Cheryl’s List #179 – November 18, 2014

1. Upcoming Class in Dallas and Special Offer
2. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2014 No. 3
3. Customer experience – SU/Sec wrong for some zBC12s
4. IBM Eases Migration to z/OS Version 2

1.  Upcoming Class in Dallas and Special Offer

As you have hopefully noticed, we have our 3-day ‘Exploiting New Features of z/OS to Minimize Costs’ class coming up in Dallas on December 8. It will deliver information about features and functions in z/OS 1.13 and 2.1 that can help you save CPU, or improve response times, or improve user productivity, or increase availability. All of these, and more, can be achieved using functions that you already have (they are standard features of z/OS) but that you are probably not exploiting.

We picked the week of December 8 for this class because we felt that this would be during the year-end change freeze in many companies, and therefore it would be easier for sysprogs to be away from the office. Why sit around the office, unable to do anything productive, when you can come to our class and find out how to make your z/OS environment even more cost-effective next year? And now that IBM has announced their Migration Pricing Option (MPO – see item #4 below), what excuses are left for delaying your migration to z/OS V2 any longer? Take this opportunity to start on your migration and exploitation plans for 2015. You can get much more information about this class on our website at http://www.watsonwalker.com/ExploitingzOS.html.

The feedback we have received from our first two classes has been very positive, with 100% of respondents saying that they would come to another class or recommend our classes to a colleague. In fact, one of the attendees at our Pittsburgh class is returning for the class in Dallas. We believe that the best advertising in the mainframe world is word of mouth, so to help us spread the word to more potential students, we want to tell you about two special offers for this class:

• Two students for the price of one – Send two students for the price of one. That means you can send two people to our 3-day ‘Exploiting z/OS’ class for only $1950 total.
• Education Pack – Some people would like to attend our upcoming classes, but don’t have any training budget left this year. If that’s your situation, please consider our 2015 Education Pack. You can order a 2015 Education Pack for $600/day/student for as many days as you’d like, which is a discount from our $700/day/student 2015 rate. This is billed in January 2015, but is available to be used from December 2014 through December 2015.

For more information about these special offers and how to take advantage of them, see our website at www.watsonwalker.com/education.html.

You might have seen another of our offers that included our ‘z/OS Software Pricing Strategies’ class, but we have since closed registration for that class. We’ll be giving it again in the NY/NJ area in the spring or summer. If you’re interested in our pricing class at that time, please let us know because we’re still trying to decide on the best location. Also, if you are interested in the z/OS Software Pricing class, but would like to have more people take part and would like be able to discuss strategies in a less public forum, we are also preparing an offering that combines consulting and education. This offering will involve us studying your contracts and configurations and working with you to find ways to optimize both combined with on-site education for as many of your staff as would like to take part.

If you are interested in any of the above, please email us at www.watsonwalker.com/education.html. We love the opportunity to work closely with our customers so we hope that we will see you in Dallas in December, or at a city near you in 2015.

2.  About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2014 No. 3

The 137-page 2014 No. 3 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on November 7, 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:

Money, Money, Money
Do any of you remember that Abba song? I won’t embarrass myself by saying how old I was when that song was out. But I never thought back in those days that that song would be so relevant nearly 30 years later. Yet here we are, with telephones with more MIPS than the first spaceships, and 10s of times more storage than the first mainframe system that I worked on, and the sentiment is still just as popular.

I have to admit that I am not a big fan of the cost-cutting fever that has gripped our industry for so long. So I am really happy to see the first inklings of some light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, I have an article about how the job market is starting to change and a new business cycle is starting to take hold. They say that business swings like a pendulum, from one extreme to the other – hopefully we are starting to move away from one extreme and back to a more balanced middle ground.

