1. We’re back! Announcing First 2014 Watson and Walker Class
2. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2014 No. 1
3. Addendum to Tuning Letter
4. Education Survey Reminder
5. Happy 50th from SHARE
1. We’re back! Announcing First 2014 Watson & Walker Class
We are delighted to announce the first of our new classes – SYS1.PARMLIB, The Heart of z/OS: Updates in z/OS 1.13 and 2.1. Based on your generous feedback, our first class will help you identify and set up many of the new functions that were delivered in z/OS 1.13 and 2.1. Many of you also commented that you are under pressure to minimize your education costs. So to help you control travel costs, our first class is going to be held in Pittsburgh on August 3, on the Sunday before SHARE. Further, we are offering the class at a special introductory price of $475.
Description:
It would be difficult to name a function or capability in z/OS that does not involve some change to SYS1.PARMLIB. You want to enable a new function? Update Parmlib. Want to ensure that your system setup reflects IBM’s latest best practices? Update Parmlib.
This one-day class provides information about all the changes to Parmlib that were delivered by IBM in z/OS 1.13 and 2.1. For each one, it describes the reason for the change, the associated function or capability, what environments it is appropriate for, and recommended values.
For those of you who have seen our articles on Parmlib enhancements in our Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter, we’d like you to know that the class will get into much more detail about each parameter and keyword. We will ask you to bring your own Parmlib members and we’ll help you understand and review the settings in your installation.
Objectives:
One of the cornerstones of z/OS is upward compatibility. And the number one priority when you migrate to a new release is typically to ensure that everything that worked with the old release still works with the new release. As a result, the default mode of operation is that enhancements or new functions tend to be shipped by IBM in a disabled state. Therefore, to maximize the return on your investment in z/OS, you generally need to take some overt action. The objective of this class is to help you get the full value out of your z/OS system by making you aware of all the Parmlib changes that were delivered in z/OS 1.13 and z/OS 2.1.
If you are currently running z/OS 1.12, this class will help you prepare for your next upgrade. If you are already running z/OS 1.13, you can use this class as a health check, to ensure that you are actually exploiting all the capabilities that are available to you. And if you have already migrated to z/OS 2.1, or are working on a business case to justify the migration, this class will help you identify all the functions that are applicable to your environment (including those that were shipped in z/OS 1.13 that you might have overlooked).
By attending this class immediately before SHARE, you can:
- Build a list of enhancements that you would like to exploit.
- Identify SHARE sessions that you will attend to gain more information about particular enhancements.
- Have an opportunity to talk to other SHARE attendees about the enhancements that you are interested in.
- Take advantage of the presence of IBM’s developers to discuss your questions or plans with them.
- Attend this class without incurring additional travel costs.
Cheryl’s technical skills are legendary, and I’m well known for having a good Irish joke or two. We are sure you will find the class both interesting and informative and look forward to seeing you in our first new class in 2014. For information about signing up for the class, please refer to our new Education page or send an email to education@watsonwalker.com.
2. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2014 No. 1
The 110-page 2014 No. 1 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on April 22, 2014. You may visit our website at www.watsonwalker.com to obtain subscription information and the table of contents. The following is our Management Summary from that issue, talking about just some of the contents of that Tuning Letter:
More with Less
‘Do more with less’ is a refrain that is all too familiar to just about any IT manager and those who deal with them. The ultra-competitive business environment requires record levels of performance and availability. And the stock market demands record profits. And, for better or worse, the IT department is where these demands meet.
Fortunately, both IBM and the ISV vendors are constantly inventing new ways to drive more value from your System z environment. However, many of these enhancements do not just happen automatically. To ensure compatibility with previous releases, many enhancements require overt action on your behalf to enable them. In many cases, those actions include changes to Parmlib, so in this issue we conclude the list of Parmlib updates that Cheryl started in our last Tuning Letter. We strongly encourage you to invest some time to review the new capabilities delivered in each z/OS release – you might find functions that help you deliver improved performance, improved availability, or even functions that allow you to displace a chargeable product. Most of these enhancements are included as part of z/OS at no additional charge, so you should ensure that you are really exploiting all the features that apply to you. Remember, IBM doesn’t give refunds for functions that you choose not to use!
