1. Great z/OS News From IBM
2. Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2012 No. 1
3. SHARE in Atlanta
1. Great z/OS News From IBM
Today at SHARE, Jeff Magdall, z/OS Program Leader from IBM, described an upcoming SOD (Statement of Direction) for z/OS. Starting with z/OS 1.13, z/OS releases will now be available every other year instead of every year. That means that the next release of z/OS will be the second half of 2013 (not September 2012, as expected). I think this is terrific news for our customers! IBM has found that only 5% of z/OS customers migrate every year, while the great majority of customers migrate every other year or so.
Why do I think this is great news? There are several reasons. Foremost is that customers no longer need to decide whether to be on an “odd” or “even” release. I highly recommend that you now plan on two things: 1) migrate to z/OS 1.13 whenever you can, and 2) migrate to every release from that point on (whether they call it z/OS 1.14 or z/OS 2.1 – this is not a pre-announce – I really have no idea). Most customers take six months to 18 months to roll a new release out to all production LPARs, and don’t have time to exploit the enhancements in each release. Providing time to exploit the enhancements is the second reason that I think this is a great move.
The third reason is that IBM can provide more complete solutions in each release. For example, Extended Address Volumes (EAVs) first became available in z/OS 1.10, with minor enhancements in 1.11, 1.12, and 1.14. With a release every other year, you would have received much more function in the first release. And finally, I think that each of the functions will be more thoroughly tested before becoming generally available (GA).
A few customers and a few software vendors have some reservations about this change, but I’m positive that this will provide many benefits to everyone. There might be a few people who might see this as IBM moving away from z/OS as a strategic platform. I definitely disagree with this. I understand that IBM is spending more resources on z/OS today than in the recent past. I know personally how much future development is going into z/OS development, and how much development is going into CICS, DB2, and WebSphere on z/OS. I still believe that z/OS and zEnterprise provide THE platform of the future.
If you have any worry about your current end-of-service, don’t worry. IBM will be changing those dates to ensure that you’ll be okay. You should expect a formal statement of direction within the next two months with more information.
2. Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2012 No. 1
The 41-page 2012 No. 1 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on March 5, 2012. You may visit our website at www.watsonwalker.com to obtain subscription information and the table of contents. The following is the Management Summary from that issue, talking about some of the contents of this latest Tuning Letter:
WebSphere Message Broker
We’re finding more and more installations are installing WebSphere Message Broker (WMB), only to be surprised by the amount of storage and CPU time it consumes. WMB is a multi-platform IBM product that simplifies and enables communication between applications and provides data transformation across heterogeneous environments. WMB on z/OS exploits the facilities provided by WebSphere MQ. Because the product is new to many installations, few performance analysts are prepared to tune it or track its usage. Fortunately, WMB can be set up to create SMF records (type 117), which provide plenty of information to help understand which types of requests are responsible for the resource usage, and what types of response times the users are receiving. Our Focus article in this issue is by Fabio Massimo Ottaviani, and describes how you can use this new SMF data.
Service Level Objectives for TSO
Our second major article in this issue continues our multi-part series on managing service levels. Part 1 of this series described how service levels are used for perfor-mance analysis, capacity planning, data center management, management reports and (sometimes) chargeback. In this issue we start into the details by describing how to set service level objectives (SLOs) for TSO. TSO is one of the easiest workloads to track and manage, and provides a model for setting SLOs for all workloads.
User Experiences
Our popular User Experiences section covers several topics, such as setting a rule of thumb (ROT) for paging, WMB response time, WebSphere MQ analysis, DB2 analytics, free Webcasts, an update on the CPU Measurement Facility, and an update on z/OS 1.12’s CA Reclaim facility.
Elsewhere in This Issue
You’ll also find many other useful or interesting items throughout this newsletter: Internet articles about the benefits of running Linux on System z, cloud computing, and big data • Important publications and papers from IBM • New Function, SMF, and Information APARs to help you identify useful maintenance.
3. SHARE in Atlanta
I’m at SHARE in Atlanta this week, and I expect this to be a fantastic week. If you aren’t able to attend, you can at least see most of the presentations. Logon to www.share.org, and select ‘full list of sessions’ from the first line. This takes you to share.confex.com/share/118/webprogram/start.html, and you can list the sessions. If you see a folder icon next to a session, you can expect that a handout is available. These sessions provide a wonderful education resource. Please note that it takes 24 hours to have a presentation uploaded, and often a speaker won’t upload a presentation until after the session is presented.
Stay Tuned!