1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2012 No. 2
2. New Publishing Schedule
3. Cheryl’s Hot Flashes in Atlanta
4. New LinkedIn Forums
1. Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2012 No. 2
The 57-page 2012 No. 2 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on May 16, 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:
Service Level Objectives
This issue continues our series on setting service level objectives (SLOs). We’ve received very positive feedback from the first two articles, and this one on batch SLOs should be even more useful. It answers such questions as how many periods to use for batch, whether to use average response time or percentiles, and which jobs to eliminate from the SLOs. Even if you use a batch job scheduler, you still need to make decisions on how to treat duplicate jobs, held jobs, printing of reports, and many other items.
In a follow-up to our previous article on TSO SLOs, we explain the reasons for our recommendation of two-period TSO service classes, along with a reader’s observations about when single-period TSO service classes can be useful.
z/OS Releases
As most of you know by now, IBM has announced that z/OS releases will become available every other year instead of every year. z/OS 1.14, which was expected in September 2012, has become z/OS 2.1 and is scheduled for the second half of 2013. There is no word yet on whether this will result in a price increase. But the announcement indicates that this will be the first architectural level set we’ve seen in several years. An architectural level set means that the new z/OS version will be available on only the new processors (z9, z10, z114, z196), and will not be able to run on the older z800, z890, z900, and z990 processors.
The every other year release should give your staff more time to exploit the enhancements in each release. We’ve found that many sites haven’t had time to exploit the new features, and that’s a shame. New features often provide performance or stability improvements that you really want on your machine. In Cheryl’s SHARE Hot Flashes presentation (page 5), she listed 38 enhancements that should be investigated. We’ve covered 37 of them in previous Tuning Letters.
One of the unnoticed changes in z/OS V2 is that all publications will now be available only on the internet as downloadable PDFs or through the Information Center (HTML). BookManager manuals will no longer be provided for z/OS.
For more on this change in schedule, please see our discussions on pages 5, 44, and 56. One point that we didn’t make in those discussions is the impact the two-year cycle has on resolving issues. Currently, if IBM has opened an APAR for a problem at your site, and they decide to Fix it In (or If)a Next or future release (marked as FIN), your staff might be content to accept the FIN because it’s less than a year away. Now, a FIN might be at least two years away.
Our recommendation is that you start rejecting the FINs (which is your right) if you think that the fix might be too far away. After all, the developers should have more time to create APARs since they have less frequent releases.
CA Reclaim
One of our readers was kind enough to describe their experience testing a new z/OS 1.13 enhancement to reclaim unused VSAM control areas (CAs). This can reduce the number of VSAM file re-organizations, and therefore can improve the availability of those files. But the most important part of the article is how the team went about testing this new feature. Planning and step-by-step analysis of the results leads to a more thoroughly tested feature, while providing an understanding of the feature itself. The time available for this type of testing is the kind of benefit you may see from IBM’s new, slower release cycle.
Elsewhere in This Issue
You’ll also find many other useful or interesting items throughout this newsletter: Internet articles • Important publications and papers from IBM • New Function, SMF and HIPER APARs to help you identify useful maintenance.
2. New Publishing Schedule
Our survey of subscribers last summer indicated that articles about new z/OS releases were among the most popular topics. But we’ve had to squeeze that information into a single year due to IBM’s yearly z/OS release. Now that z/OS releases will be every other year, we’ll have time to go more into depth about the enhancements in each release. And because readers say that they prefer an article in one issue rather than split across multiple issues, we’ve decided to change our publication schedule to quarterly in 2013 instead of six times a year. This will give me more research time for each in-depth article.
The total amount of information (i.e. pages) will be the same, and probably more. You’ll still receive the same valuable information, but it will be in more depth and cover more topics for each z/OS release. From our survey, 32% of our readers would prefer quarterly, and 40% had no preference. We think you’ll be pleased with this conversion.
For current subscribers: To ensure that you receive a full year of information, your renewal dates may be extended. In other words, if your renewal falls within a quarter, you’ll get that full quarterly issue. You’ll soon receive a letter containing details about your new subscription cycle.
3. Cheryl’s Hot Flashes in Atlanta
I gave my Hot Flashes #27 at SHARE in Atlanta. You can find a PDF of my presentation at the SHARE website (www.share.org), or at our website atwww.watsonwalker.com/presentations.html. If you want to listen to me give the presentation (snore…), here’s a link that will work for the next few months –share2.webex.com/ec0606l/eventcenter/recording/recordAction.do?siteurl=share2&theAction=archive. This link will take you to many of the event recordings from SHARE in Atlanta (mine is the second one).
4. New LinkedIn Forums
I included the following item in Tuning Letter 2012 No. 2 on page 53):
LinkedIn has added some interesting mainframe discussion groups. Once you are logged in to LinkedIn, select the drop-down of Groups at the top, and see if there are interesting groups. Here are just a few of the z/OS groups showing the number of members and the number of discussions during the last month:
Capacity Planning & Performance Management (16 discussions, 1,236 members)
Capacity Planning and Performance Evaluation (26 discussions, 2,204 members)
IBM Cloud Computing (78 discussions, 3,835 members)
IBM MAINFRAME Group (184 discussions, 12,304 members)
Mainframe Assembler Professionals (47 discussions, 1,589 members)
Mainframe Experts Network (68 discussions, 13,778 members)
Mainframe Performance & Optimization (7 discussions, 523 members)
Mainframes R Us (20 discussions, 1,108 members)
MainframeZone (44 discussions, 4,714 members)
Program Management Forum (41 discussions, 3,577 members)
SHARE (10 discussions, 900 members)
System z Advocates (14 discussions, 4,116 members)
TIVOLI OMEGAMON Specialists (1 discussion, 529 members)
z/OS (5 discussions, 1,262 members)
What I neglected to mention is that several of the postings in a few of these forums are primarily related to job postings. So if you’re looking for a position in the mainframe world, it would be worth your time to sign up for LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com).
Stay Tuned!