Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 97-page issue, 2022 No. 2, on our publications website. In this issue, you will find the following articles:
- We are finding that a growing portion of our time is spent working with customers that are feeling a growing anxiety as they look at the demographics of their mainframe infrastructure support teams. The reality is that most departments don’t have enough resources today. And then they look at how many staff they are likely to lose this year, and next year, and the year after, and wonder how they are going to continue to support the platform that runs many of their company’s revenue-generating applications. This is a scary situation, and the prospect of heading into a recession, with the attendant ‘cost’-cutting and headcount reductions, does not help. A Letter to Management honestly describes the challenges we are facing, and Watson & Walker’s plans to help our readers be better prepared for the oncoming skills tsunami. The good news is that there are many things that can be done to make the transition less nail-biting, but you need to start now. If you don’t have time to read the entire Tuning Letter right now, we urge subscribers to read that article and pass it up the chain to your executives.
- If you are like many readers and don’t read the Announcement Letter for each new release z/OS or any of the major subsystems (never mind reading the entire Release Guide), we hope our z/OS 2.5 Second Quarter 2022 Update article will help you. The article is designed specifically to help you quickly identify the latest z/OS enhancements that are relevant to your environment, and then provides links to relevant websites, documents, or presentations where you can get more information for the subset you are interested in.
- They say that ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’. Well, we believe that XCF is the window to your sysplex. We include an XCF analysis as part of our sysplex reviews, and have yet to meet a sysplex that didn’t hold some surprises for us (and often for their owners). The biggest challenge is that the RMF Post Processor XCF reports are not terribly user-friendly. All those juicy insights are lurking in your XCF SMF records, but unearthing them can be quite a chore, especially if you don’t really know what you are looking for. So IntelliMagic’s Todd Havekost kindly wrote the XCF – A Reliable (But Often Overlooked) Component of Sysplex article in this Tuning Letter issue, describing our experiences and providing ideas about how you can use XCF SMF data to see what your sysplex is up to.
- We are hearing from more customers that are starting to exploit Z Sort on their z15 CPCs. One of the frequent questions is “Without looking in every joblog, how can we know how our enablement is progressing, and are there constraints that are stopping us getting even more value from it?” We’ve been helping customers with their implementations, and we had the same questions. So we turned to IBM DFSORT guru, Sri Hari Kolusu, to see what information we can retrieve from the DFSORT SMF records. He kindly worked with us to develop three very easy-to-use ICETOOL reports on Z Sort – one that reports on sort steps that are using Z Sort (so you can see how you are progressing), one that reports the sort steps that are not using Z Sort and why, and one that provides a summary of the number of steps (and associated CPU times) that are or are not using Z Sort, and why. Armed with these samples and the information in Optimizing DFSORT Use of Z Sort Accelerator, you can quickly see where you stand, and how to move forward.
- Our popular User Experiences and Tips article once again delivers timely and helpful information. In this issue we provide an invaluable checklist (based on real customer experiences) of things to do if you are preparing to decommission some piece of software, a couple of simple-but-effective time-saving tips for ISPF users. and some thoughts on how to get the best value from an environment that consists of DFSMShsm, zEDC, encrypted data sets, and TS7700 tape libraries. Take a few minutes to check out this article – we’re sure you won’t be disappointed.
- And, last but never least, this issue’s News article contains information about recent Performance, New Function, and selected HIPER APARs, pointers to new or updated Techdocs, and information about upcoming user conferences, including information about Watson & Walker sessions at the upcoming SHARE conference.
You can find the full Table of Contents here. We hope you find this information helpful and timely. And please let us know if there are specific topics you would like to see in a future Tuning Letter article.
Take care, and enjoy the rest of your summer.
Stay Tuned!
The Team at Watson & Walker