It seems that every new news cycle brings yet more evidence that the world is falling apart in front of our eyes. In times like this, it is up to our readers to make sure that the systems that support their companies and their customers do not fall apart. To help you achieve that, Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2019 No. 4, now available on our Publications website provides the following articles:
- Cheryl’s Guide to buying a CPU upgrade. Judging by IBM’s fourth quarter results, and the number of trucks circling the IBM Poughkeepsie site, just about every mainframe customer must have received a z15 proposal from IBM. If you are one of them, Cheryl’s article about buying a CPU upgrade couldn’t come at a better time.
- Hand-in-hand with your CPU upgrade proposal, many of our clients have been receiving Tailored Fit Pricing (TFP) proposals. As with all IBM software pricing options, there are some customers that are probably a perfect fit for TFP, and other customers that would achieve lower costs using one of the other pricing options. Our IBM’s Tailored Fit Pricing article describes how TFP differs from traditional R4HA-based pricing options, and provides advice to help you determine which is the best fit for you.
- Regardless of the industry your company operates in, protecting your systems and data has to be near the top of your CIO’s list of concerns. IBM’s z Encryption Readiness Technology creates SMF records containing encryption information about all TCP connections in and out of z/OS. As part of a new series of Tuning Letter articles by IntelliMagic’s Todd Havekost, this issue provide real world examples of how the zERT SMF records can be used to identify TCP sessions that represent potential security exposures. We are sure that our readers will enjoy and benefit from this and future articles by Todd.
- This issue also includes an article about another hot topic – ‘serverless’ backups. DFSMSdss underlies DFSMShsm’s exploitation of the DS8K Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT) capability, but this article, written with invaluable help from IBM’s Robert Gensler, describes how DFSMSdss could be used directly with TCT. It also illustrates the challenges that are faced by any product that wants to move data directly between a disk subsystem and the cloud. Even if you are not ready for serverless data movement, or think that it isn’t ready for you, this is an important technology that you should be familiar with. It is also a good way to illustrate to your executives that z/OS IS ready for a cloud world.
- Our last big article this month is about RACF performance. RACF is one of those products that just works away quietly in the background, with no indication of how well or poorly it is performing. However, RACF provides many performance-enhancing capabilities, but most of them require overt actions by the system programmers or security administrators to exploit them. IBM’s Mark Nelson and independent security expert, Bob Hansel, kindly helped us create an article about these many capabilities. If you are a RACF customer, this article is a must-read.
- We also have our usual reviews of New Function and performance-related APARs, Redbooks, and Techdocs. Your staff have more valuable uses for their time than reading APARs that are not relevant to your company. And yet APARs can deliver valuable performance and functionality improvements, especially in this age of continuous delivery, so not checking APARs can result in your being unaware of valuable enhancements. So why not let us do the reading and research, and then your team can concentrate on the small number of APARs that are important? We also provide End of Support dates for all the major IBM subsystems, to save you from having to find that information. And we have our normal list of new or updated Redbooks, IBM Techdocs, and upcoming conferences and user events.
If you would like more information about the Tuning Letters, you can find the Table of Contents from all issues here or feel free to email us any time – we are always happy to welcome new members to the Tuning Letter family.