Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 139-page issue, 2022 No. 4, on our publications website. In this issue, you will find the following articles:
- One of the most consistently popular Tuning Letter articles is the User Experiences and Tips one. This issue’s article opens with a reminder to readers that the FREE GSE UK 3-day virtual conference starts tomorrow (February 7th). Refer to the article for a link to the agenda and the registration page. The article also provides valuable information about a way to automatically retrieve Security/Integrity HOLDDATA from IBM’s Security Portal (this will really impress your internal and external auditors!), tips about understanding utilization metrics for Coupling Facilities with shared engines, using information from disaster recovery tests to better evaluate future CPC upgrade options, how to get Gartner’s MIPS numbers for z16s (for Gartner subscribers), and more.
- Many of our readers are considering proposals to upgrade their CPCs to z16s. Every CPC upgrade is a significant undertaking, both financially and in terms of time and effort. When the dust finally settles, everyone from the CIO, through the Finance department, and on to the technicians involved in the project will have the same questions – “How does it compare to the previous CPC, and did we get the capacity we were expecting?” The Planning for an Upgrade to z16 article helps both experienced and relatively new capacity planners prepare for any CPC upgrade (it is not specific to z16 upgrades) and positions you to quickly and accurately answer those capacity-related questions.
- Tuning Letter 2022 No. 3 delivered Todd Havekost’s Using New XCF Metrics to Optimize XCF Buffer Use article about understanding and exploiting recently-added XCF SMF metrics to optimize the inbound side of XCF message processing. In this issue, Todd and Frank team up on the second and concluding part of that article, providing information about XCF’s processing of outbound messages. Building on that knowledge, the article uses real world examples to show how you can optimize the resilience, performance, and efficiency of your XCF signaling infrastructure.
- In our experience, MQ has become nearly as pervasive as CICS. Reflecting its role in mission-critical applications, customers are starting to ponder how they would handle an extended outage of an MQ ‘getting’ application. To assist in that task, IBM Hursley’s Matthew Leming provided the Planning for MQ Deep Queues article in this Tuning Letter. However, this article is not aimed solely at MQ gurus – in Cheryl’s words, “I was blown away by Matthew’s MQ article. Not only is it the best introduction to MQ that I’ve ever seen, but it’s invaluable to the experienced MQ analysts trying to manage millions of messages.” I don’t think you could ask for a better recommendation than that.
- Todd Gagle’s Software Risk Assessment article in Tuning Letter 2022 No. 3 introduced the concept of Software Risk Assessments and described how they are based on your SMP/E CSIs. Software Risk Assessment Considerations for Software Deployment builds on Todd’s article and discusses the relationship deploying software and the growing need to be able to performance a Software Risk Assessment at the system level. After describing the challenge, the article goes on to discuss how the z/OSMF Deployment function can help, and also positions that function in relation to the industry-wide passing of responsibilities to the next generation.
- Of course, we also have our review of IBM z/OS-related APARs from the last quarter. IBM closed over 1400 APARs in that time, including around 100 HIPERs and another 100 New Function APARs. The News article boils those down to the ones that warrant your attention, broken down by subsystem. It also includes a review of new and updated IBM Techdocs materials, as well as upcoming conferences.
You can find the full Table of Contents here. We hope you find this information helpful and timely. Please let us know if there are specific topics you would like to see in a future Tuning Letter article.
If you are not a current Tuning Letter subscriber, see our website for information about subscription rates and the ordering process.
And that’s all our news for this quarter. We are already working on our list of potential articles for the next issue – we have 12 candidates at the moment, and every time we meet to narrow down the list we end up with even more candidates ?. This is going to be an interesting year.
Stay Tuned!
The Team at Watson & Walker