1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2011 No. 3
2. IBM’s New z114 Processors
3. Correction for Free Tools Program, RNIHINT
4. Looking for User Experiences
5. Subscribe Now!
1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2011 No. 3
The 48-page 2011 No. 3 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on July 8. You may visit our website at www.watsonwalker.com to obtain subscription information and the table of contents. The following is the Management Summaryfrom that issue, talking about some of the contents of this latest Tuning Letter:
The Value of User Experiences
If you’re like most companies, your IT staff is overworked and under-trained. Its one of the reasons you subscribe to our Tuning Letter. We do a lot of the research that you and your staff don’t have time for. We’ve found that some of the most appreciated and used sections of our newsletter are those sharing the experiences of other users. Why should your staff need to fight the same battles as another site?
That’s why Cheryl monitors forums, communicates with our readers, researches APARs, reviews technical blogs (all quite time-consuming), and selects those items that will be of interest to z/OS system programmers, performance analysts, capacity planners, and chargeback analysts. She then does additional research in manuals and by contacting the developers.
Here’s just a sampling of some of the user experiences in this issue: DB2 CPU increase in z/OS 1.12, IMS problems with RSU1103, SMF dump program abending after applying maintenance, data compression problems, batch delays due to HiperDispatch, and VTAM fixed storage issues.
Enhancements
Lack of staff time also means that you don’t have time to exploit new facilities, or even learn about them. So Cheryl picks those that will help the most, describes them, and provides insights that might not be apparent. One of the complaints we hear the most often is that SMF is overrun by huge volumes of records, and the customer has to jump through hoops to determine which subtype is causing the problem. IBM has a solution, but it’s not obvious.
Of Special Interest to Managers
One of the marketing hypes about the z196 is that it can go into Power Saving Mode to reduce power consumption (by up to 20%). Sounds neat, doesn’t it? But are you willing to ignore complaints from customers who receive higher bills during that period? We explain why this could happen on page 6.
Do you IPL too often? IBM has provided dozens of enhancements to allow your staff to make changes dynamically, without requiring an IPL. But most of these enhancements need some action to fully exploit them. It’s worth the time of your staff to implement some of these new features. See page 9 to learn more about them.
Each new release of z/OS consumes fewer resources, and exploiting new features can also be beneficial. Therefore, it’s more important these days to stay on as current a release as possible. We show you why on page 7.
Do your employees have access to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs, or are these blocked in your installation? Whether to restrict or embrace social media is an ongoing topic at most installations today. Our article on Social Media (page 18) should add to your discussions.
Elsewhere in This Issue
You’ll also find many other useful or interesting items throughout this newsletter: A short bio of Cheryl • Great documentation on SMF Type 113s • Neat enhancements for SMF • How IBM machines survived the Japan earthquakes • New Function APARs to provide enhancements before the next release • Important publications and papers from IBM • SMF, Information, HIPER, and performance APARs to help you identify important maintenance.
2. IBM’s New z114 Processors
IBM announced their latest line of mainframes, the z114s, on July 12. The US announcement letter is 111-136. There are 130 new machines that correspond almost one-to-one in capacity and speed with the older z10-BC line of machines. With few exceptions, z10-BC sites can move directly to a similar z114 machine with similar MIPS and MSUs. IBM has even kept the model names the same. For example, both the z10-BC model 2098-B01 and the z114 2818-B01 are 29 MIPS and 4 MSUs. The largest models, the fifteen X01 to Z05 models offer between 5% and 18% boost in speed and capacity (with a corresponding increase in MSUs), but the other models do not. In fact over half of the other models come with a 1% to 7% reduction in speed compared to the z10-BCs. And sometimes, there are not corresponding reductions in MSUs.
The z114s, however, come with a lot of advantages over the z9-BC and z10-BC models, so they still provide a price advantage. The hardware maintenance is lower, the price of specialty engines is lower, and you can still have up to five specialty engines on each model. In additional, the z114 can attach to a zEnterprise BladeServer (zBX). The M05 comes with 5 processors, while the M10 comes with 10 processors, but only 5 processors can be configured as general purpose processors (CPs).
In positioning the z114 as an alternative to UNIX and Windows servers, IBM has lowered the cost of the smallest z114 to $75,000. And instead of reducing the MSUs to provide a technology enhancement, IBM has introduced yet another pricing option. This one is called AEWLC (Advanced Entry Workload License Charges), and is described in US announcement 211-250.
We’ll have much more about these new processors and AEWLC in our next Tuning Letter. The updated Cheryl Watson’s CPU Charts and an update to our BoxScore product
3. Correction to Free Tools Program, RNIHINT
Santosh Kandi, of J.C. Penney, pointed out that our free tool, RNIHINT, had an error in it. The code was: “IF L1MP LT 3 THEN DO; IF RNI LT .75 THEN HINT=’AVERAGE’; ELSE HINT=’LOW’;”. The code has been corrected to be: “IF L1MP LT 3 THEN DO; IF RNI LT .75 THEN HINT=’LOW’; ELSE HINT=’AVERAGE’;”. Fortunately, few sites will have L1MP less than 3. The program has been corrected on the website. If you’ve used this program to determine your best workload, please rerun it. The other tool we provided to produce the same information, $RNIRPTS, is correct. They are both available at www.watsonwalker.com/freetools.html.
4. Looking for User Experiences
We’re looking for user experiences with any of the following features. If you’ve tried the following and had good or bad experiences, please let us share those experiences with our readers.
z/OS 1.12 CA Reclaim
Capacity on Demand
z/OSMF (z/OS Management Facility)
Java Performance on z/OS
Solid State Devices (DSS) on z/OS
Data Compression
5. Subscribe Now!
The yearly single-site subscription price for our Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter has been $950 for the last three years. The 2012 price will be $1050. (Multi-site subscriptions are also available.) If you’re planning to subscribe to our Tuning Letter, you should try to get your order in before the end of the 2011. A subscription provides one year of Tuning Letters (6 issues), the Cheryl Watson’s CPU Charts, and an indexed DVD of all past issues and Cheryl’s presentations since 1991. Don’t forget that we’ll have an updated CPU Chart this month containing the new z114 processors.
Stay Tuned!