1. Cheryl Presents SHARE Webinar Tomorrow About CPU Fields in SMF
2. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2013 No. 3
1. Cheryl Presents SHARE Webinar About CPU Fields in SMF
You should have received an email announcing a no-charge webinar that is being offered by SHARE presenting Cheryl giving her presentation on CPU fields in SMF. It’s at 11 am Central time on Wednesday, December 4th. If you can’t make it, you can replay it at a later date (www.share.org/p/cm/ld/fid=28).
2. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2013 No. 3
The 69-page 2013 No. 3 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on October 30, 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:
Spotlight on Cheryl
Cheryl had a great week at SHARE; she was one of three people receiving the SHARE President’s Award from President Brian Peterson. This is how she was described in the SHARE wrap up: “A larger-than-life presence in our industry through her consulting practice and ‘Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter’, Cheryl has been both an active SHARE volunteer as well as one of SHARE’s most consistent and effective advocates with her frequent references to ‘things she learned at SHARE’ in nearly every issue of her newsletter. Most recently, Cheryl and her MVS Requirements team have rekindled the relationship between SHARE and IBM with the MVS Core Technology Project’s ‘Top 39 Requirements’, effectively driving engagement between the SHARE community and IBM leadership, with results included in the z/OS 2.1 announcement and beyond.” She also won the Best User Session award on her Exploiting z/OS – Tales from the MVS Surveysession from the spring conference, and received her 35-year SHARE volunteer pin. Naturally, we’re very proud of her.
Faster Machines Than Expected
One of the major surprises recently is the discovery that many, if not most, of the upgrades to the zEC12 and zBC12 appear to be getting more capacity than expected. This is great news for anyone planning to get a new machine. We saw some of this same surprise with sites installing z196s and z114s. For anyone doing chargeback, this means that the revenues will go down because jobs are taking less time. Cheryl wrote about this in a recent Cheryl’s List (#167), where we describe our solution, BoxScore, a product designed to address this very situation. If you’re planning a hardware upgrade, be sure to review that article.
The July 23rd announcement from IBM included not only the zBC12 (successor to the z114), but some outstanding enhancements to the zEC12 (called GA2). One of the more important additions is the new hardware compression, zEDC, which has the potential for some incredible performance improvements. See page 43 for our articles on both of these machines.
IBM Education
IBM is making a major change in how they provide training. We’re not sure how well it’s going to work, but we hope that some of the kinks will be worked out soon. We DO provide some recommendations on how to obtain the best training on page 26.
Exploiting z/OS
The majority of this issue deals with how to get the most out of z/OS. As we’ve mentioned in the past, most enhancements are delivered by IBM disabled, and you need to perform some function to activate them. Until you do, you are not really getting the benefits (usually performance improvements) that you have installed. In this issue, Cheryl explains how and why you would want to use CEA, CIM, and Operlog. She also explains which new parmlib parameters should be activated or left alone. If you’ve paid for these upgrades, why not exploit them?
If you’re thinking of migrating to the new version of COBOL 5.1 with its many, many, enhancements, be aware that the object libraries can only be PDSEs, not PDSes. This might be a major migration issue for some installations. It’s not a show-stopper, but you want to plan carefully.
Elsewhere in This Issue
You’ll also find many other useful items throughout this newsletter: User experiences with WLM dispatching, security APARs, free mainframe goodies, and an update on WAS Liberty Profile • A description of the SMF Type 42, subtype 6 record for tuning data sets • A continuing section on Social Media • and our usual collection of New Function, SMF, Information, and Information APARs to help you identify useful maintenance.
Stay Tuned!