Having said that, the drive to reduce costs has driven the development of some very interesting new technologies. This started with IBM delivering the defined capacity capability, giving customers more control over their software costs. These capabilities were then exploited and managed by a new set of ISV products. They let you create policies that describe how you want to balance costs against performance. And they help you get more value from your installed capacity by ensuring that your MIPS really are being used to process your most business-critical workloads. We describe the three players in this market in the final installment of our capping article. We received great and enthusiastic support from all three vendors who kindly shared information, answered my myriad questions, and validated the accuracy of our article. All of these products are technically interesting, and they all pursue your objectives in different ways. If you are under pressure to reduce software costs, you really owe it to yourself to have a look at these products to see if they can help you. We hope that this information will be valuable to you.

In This Issue
We also have an article by that great mainframe philosopher, Bob Rogers. Bob shines up his crystal ball for a view into what the future holds for us mainframers – Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT). IBM has publicly stated that a future System z processor will implement this technology. So Bob looks at IBM’s experience with SMT on its Power processors and merges that with his many years of experience of how IBM thinks, to give us his view of what a future System z SMT processor might look like. If Bob is anywhere close to being correct (which, of course, he always is), we have some very interesting times ahead of us. Certainly SMT has the potential to keep the techies and the checkbook-holders happy, although maybe not at the same time..

Speaking of SMT and the effect it might have on us, we have an article that reviews IBM’s zBNA tool. Yet again, something to warm the wallet of even the stingiest accountant – a free tool to help you get ready for the SMT era. Cheryl reviewed zBNA just over a year ago, but in that time it has undergone many enhancements. So much so that we felt impelled to bring you up to date. With enthusiastic support from the zBNA team in IBM, our article not only shows the new features in zBNA, it also shows how you can use zBNA to improve the efficiency of your batch processing today. We hope that you will find it valuable.

One of the findings of the SHARE survey that Cheryl organized was that there are still many installations that are not using HiperDispatch. One of the concerns of some of those customers is how parked engines will impact the performance of their critical applications. Warning Track Interrupt is a feature on zBC12 and zEC12 that is intended to make systems more responsive and more efficient in a HiperDispatch environment. Even though it is turned on automatically, we felt that it would be valuable to explain how it works, so we have a short article about it. We hope that this will encourage more installations to dip a toe in the HiperDispatch water – you might find that it is not as chilly as you expected.

Speaking of Cheryl’s work on the SHARE survey, she extracted some of the more interesting highlights from that survey and included them in her SHARE trip report. She also provides some invaluable nuggets of useful information from the many sessions that she attended. If you were at SHARE in Pittsburgh, you were probably like us, with many more sessions that you would have liked to attend than you had time, so I would encourage you to review Cheryl’s report for information from the sessions that you missed.

We also have a short article describing an IBM group that is largely unknown outside the ISV community. The IBM ISV Enablement group does a great job of reaching out to other software vendors to discuss planned changes to major IBM software products. This group is key to vendors having their products ready for new releases on or close to the general availability date. We are a member of this community and find it invaluable. Our article describes the benefits of involvement for any ISV. We encourage you to talk to your software vendors and suggest that they get involved if they have not already done so.

And, of course, we have our usual bounty of User Experiences, reviews of what is happening in the z/OS world, and our list of interesting and important APARs, Washington System Center documents, Redbooks, and industry blogs.

The size of all this? Well, I did promise in the July issue that the next issue would be smaller. This one is a mere 137 pages, compared to the 166 pages in the July issue. Not quite down to our 60-70 page target, but there are just so many interesting things happening in the mainframe world, it is difficult to control our enthusiasm. 

We hope that you find this issue interesting, entertaining, and valuable. We eagerly look forward to your comments, questions, and suggestions for future issues. Remember, we are strongest when we all help each other. So, please partake, please make sure that you share this issue with all your colleagues, both the young and the young-at-heart, and please contribute. 

Consulting and Classes
As you might recall, we mentioned in the last issue that we are starting to get back into the consulting and education business. And we have some very interesting and encouraging developments. Our second Parmlib class was just held in Whittlebury in the UK the day before the GSE conference where we presented. We’ll be teaching the same Parmlib class again in Seattle next March, immediately before the next SHARE conference. Please see www.watsonwalker.com/SYS1.html for more information. 

