1. MTTR ITSO Residency
2. Correction in Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2009 No. 1
3. Hot Flashes Update
1. MTTR ITSO Residency
While at SHARE, I heard about an interesting upcoming ITSO residency on reducing the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). IBM’s ITSO (International Technical Support Organization) is the organization that publishes Redbooks, and the objective of this four-week residency in May is to produce a Redbook showing ways to reduce the MTTR (the time to shut down a z/OS system and complete a re-IPL). I’m very excited about being selected for this residency. Would you like to help out our team by providing some information about your site? All information will be kept confidential. The easiest way is to forward this email to me at technical@watsonwalker.com and include your answers to the questions below. You can also find a form at www.watsonwalker.com/mttr.pdf. If you want to send it anonymously, you can fax or mail the form. My direct fax rather than the company fax is best because it comes to my email (941-827-9493). Please try to provide feedback before May 4 when the residency begins.
Frank Kyne of IBM is the project leader of this residency and thinks that your answers to the questions below would help us. (I told him that our readers were always very willing to help when needed!)
1. How long is a typical IPL for a planned outage?
2. How do you define the start of an IPL and the completion of an IPL?
3. How long is a typical shutdown for a planned outage?
4. How do you define the start of the shutdown and the end (the point at which you are able to IPL)?
5. Do you have any subsystems that take a long time to initialize? How long? Can you explain why?
6. How do you define the start of subsystem initialization and its completion? Specific messages?
7. Do you have startup or shutdown problems you frequently observe?
8. What is the worst recovery time problem you face on an ongoing basis?
9. Which typically takes longer: the recovery processing itself, or determining what recovery process to initiate?
10. Briefly describe your environment (e.g. large system environment, 4-way SYSPLEX with DB2 Data Sharing and JES2 MAS, Automation Product XYZ, CICS and WebSphere, OLTP workload, etc.).
In addition, we’d love to have any logs that you’re willing to share, such as syslog at start up or shut down, or joblogs from subsystems, such as CICS, IMS, etc.
I really appreciate any information you’re willing to share with us. It will help everyone in the long run.
2. Correction in Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2009 No. 1
Lucy Trabulus from Merrill Lynch noticed the following typo on page 31. In the paragraph about VARYCPU, I said that the command was used for ‘LPAR weight management’ when I should have said ‘CPU weight management’. Thanks for letting us know, Lucy!
3. Hot Flashes Update
I mentioned a site in my SHARE Hot Flashes presentation that no longer exists. In the previous Hot Flashes, I had referred to a site that let you build your own Redbook from extracts from other Redbooks. It was called ‘My Redbooks’ at http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/MyR/. Apparently, that was just a Beta and is no longer available. It was a handy tool, so I hope that IBM comes up with something similar.
Stay Tuned!