Also on the topic of doing more with less, in this issue we provide the first part of a two-part article about the various capping options that are available in System z. This is a very important topic for many reasons: it can affect performance (which can have a knock-on impact on availability), it obviously is tied to software costs, and it is core to many outsourcing agreements, both from the clients’ and the providers’ perspectives. It is great to have a capping option to address every need. However as the number of options grows, the number of opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot also grows – and we don’t want clients with injured feet!
Finally, on this topic of doing more with less, we have an article on a very interesting new zEC12/zBC12 capability called Coupling Thin Interrupts. We believe that this will benefit nearly every customer that has a Parallel Sysplex. We describe how it works and provide some examples from a real customer environment. We are really excited about this new function and believe it is the largest step forward in making Coupling Facilities more flexible and affordable since IBM delivered Dynamic CF Dispatching back on z900s.
Other topics
In this issue we hope that we have something for everyone. We cover items that are only in z/OS 2.1, and items that are available to z/OS 1.12 and 1.13 customers. We discuss functions that are only available on zBC12 and zEC12, and others that are available back to z9.
In fact, we had more things to talk about than we had time and space to cover. But some of the other things that we did have time to cover include early experiences with the new DFSMS compaction of sequential data sets using zEDC, Cheryl’s SHARE trip report, and an exhaustive list of recent Redbooks, techdocs, blog entries, and all the other goodies that you have come to expect.
Also in this issue, we have a viewpoint article that discusses the pros and cons of IBM’s strategy of requiring customers to explicitly enable new functions and not updating default values to reflect changes in technology – we hope that you find it interesting, especially the next time you need ammunition to support the mainframe versus other platforms. And by the way, if one or more tips in this newsletter results in savings, please tell your management so they’ll be more likely to let you renew!
One last thing. You might have noticed that this issue is larger than usual. But don’t worry, this is (hopefully) not the start of a new trend. There were a number of contributors to the increased girth. First, this is the first issue that Cheryl and I worked on and I think we both got a little carried away. Next, this issue contains the second part of the list of Parmlib changes in z/OS 2.1, and that took up a lot of space. We also had SHARE just before we planned to close off this issue, and that gave us lots of additional useful information that we wanted to pass on to you. We know that you are busy and need a document that is both concise and comprehensive – we expect to return to our normal length in the next issue, and give you back a little of your scant spare time.
3. Addendum to Tuning Letter
The latest Tuning Letter contained an article about our experience with using zEDC for QSAM/BSAM compression. We received a question from one of our readers about the software charging considerations for zEDC. There is no software product as such that you have to purchase to use zEDC – rather, it is a charged feature on z/OS, based on the size of the CPC. The price of the z/OS charged feature is independent of the number of zEDC cards on the CPC, but each zEDC card has a separate charge of about $12,000 (US base price) for each card. For more information, refer to the zEDC FAQ at
http://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/FQ131484.
We will have a full article about zEDC in the next Tuning Letter.
4. Education Survey Reminder
We received excellent, and very encouraging, feedback already to our survey asking for your views on future education offerings. It is great to see so much enthusiasm about Cheryl’s return to the mainframe education arena. We are going to be holding the drawing for a free class or 1-year subscription to Cheryl’s Tuning Letter on May 5, so if you would like to be included in that drawing, please take a minute to complete the survey at –https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DFYZDLH.
5. Happy 50th from SHARE
Lauren Williamson wrote a very informative and interesting entry on the SHARE President’s Corner blog (http://www.share.org/p/bl/et/blogid=2&blogaid=285), celebrating fifty years of the mainframe. The entry contains interesting perspectives such as “[It would take]20,000 American football fields filled with 360s to do what we can do on one zEC12 today.” Well worth taking a few minutes from your hectic day to have a read of this and reflect back on how things have changed since your first interaction with a mainframe.
Stay Tuned!