1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2013 No. 1
2. IBM Red Alerts
1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2013 No. 1
The 68-page 2013 No. 1 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on May 21, 2013. 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 just some of the contents of that Tuning Letter:
Exploiting the zEC12
Cheryl described the zEC12 from a hardware point of view when the machine became available in 2012 (Tuning Letter 2012 No. 4). And most analysts are expecting a “baby” zBC this summer or fall. But we haven’t gone into any great detail about the software that can exploit the zEC12 and the expected zBC. That’s what we do in this issue. Our customers are telling us that the zEC12 has been performing as expected or better even without turning on the new features. So imagine how it will perform if you take advantage of some of these new capabilities. We describe the major three enhancements (zFlash, Transactional Execution Facility, and zAware), as well as the other enhancements that often require some work on your part to exploit. If you have installed or are planning to install a zEC12 or zBC (as you all should be), you will find our recommendations in this section to be quite useful.
Exploiting z/OS
IBM announced the next z/OS version, 2.1, in February. Although it will entail a price increase (we expect it to be a single-digit % increase range), most z/OS sites will HAVE to migrate to z/OS 2.1 in order to stay current. That is, z/OS 1.13 has an end-of-service of September 30, 2016, which IBM has extended from the previous EOS date. But you’ll really want to move to z/OS 2.1 before that, and the number of enhancements will more than pay for the price increase.
The majority of enhancements will be coming this fall when z/OS 2.1 becomes generally available. We’ll be covering those enhancements in future Tuning Letters, and will provide our own recommendations as usual.
But almost every site is currently running z/OS 1.12 or 1.13, and many of the z/OS 2.1 enhancements are available on these current releases. We give our recommendations on which of these enhancements will provide the most benefit for you. Why put off getting the benefit?
We’ve covered many of these enhancements in previous Tuning Letters and in-clude pointers when we have. Every current subscriber should have access to our DVD that contains all past issues since 1991. If you don’t have access to the DVD, you’re not getting the full benefit from our Tuning Letter. Just contact the person in your organization who distributes our newsletter to find the location of the DVD.
Outsourcing
Many of the questions we get are generated from outsourcing environments, and come from both the outsourcing vendor and the outsourced customer. Most of the reported problems could have been avoided with better contracts. Cheryl provides several examples from her years in outsourcing environments in order to help those who are negotiating their first outsourcing contract or are planning a re-negotiation.
SHARE Highlights
IBM and users present such valuable information at each SHARE conference that we can’t recommend it highly enough as a major education investment. If you can’t afford to send someone to SHARE, you’ll find Cheryl’s highlights of SHARE to be extremely useful. Out of almost 600 sessions, Cheryl selects some of the best for you to concentrate on.
Elsewhere in This Issue
You’ll also find many other useful items throughout this newsletter: User experiences with EAVs, RMF and WLM capping, and an update on zIIP usage • Enhancements in the already wonderful IBM Redbooks • An introduction to IBM Large Pages • A new and continuing section on Social Media • and our usual collection of New Function, SMF, Information, and HIPER APARs to help you identify useful maintenance.
2. IBM Red Alerts
IBM Red Alerts should be tracked and monitored by someone at each installation. There are four new alerts:
2013.03.25 – PTF UK91435 (APAR PM79520) is required for DB2 10 for z/OS customers in a Data Sharing environment. This addresses a potential data loss during data sharing.
2013.05.29 – Potential loss of data for DB2 v10 users on z/OS 1.12 and 1.13 releases. Data loss can be seen in some instances during Media Manager IO recovery, especially users of zDMF running zHPF. See APAR OA42277 (28May2013, HIPER) and the next two alerts for more information because there is a problem with OA42277.
2013.05.31 – Potential loss of data for DB2 v10 users and IMS FastPath DEDB users on z/OS 1.12, 1.13 and 2.1 releases. The same APAR is referenced, but the alert indicates that the same problem can occur for IMS FastPath DEDB or PDSE data sets. See the next alert also.
2013.06.03 – An error has been discovered in a Pre Req for Red Alert APAR OA42277. IBM’s recommendation is to NOT install the PTFs for APARs OA42277 and OA39870 (26Apr2013, New Function). This Red Alert also indicates a problem with MQSeries and other users accessing Extended Function VSAM data sets greater than 2 GB.
If you don’t get these Red Alerts automatically, you can sign up to receive them at www.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/redAlerts/home.html.
Stay Tuned!