Following on from Part 1 of our posts about sessions at SHARE that we think might be particularly interesting to our readers, this post has more than a few sessions to keep you entertained on Tuesday. I had hoped to send this post out yesterday, but this is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath since arriving here. So, this post will cover Tuesday, and I’ll get the list for Wednesday’s sessions out tomorrow evening.
But before I go on, I have a big mea culpa. I received an email from Glenn Wilcock during the week, in response to some questions from me about this new DFSMS Cloud Data Manager (DFSMScdm) product. In his email, Glenn mention that he and Robert Gensler will be doing a session on this topic on Thursday, and that there would be a session on Sunday afternoon about Use Cases for DFSMScdm. I misunderstood and thought he and Robert were presenting both sessions, and I said that in my Part 1 post – it turned out that I was wrong (again), and the presenters were Tracy Dean and John Hogan. I apologized profusely, but John extracted a high price – he said he would only forgive me if I buy him a beer – the things I do to keep our readers happy ?.
So, with that little faux pas behind me, hopefully my remaining posts will be more accurate. My list of sessions I think might be especially interesting to our readers on Tuesday are as follows:
- Tuesday, 09:15, Introduction to z/OS Communications Server, INTRO Session. By Paul Gartman and Sam Reynolds. If we all had z/OS systems with no users, we would never have a response time complaint again. But for the 100% of us that are not like that, you need to connect your systems to the outside world, which means that you need the z/OS Communication Server. Just about any component of z/OS is going to be touched by some aspect of Communication Server, so this is a great opportunity to learn a little more about this vital, core part of your z/OS environment.
- Tuesday, 09:15, RMF: The Latest and Greatest, by Mark Jula and Fiona King. The RMF Reporting Interfaces have been going through a lot of change over the last year or so, so take this opportunity to ensure you are up to speed on the latest capabilities.
- Tuesday, 09:15, Turn “Oh No!” Into “No Problem” with Safeguarded Copy and IZBR, by Chris Taylor. If you were one of the Tuning Letter readers that felt very queasy after reading our Recovery At Scale articles, this is one of the sessions this week that might help you move from panicking to planning how you will address the scenarios we raised in those articles.
- Tuesday, 09:15, What’s New in the Hitachi VSP 5000 Family, by Alain Beauregard. All the storage vendors have their own offerings and thoughts on cyber resiliency & cyber security. Even if you don’t use Hitachi storage subsystems, it is always valuable to attend sessions such as this to get a broader view. No one has a monopoly on all the bright ideas, and all the vendors have very bright people we all can learn from.
- Tuesday, 09:15 and 10:30, Upgrade to z/OS 3.1, Part 1 of 2: Planning and Upgrade to z/OS 3.1, Part 1 of 2: Planning, by Aaron Kippins and Marna Walle. Back-to-back sessions covering everything you need to know before embarking on an upgrade to z/OS 3.1.
- Tuesday, 10:30, How Svenska Handelsbanken (SHB) Automated Deployment and Configuration of Their OMEGAMON Monitoring Environment, by Ash Mahay and Dan Wiegand. Not only is this an interesting and potentially time-saving topic, it is also important to support any customer that steps up and is willing to put the time and effort into sharing their experiences with their peers.
- Tuesday, 10:30, Sysplex Data Sharing – What You Need to Know for Implementing RLS and TVS, by Terri Menendez. Noone in the world knows more about VSAM RLS than Terri. And VSAM RLS underlies IBM’s implementation of NoSQL databases on z/OS, which in turn are likely to be pre-reqs for an increasing number of other products, so this is an important session. There is also a session specifically about EzNoSQL, complete with customer use cases, at 14:15 on Tuesday.
- Tuesday, 10:30, What’s New with PowerMax!, by Justin Bastin and Robin Fromm. If you use Dell (formerly EMC) storage subsystems, this is your chance to catch up on their latest developments and strategies. And if you don’t use Dell storage, it still might be insightful to see what other vendors are doing.
- Tuesday, 13:00, PSP: Leveraging Visibility into Your SMF and RMF Data to Enhance Performance and Availability (IntelliMagic), by Todd Havekost, Mark Rader, and yours truly. Todd and Mark are both excellent, very knowledgeable presenters. They presented a similar session to this one at another user conference and received rave reviews, so this will be an informative and enjoyable session – I hope we see you there.
