administrative requests to Linda May at admin at watsonwalker.com.
Stay tuned!