We also have two classes coming up in Dallas in early December. We deliberately selected those dates because many sites are in their end-of-year change freeze by then, and many people find themselves with some education budget that they want to invest. One class is about ensuring that your installation is getting the maximum value from the enhancements in z/OS 1.13 and 2.1. The other class is about controlling your software costs. We believe that this class is unique because it is specifically designed to get your technical and financial people to work together to understand the technologies and challenges that are available to both communities. The class will help you identify the full set of tools and facilities to control and minimize your software costs. If you would be interested in joining us, refer to www.watsonwalker.com/ExploitingzOS.html and www.watsonwalker.com/Pricing.html. We look forward to seeing you there.

[Note: The Pricing class registration is now closed.]

Things are also progressing apace on the Consulting side of the house. We are working with customers in Europe to combine a review of their operations with education for their technical staff. This is really very interesting work and we always come away with valuable new nuggets of information – which we are then able to pass on to you, our readers. If you would be interested in working with us, please send an email to 
consulting@watsonwalker.com.

3.  Customer experience – SU/Sec wrong for some zBC12s

One of our subscribers upgraded to a zBC12, (a 2828-L06 to be precise), and noticed that the service units in RMF did not match IBM’s published values and our CPU Chart published values. The difference was seen in the 2-way and 3-way LPARs running on the machine. We checked with Craig Day and Steve Olenik from IBM who determined that the published CPU service units per second were in error. The documentation (web page with Processor version codes and SRM constants) has now been updated, but here are the corrections for your information:

This information did not come out in an APAR or other notice, and only affects owners of the Lxx models of the zBC12. Because IBM has indicated that there will probably be a new processor line announced in the first half of 2015, we have updated our current CPU Chart and BoxScore charts to include these corrected service units, but not published them. If you would like that update of our charts, please contact us at technical@watsonwalker.com.

4.  IBM Eases Migration to z/OS Version 2

Traditionally, both customers and IBM have had to overcome financial hurdles when moving to a new version of a piece of software. Not only was the new version typically more expensive, it was possible that you could end up having to pay for both old and new versions of the product. To address this double-cost issue for z/OS, IBM introduced Single Version Charging – this gave customers 12 months to complete the migration to the new version, during which you would be charged only for the newer version.

However, this still had some drawbacks. It was not necessarily available in every geography or every country. And because the clock started ticking as soon as you ordered the new version, customers would delay ordering the new version for fear that the 12 months might run out before the migration was complete.

In Cheryl’s List 177 in August of this year we discussed IBM’s new version pricing strategy – basically, IBM plans to price new versions of most MLC products so that there is no financial incentive to stay on the old versions. [Essentially, they raised the prices of the older versions to the price of the new versions.] So that addressed one of the hurdles. And then at the beginning of this month IBM announced a replacement for Single Version Charging. The new option is called Migration Pricing Option (MPO). The MPO provides gives you up to 24 months to complete the migration to z/OS V2. During this period, Sub-Capacity customers pay for z/OS V2 at the combined MSU value of z/OS V1 and z/OS V2. Full capacity customers pay for z/OS V2 only. Like Single Version Charging, the clock starts ticking on the day you order z/OS V2, but two years should be more than long enough for nearly any installation to complete the migration. Another difference is that MPO is available in all countries.

When ordering z/OS V2, make sure that you ask for the ‘Migration Pricing Option’. And if you already have z/OS V2, but have not completed the migration from z/OS V1 yet, you can ask IBM or your Business Partner to update your billing records to reflect that you want to use the Migration Pricing Option. This should happen automatically, but it is always better to be on the safe side.

Our SHARE Survey back in August showed that most, but not all, z/OS V1 customers have a plan to migrate to z/OS V2. Between this announcement and the pricing announcement in August, we can’t see any financial reason for delaying your migration to z/OS V2. 

And V2 has so many enhancements and new features, why would you want to pay the same price for z/OS V1?

For more, see www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/resources/swprice/reference/announce.html. And for more information about the August announcement, refer to Cheryl’s List 177 and the IBM announcement 314-090.

Stay Tuned!