Here is the third installment of our 4-part series of Cheryl’s List blog posts about sessions at SHARE that we think might be particularly interesting to our readers. This post has enough sessions to keep you and your colleagues out of harm’s way for all of Wednesday. Time permitting, I’ll get the list for Thursday’s sessions out tomorrow evening.
So, my list of sessions I think might be especially relevant to our readers on Wednesday are as follows:
- Wednesday, 07:30, Do You Know Your Environment? WatchTower Topology and CMDB Feed from SMF Data, by Dave Helsley and Michal Kramaric. I really want to learn more about WatchTower, and this session sounds particularly interesting. But 7:30? In the morning? Who schedules these things? I think I’ll be relying on the slides and then hoping that I catch poor Dave or Michal to answer any questions I have before they leave the conference.
- Wednesday, 07:30, SMF-Data Exploration for Mainframe Insights: Leveraging IBM SMF Explorer in Jupyter Notebooks, by Alexander Glemsa. Another very interesting session that I would love to attend. But, 7:30 AM?? Really? Even if my body somehow showed up, my brain would still be blissfully asleep. ☹
- Wednesday, 07:30, z/OS Native APIs for Cloud Object Storage, by Andrew Wilt. In Part 1 of these posts I mentioned a Sunday session about use cases for DFSMScdm, and a little about how CDM uses the capabilities provided by CDA (Cloud Data Access). This session talks about how your application developers could use CDA to access cloud resources from their COBOL programs. Wow – COBOL and Cloud at 7:30 in the morning, what a scary prospect.
- Wednesday, 08:45, Are You Leveraging the Latest DFSMShsm Enhancements?, by Robert Gensler. It is not unusual to see HSM appearing as one of the top CPU consumers in a system. If HSM has a big footprint in your installation, attend this session to be sure you are aware of the many enhancements the DFSMS folks have made to reduce HSM’s CPU consumption and/or add new functions.
- Wednesday, 08:45, Blending Art and Science: The Performance Top 10, by John Baker and Jerry Street. Whether you are new to the performance field, or you are your site’s guru, come along and benefit from the experiences of two very respected performance experts who have the added insight of being able to see many customer systems in the course of a normal working day.
- Wednesday, 08:45, z/OS Communications Server Performance Update, by Mike Fitzpatrick and Christopher Nyamful. The folks from the Comm Server Development group always have interesting new capabilities and measurements up their sleeves. If you are responsible for network hardware or software for your mainframes, you have to attend this session.
- Wednesday, 08:45, z/OS Parallel Sysplex Update, by Mark Brooks. Mark’s sessions are always well-attended because he always has so much interesting news, and he presents it in such an enthusiastic manner. This is another of the small set of ‘must-see’ sessions at SHARE.
- Wednesday, 10:00, Achieve Mainframe-Inclusive Observability with OpenTelemetry, by Angelika Heinrich and Machhindra Nale. Observability is all the rage at the moment, and OpenTelemetry allows z/OS to play in this multi-platform game.
- Wednesday, 10:00, WSC System Programmer Hot Topics, by Daniel Snyder and Meral Temel. Come and hear about the Washington System Center’s experiences with the latest hardware and z/OS 3.1. This session should be of particular interest if you have already moved to z/OS 3.1 but haven’t enabled all the latest ‘bells and whistles’, or if an upgrade to z/OS 3.1 is looming in your near future. Come and learn from the experiences of the experts.
- Wednesday, 13:15, Language Environment Storage Tuning, by Naijie Li. Nigel’s abstract says it better than I ever could – “With more and more memory intensive and highly concurrent applications running on z/OS, there are more application level tuning opportunities. In this session you can learn how to use LE runtime options to tune your C/C++, COBOL and Java applications for both performance and minimal storage usage without recompiling”.
- Wednesday, 13:15, z/OSMF Sysplex Management Application and the New Coupling Facility Resource Management (CFRM) Policy Editor, by Rolando Perez and Dave Surman. If you have a Coupling Facility, large or small, you have to attend this session. You couldn’t wish for two more knowledgeable guides to this great new capability.
- Wednesday, 13:15, z16 SMF 113s – Understanding Processor Cache Counters, by Peter Enrico. The SMF type 113 records are the gateways to the soul of your system. These records provide insights that other platforms have not even dreamed about. In addition to his vast experience and knowledge, Peter has the added benefit of seeing data from many systems and many customers. If you have been wondering about why there is so much focus on these records, attend Peter’s session and find out for yourself.
- Wednesday, 13:15, zHyperLink User Experience and New Features, by John Baker and Beth Peterson. zHyperLinks have been around for quite a while now, but we haven’t seen many customers using them yet. It will be interesting to see what new insights John and Beth can provide.
- Wednesday, 14:30, CICS Problem Analysis and Performance Tuning Methodology, by Ezriel Gross. If you are into CICS and performance, this is the place to be on Wednesday afternoon.
- Wednesday, 14:30, Digging Deeper on z/OS Container Platform, by Kershaw Mehta. This is still very new technology, but you couldn’t ask for a better guide to it than Kershaw. If you think there will be a place for this new capability in your installation, you can’t miss this session.
- Wednesday, 14:30, Using Generative AI to Help Modernize System Programmers Tasks, by Chad McIntyre. In his abstract, Chad mentions using generative AI to help modernize JCL. Wow – AI and JCL, there’s an ‘odd couple’ if ever there was one. It would be worth attending this session for that bit alone.
- Wednesday, 15:45, Get conversational answers to z/OS questions and launch automation with IBM Watsonx Assistant for z/OS, by Jayakar Manickam. Is this the answer to the Z Skills Issue? Z16 meets The Terminator? In all seriousness, this is a very important session for anyone with responsibility for skills and staffing strategy for your mainframe department.
- Wednesday, 15:45, System Recovery Boost Update, by Dave Surman. I was at a session today where a good few questions came up on this topic, indicating that there are still sites that are not getting the maximum value from this exciting technology. If you have a z15 or z16 and you haven’t put time into studying everything that System Recovery Boost can do for you, you should attend this session.
- Wednesday, 17:00, Uncovering Both the Mysteries Behind How z/OS Leverages General Purpose and Assist Processors, and the Realities of COBOL-to-Java Conversion, by Roger Bales and Dave Hutton. This is a new presentation, on a very topical subject, so I expect this will attract great interest.
- Wednesday, 17:00, z/OS 3.1 Release Beta Program Client User Experience, by John Petreshock and Jeff Wells. Hopefully you attended Ed Jaffe’s z/OS 3.1 User Experiences session on Monday. This session gives you an opportunity to hear about the experiences of another early z/OS 3.1 user.
- Wednesday, 17:00, z/OS Validated Boot, by Dave Surman. Validated Boot is not a subject for the feint-hearted. And it certainly is not something you will implement during your coffee break. But it is something that your external auditors might want to discuss during their next visit. Take this opportunity to learn about this new function, and the important planning requirements for it, from one of IBM’s real experts on this topic.
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 the chance to catch up with your friends. 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