Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest, 140-page, issue on our publications website (https://watsonwalkerpublications.com/). No matter what your job role (or ‘persona’, to use the ‘in’ terminology) is, if you work with z/OS, we’re sure that you will find interesting and valuable information in this issue. Specifically, we have:
- Information about the new Z Sort Acceleration function on the z15. Exactly how does it work? What performance benefits does it provide? What changes do you need to make to your applications to benefit from this new capability? What are the software and hardware prerequisites? All this, and lots more, are provided in our z15 Sort Accelerator article.
- z/OS is the gold standard in operating system instrumentation and control, and SMF is the repository for all that information. Cheryl is well known as The Queen of SMF, and this issue includes her latest What’s New in SMF article that describes the SMF-related changes in z/OS 2.3 and 2.4 that we believe are the most important to our readers. From new fields, to new sections, to new subtypes, and up to new record types, this article has it all.
- Tailored Fit Pricing (TFP) is one of the hot topics of the day. Most of the discussion to this point has been about the concepts behind TFP and how it compares to the traditional R4HA-based pricing metrics. But now that TFP is growing its customer base, it is time to move the discussion on to managing costs after you move to TFP. Our friend Todd Havekost from Intelligmagic penned an information-packed article on this topic for this issue. Reporting on Tailored Fit Pricing Enterprise Consumption provides invaluable information for any site that has moved to, or is about to move to TFP. Just make sure that you read this at the start of your contract, and not when you are approaching the end of the first year.
- One of the more interesting enhancements on the z15 is System Recovery Boost. The capabilities included in the initial delivery were aimed at reducing system shutdown and restart times. In August, IBM announced ‘System Recovery Boost Stage 2’. This uses the boost technology to reduce the elapsed time for sysplex and CF-related recovery processing – a logical extension of this technology. In our System Recovery Boost Gets A Boost article we discuss the latest enhancement, the underlying technology, and muse about what might be coming in Stages 3, 4, and 13.
- Our most popular section is our User Experiences. After all, who doesn’t want to benefit from other’s experiences, and maybe chuckle at our peer’s misfortunes? This issue has a bumper crop of seven experiences, including one of our own, as well as hints and tips from Cheryl about how to get the best value from your SHARE membership – especially important in these days of virtual conferences.
- And, of course, we have our 46-age News article, chock full of interesting APARs, information about upcoming End of Support dates, IBM Statements of Direction, helpful website, Red Alerts, Redbooks, and new or updated Techdocs.
- You can find the Table of Contents for this issue (and all past issues) here: https://watsonwalker.com/publications/tuningletter/table-of-contents/2020-tuning-letters/.
Speaking of Techdocs, you might find that some links to Techdocs in this Tuning Letter are broken. They were working when we sent the Tuning Letter to our publisher, but they were broken by IBM’s ongoing website ‘improvements’. We mentioned these in our Free GSE UK Conference and IBM Techdocs Snafu blog post, however the changes are ongoing, meaning that even if we were to go through the entire document and update the links, we have no certainty that they won’t change yet again.
If you find the changes to the IBM Techdocs website as frustrating and counter-productive as we do, please let your IBM account team know. We, and multiple large customers, have expressed our opinion about these changes to IBM before, but our protestations do not appear to have had any effect. Perhaps a larger volume of inputs might be more successful. One thing that we would like to stress is that, to the best of our knowledge, these changes are not being driven by the IBM Z technical community. We know for a fact that many of them are just as frustrated as we are, so please don’t take your displeasure out on them.