Following on from our Cheryl’s List blog posts about sessions at SHARE on Monday and Tuesday, this post has some sessions to keep you entertained on Wednesday (February 25). We plan to do a separate post for each day, to make them a little more manageable for you. Please let us know if you find these posts helpful and if you have any suggestions about how we could make them more valuable to you.
The Wednesday sessions I think might be particularly interesting to our readers are as follows:
- Wednesday, 07:30, IBM Watsonx Assistant for Z, by Prentice Rogers and Sunayana Sharma. I played around a little with the Watsonx Assistant for Z last year and, quite honestly, I was not exactly bowled over with its responses. However, a year is a long time in AI-world, so I will be very interested to see how it has progressed. It takes a lot to get me out of bed for a 7:30 session, but this might be one of the few topics to achieve that.
- Wednesday, 08:45, Enablement of the AI Powered WLM Initiators Solution in a Multiple System Sysplex, by Anastasiia Didkovska, Tariq Hanif, and Robert Miller. This presentation covers the setting up of the AI Framework in a multi-system sysplex, including loading the SMF data into the EzNoSQl database, training the model, deploying it, and simulating, enabling, and disabling the function.
- Wednesday, 08:45, Observability, OpenTelemetry and z/OS: Practical Examples Driving Operational Resiliency, by Muruganandam Somasundaram and Chris Walker. We’ve been hearing a lot about Observability and OpenTelemetry, but this might be your first opportunity to see it in action. This is definitely going to be a key aspect of any future capacity or performance tool, so this will be an important session for anyone whose career lies in this discipline.
- Wednesday 08:45, Recovery Compliance: A Simple Recipe for Success, by Samantha Buhler and James Endler. For those of you that enjoy having the daylights scared out of you, you might enjoy a recent mini-series on Netflix called Zero Day. I won’t ruin the fun on you, but if you DO watch it, you might want to get a front-row seat for yourself at this session. It truly is a very scary world that we live in, and anyone that plays a role in delivering z/OS-based services really should be thinking about the risks and what you can do to minimize them. Another session along similar lines to this one might be Unleashing Db2 Utility Performance With IBM Db2 Automation Expert for z/OS, by Perry Shindle and Tim Willging, at 7:30 on Wednesday morning.
- Wednesday, 08:45, zPCR Overview and Sizing Demonstration, by Shawn Lundvall. If you are planning for a CPC upgrade this year (maybe to an as-yet unannounced zNext), this is a great opportunity to learn about THE IBM tool that you will hopefully use when evaluating the best fit for your needs. Shawn is the developer for zPCR, so no one can answer your questions better than him.
- Wednesday, 10:00, How to Achieve HA and DR Across Multiple Geographic Regions, by John Thompson. I had an interesting discussion with a subscriber recently about ‘Active/Active’ – a somewhat nebulous term that spans DR and HA and seems to be coming from our friends in the distributed world. I hope to attend this session to get the official IBM position regarding what is and isn’t really available and achievable on z/OS.
- Wednesday, 11:00-13:00, SHARE Technology Expo. Wednesday is the last day for the Expo, so don’t forget to take this opportunity to catch any vendors or friends before the Expo ends.
- Wednesday, 13:15, Mainframe AI 101: Understand How AI Can Improve Your Business Workload With Real-Time Insights, by Purvi Patel and Stephen Warren. One thing we are not short of in the world today is hype about AI. Despite that, I’m still convinced that AI can deliver real value to mainframe infrastructure specialists. We are drowning in metrics and raw data, but pitifully lacking in powerful easy-to-use tools to help us extract real insights from it. I’m not expecting to come out of this session with the answer to all my prayers, but I do hope to have a better understanding of what might be coming in the future, and when.
- Wednesday 13:15, Maximize Your z/OS Support Experience, by John Shebey and Laura Sperling. This is one of those times I really wish I could be in two places at the same time. I have already started working on my list of questions for John and Laura. I might not manage my own system, but we do spend a lot of time navigating the various IBM tools and websites so I hope I can come away with a few tips to save me precious hours every month.
- Wednesday 14:30, How Busy Is That Mainframe, Really?, by Scott Chapman. This session is not for performance newbies, but it does offer some very interesting insights and examples of how you can get invaluable information from the SMF type 98 and 99 records. This will certainly be a session that I hope to attend.
- Wednesday 14:30, What’s New on the IBM DS8A00F Storage Family, by Beth Peterson. Modern storage subsystems are so powerful and so complex that I normally steer clear of them, preferring to leave that stuff to the experts. However we’ve seen quite a few cases where there is a common storage management team for mainframe and distributed, but most of the staff come from a distributed background. As a result, many functions that could be used by z/OS never get exploited. If that description sounds similar to your installation, you might want to attend this session – hopefully it will arm you with some ideas to bring back to your storage management colleagues.
- Wednesday 17:00, Pardon the Interruption: CPENABLE and Interrupt Delay, by John Baker. Tuning Letter subscribers might remember a User Experience article in 2023 where we described why one of our readers decided to veer from the standard IBM-provided CPENABLE settings, and the impact that had on their performance. If you were intrigued by that article, this is an ideal opportunity to participate in a session with a real expert on this topic, and hopefully come away with a better understanding of how using the new CPENABLE=SYSTEM setting might help or hurt you.
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. 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