The 2024 Summer SHARE conference will be held in the Kansas City Convention Center and the adjoining Kansas City Loews Hotel, starting tomorrow, Sunday, August 4. This one is a 4+-day conference, with sessions starting on Sunday afternoon, and with the last day (Thursday) being a full day. If you are attending, check out the agenda and download the SHARE app for your mobile device.
I don’t have the Technical Agenda from a previous SHARE conference to hand, but when building my plan for the week I’m finding that I have many instances of scheduling clashes between multiple sessions that I really want to attend. For example, the 10:30 slot on Monday has the What’s New in z/OS, What’s New in MQ, and WLM Update sessions, and the 13:15 slots has the What’s new in z/OSMF. What’s New in AI, the Communications Server Update, and the Introducing the New Version of CICS sessions. If you are you are attending with colleagues, I suggest that you sit down in advance and agree who will attend which session so between you, you cover as many presentations as possible.
I am presenting one session (our zRoadshow session on Thursday at 13:45), and co-presenting a vendor session with Todd Havekost and Mark Rader (PSP: Leveraging Visibility into Your SMF and RMF Data to Enhance Performance and Availability (IntelliMagic) at 13:00 on Tuesday. Note that Todd and I were originally scheduled to co-present a session about SMF I/O fields on Monday, but that has been replaced with a BYOD hands-on lab for IntelliMagic Vision – er, I mean, “IBM IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS”. See the session description later in this page for more information.
There are many interesting sessions this week, some related to z/OS V3.1, but there are also many other topics – I don’t think there is a single slot when there aren’t multiple sessions I would love to attend. Also, because of our focus on skills and preparing for the coming retirement of many of our most experienced colleagues, I’ll point out a few introductory sessions for those that would like to spread their wings to other specialties of the z/OS world.
So, my list of sessions I would love to attend (but often can’t because of scheduling clashes) contains the following STARTING ON SUNDAY:
- Sunday, 17:00, 60 Years of Pushing Performance Boundaries with the Mainframe, by Scott Chapman. Scott rekindles some find memories from the past in this session. It sounds like a very interesting session for those new to the platform, and those of us that have been around a little
- Sunday, 17:00, An Introduction to IMS Database – A Primer, INTRO Session. By Dennis Eichelberger. For those that think that MVS control blocks and SMF records are too simple ?.
- Sunday, 17:00, New Use Cases for z/OS Data and Cloud Storage: Continuing the Journey. Excellent opportunity to hear all about the relatively new IBM z/OS DFSMS Cloud Data Manager (5698-CDM) from DFSMS gurus Glenn Wilcock and Robert Gensler. The agenda lists Tracy Dean and John Hogan as the presenters, but I think that is a mistake.
- Sunday, 17:00, z/OSMF Software Management Hidden Gems, by Kurt Quackenbush, IBM’s Mr. SMP/E. If you want to know more about z/OSMF and software management (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?), this will be the place to be on Sunday afternoon.
Monday
- Monday, 09:15, A Beginners Primer for IBM MQ, INTRO Session, by Dorothy Quinc
- Monday, 09:15, z/OS Performance Track Opening and WSC Performance Hot Topics, by Meral Temel and Brad Snyder. A must-see at every SHARE. I think I would learn to master bi-location before I would miss this session.
- Monday, 09:15, z/OS System Programming and Hardware Track Kick-Off, by Art Gutowski, Jayakar Manickam, John Shebey, and John Wright. I really wish the SHARE schedulers wouldn’t have this session in the same slot as the WSC Performance Hot Topics one – they both provide invaluable tidbits that can justify attending SHARE all their own.
- Monday, 10:30, IBM Z Hardware Hot Topics, by Kenny Stine. I’m not aware of any significant new functions on z16 over the last six months. However, the abstract specifically mentions “continuous delivery enhancements for the IBM z16” so it might be interesting to see what that covers.
- Monday, 10:30, CICS Technical Introduction for non CICS people, INTRO Session. by Ezriel Gross. Ezriel has won more SHARE awards for the quality of his sessions than I’ve had hot dinners. If you want to learn about CICS, don’t miss this session.
- Monday, 10:30, Demystifying how z/OS works for early career Z professionals, INTRO Session, by Roger Bales. I’m hardly an ‘early-career z professional’, but I wouldn’t mind sitting in on this one myself – maybe after all these years some light bulbs would finally go on ?.