- Tuesday, 13:00, PSP: Touchdown! Score with New Application Profiling (Broadcom), by Nicole Fagen. If you don’t attend our session, Nocole’s presentation will review the already-announced WatchTower features, and introduce a powerful new Application Profiling capability. This technology is new to z/OS and is very pertinent to anyone interested in optimizing application performance on z/OS or in understanding the many complex relationships between your applications.
- Tuesday, 14:15, Accessing a NoSQL Database on z/OS is Ez, by Nancy Kilroy and Terri Menendez. This is the session on EzNoSQL that I mentioned above. If JSON key:value databases are of interest to your shop, either for home-grown applications, or as a pre-req for other products, you should attend this session which will present sponsor use cases and implementation experiences.
- Tuesday, 14:15, JES2 z/OS 3.1 Product Update and Latest Status, by Tom Wasik. This is another of our personal must-see sessions at SHARE. Tom’s sessions are always well-attended and, as Cheryl said, she learns something new with every one of Tom’s slides.
- Tuesday, 14:15, More/Slower vs. Fewer/Faster CPUs: Practical Considerations in 2024, by Scott Chapman. Oh boy – this is another topic that is near and dear to our hearts – I wish it wasn’t in the same time slot as so many other great sessions. We are finding an increasing interest among our subscribers in migrating to a sub-capacity CPC, especially among those that want to upgrade to z16 but don’t need additional capacity, and especially among customers moving to z16 from z14, where they would likely end up with significantly fewer CPs on a full-capacity z16. If either of those descriptions fit you, you should attend Scott’s session.
- Tuesday, 14:15, What’s New in the IBM DS8900F Storage Family, by Beth Peterson. Modern disk subsystems seem to be as complex as the whole operating system was back when I started as an Operator a long time ago. If you have an IBM disk subsystem, make sure you or a colleague attend this session to hear about all the latest enhancements and capabilities.
- Tuesday, 14:15, Ansible for z/OS 101. INTRO Session, by Stewart Francis. I know nothing about Ansible, other than that I can’t attend an IBM session without hearing about it (along with hybrid-cloud and AI). If I had just about any traditional z/OS automation product, from IBM or otherwise, I would want to know how Ansible fits into that picture. If you want to understand what all your distributed peers are talking about, this is your chance to quickly get up to speed.
- Tuesday, 15:30, How New-to-Z Sys Programmers Can Update and IPL a System, Create New z/OS Images and Provision Test Systems, INTRO Session. By Christina La Row and Rafael Lima. This sounds like an interesting topic. It also sounds like one of those sessions that you really need to attend in person to get the full value from it – it doesn’t sound like reading the slides later will do the trick.
- Tuesday, 15:30, Language Environment (LE) Overview and Updates, by Naijie Li, from the LE Development group. As the focus of performance tuning activities moves inexorably towards application workloads and application modernization, LE experience and knowledge will be at a premium. If LE is this opaque ‘thing’ to you, this is your chance to lift the veil and impress all your colleagues back home with your new-found LE prowess.
- Tuesday, 15:30, SDSF Hidden Treasures, by Tom Wasik. An interesting topic (for any SDSF users) by an entertaining and vastly experienced presenter – certainly a good investment of 60 minutes of your day.
- Tuesday, 15:30, What’s Running on Your Mainframe?, by Mario Bezzi and his colleague Michal Kramaric. Our friend Mario Bezzi, now a Distinguished Engineer for Broadcom, will lead this technical session on the new Application Profiling capability that was introduced by Nicole Fagen in her PSP: Touchdown! Score with New Application Profiling (Broadcom) session earlier on Tuesday.
- Tuesday 16:30-18:30, STE and Reception. Note that the ‘Expo’ starts and ends a half hour earlier tomorrow. There’s lots to see, and many friends and colleagues for you to catch up with. And don’t forget that Cheryl will be holding her trademark ‘fireside chats’ on the Planet Mainframe stand (unfortunately the organizers wouldn’t allow us to build a real fireplace ☹), so please drop by to say hello and catch up on all the latest juicy gossip.
And that’s just for one day – and don’t forget that Thursday is a full day this time.
If you are at SHARE, please say Hi if you see us. We hope you are enjoying the conference and this beautiful and friendly city. I’ll be back tomorrow with another update. If you attend any knock-out sessions that I missed, please let me know. Thank you.
Frank