- Monday, 10:30, What’s New in z/OS 3.1? KC Edition, by Dave Surman, Marna Walle, and Steve Warren. If the Klingons transported this trio of z experts off the planet, I think the mainframe world would quickly grind to a halt. I can’t imagine a question about z/OS that one of these three presenters couldn’t answer.
- Monday, 10:30, Workload Management (WLM) Update for IBM z16 and IBM z/OS 3.1, by Simon Flaig. This is Simon’s first time to present at SHARE (you can tell, because his slides are already out on the conference website!), so be nice to him.
- Monday, 13:15, BYOD Lab: Enhancing Performance with IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS. This session will be managed by John Baker and Todd Havekost, two gentlemen that can answer just about any question you could imagine about IntelliMagic Vision, and a lot more that you haven’t even thought of yet. This is an ideal opportunity to get your hands on it and see why Cheryl and I are such big fans of this product and the people that support it.
- Monday, 13:15, Leveraging WatchTower for Mainframe Observability and Accelerating MTTR with Contextual Insights, by Matheus Milani de Oliveira and Aaron Young. Aaron did an excellent job at the z Observability Shootout last year, and this looks like it will be another very interesting session. Observability is certainly one of the hot topics at the moment, so it will be interesting to see a real example in action.
- Monday, 13:15, Improve System Resiliency with a New IBM z/OS Dashboard Solution, by Juliet Candee and Matt Hodak. IBM has been talking about this resiliency dashboard for a while now, and the abstract says they will preview it in this session. An interesting opportunity for anyone responsible for some aspect of resiliency.
- Monday, 13:15, What’s New in DFSMS, by Alexis Kapica and Barb McDonald. The DFSMS folks always have something new to discuss, and Barb does an excellent job of pointing out other DFSMS sessions during the week that will go into more detail on various aspects of the What’s New presentation.
- Monday, 13:15, What’s New in z/OSMF?, by Xiao Zhen Zhu. With z/OSMF firmly established as the defacto hub for system programming activity, it is always wise to keep up with the latest developments. This session covers the enhancements to z/OSMF in the first half of 2024.
- Monday, 13:15, z/OS Communications Server Technical Update: Summer 2024 Edition, by Mike Fitzpatrick and Sam Reynolds. The dynamic duo of Mike and Sam always have something new to keep our networking colleagues busy.
- Monday, 14:30, Intro to the IBM Z Processor Optimization Primer, by David Hutton. If you want to know what every transistor and every electron in a z16 do, Dave is the man to ask. If you really want to understand what is going on under the covers of your z16, and how to squeeze that last 2 MIPS out of it, you want to be at this session.
- Monday, 14:30, Monitoring your Distributed Workload for Db2 for z/OS, by Jørn Thyssen. This is a topic that I find particularly interesting at the moment. For many clients, DDF is the fast-growing part of their z/OS workloads. And for z/OS customers considering a migration to a sub-capacity CPC, having visibility into the CPU consumption of DDF transactions is especially important.
- Monday, 14:30, z/OS 3.1 User Experiences, by Ed Jaffe. This is an updated version of Ed’s very popular session from Orlando, based on Phoenix Software’s pre-GA experiences with z/OS 3.1, and fixes and updates that have been applied since then. If you haven’t made the move to z/OS 3.1 yet, this would be a good opportunity to see what awaits you.
- Monday, 15:45, Back to Basics Series: Understanding SYS1.PARMLIB, INTRO Session, by Rebecca Parchman.
- Monday, 15:45, Macro to Micro: Understanding z/OS Performance Moment by Moment, by Scott Chapman. Scott’s presentations are always insightful and entertaining, and this looks like it will be another classic. Highly recommended.
And that’s just for the first day and a half! I’ll be back tomorrow with some suggestions for Tuesday and Wednesday – and remember that Thursday is a nearly-full day, with sessions running until 16:00, and our zRoadshow session from 13:45 to 14:45.
If you are going to be at SHARE, please say Hi if you see us. Cheryl will be in the Expo, on the Planet Mainframe stand, so please drop by for a chat about the old days, and the exciting times that lie ahead. We hope you have safe travels and an enjoyable conference.
Frank