1. Cheryl Speaking at Florida CMG Tomorrow
2. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2010 No. 6
3. Correction to Tuning Letter 2010 No. 6
4. Correction to Tuning Letter 2010 No. 5
5. IBM Red Alert
1. Cheryl Speaking at Florida CMG Tomorrow
If you’re near Tampa, Florida tomorrow (Tuesday, January 18), please consider stopping by an all-day free meeting. In an attempt to (re)start a Florida CMG group, the organizers have created an exciting all-day event with the following speakers: Anthony Mungal, Scott Chapman, Craig S. Mullins, Brian Hoare, Peter Enrico, and me. I’ll be providing an update on my Cheryl’s Hot Flashes #24. The conference, breaks, and lunch are sponsored by SoftwareOnZ. For more information, seehttp://regions.cmg.org/regions/flcmg.
2. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2010 No. 6
The fifty-six page 2010 No. 6 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on December 22nd. You may visit our website at www.watsonwalker.com to obtain subscription information and the table of contents. The following is Tom’s Management Summary page from that issue, talking about some of the contents of this latest Tuning Letter:
Exploiting New Functions
Each new release of z/OS has dozens of enhancements to improve performance, reliability, and availability. But very often those enhancements are delivered as disabled. The reasoning is very simple – customers demand that IBM not change how the system fundamentally works. So if you don’t take some action to enable and exploit these enhancements, you’ve lost a lot of the benefit of going to a new release.
Many, if not most, of the enhancements are delivered with an option that you can turn on by changing a parmlib member. Additionally, IBM will often add new functions between releases that could be exploited. We’ve found that, unfortunately, few customers take the time to exploit these new features when they install a new release. And to do the research to go back and find each new change takes a considerable amount of time. So we do the research for you. In this issue, we start a three-part series describing parmlib changes for the last five z/OS releases. While most installations are currently on z/OS 1.10, we’ve discovered that few sites have enabled these functions, even though they became available as far back as z/OS 1.8.
This first part provides the research on changes to 18 parmlib members in the last five releases, and provides Cheryl’s recommendations on when to use the defaults, and when (and why) to exploit a new feature. In the next two issues, we’ll cover another 28 members that had changes. You probably haven’t looked at many of these in years. This would make a great project for any new sysprog or performance analyst; they can learn about both the old and new parameters while finding techniques to improve the system.
zManager
In our Tuning Letter 2010 No. 4, we described the latest mainframe offering from IBM – the zEnterprise consisting of new z196 CPCs and optional zBX boxes. The management of zEnterprise represents a giant leap forward compared to previous methods and is encompassed in the firmware called the zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, or zManager for short. One of the potential uses of zManager is to be able to define business workloads across multiple platforms (z/OS, Linux, and AIX) and manage the resources to achieve the desired goals of the business requirement.
This won’t be achieved in the first step, but it’s certainly where IBM is headed. IBM is taking this direction because it’s a strong requirement from customers. In this Tuning Letter, we’ll give you an overview of how this workload performance management will work, and provide a framework for you to understand the new terminology.
Elsewhere In This Issue
You’ll find many other useful items throughout this newsletter: A user noticed an increase in central storage occurred after installing z/OS 1.11 • An alternative for VVDS errors • A problem using CA-7 with PDSE libraries • Negative SMF fields • A method for tracking VWLC • New Function APARs to provide enhancements before the next release • Important publications and papers from IBM • HIPER and performance APARs to help you identify important maintenance.
3. Correction to Tuning Letter 2010 No. 6
Tom Kelman of Commerce Bank found a typo on page 16 in our article on parmlib member CNIDTRxx. Instead of ‘D OPTDATA,TRACKING’, the command should have been ‘D OPDATA,TRACKING’. This has been corrected on the DVD. Thanks so much, Tom!
4. Correction to Tuning Letter 2010 No. 5
Many thanks to David Kaplan of The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation for catching an important error on page 7. In the article on VVDS Space Management, we said “a VVDS is dynamically created when the first catalog or SMS-managed data set is defined on the volume”, but it should have said “… when the first VSAM and/or SMS-managed data set is defined on the volume.” This has also been corrected on the DVD.
5. New Red Alert
IBM issued a new Red Alert on January 1, 2011 (http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/redAlerts/20110111.html)
2011.1.1 – Possible corrupted backup copy for z/OS 1.0, 1.11, 1.12 users of zHPF (High Performance FICON) & PDSE users with PTFs for OA30025 or OA34009 applied.
[Affected are] Only users performing logical dumps of PDSE data sets under the following conditions, (this is also true for HSM BACKUP and MIGRATION):
- PTFs for OA30025 or OA34009 are installed
- The PDSE to be backed up resides on a device which supports zHPF channel programs
- zHPF processing is enabled
PDSE backups taken after the installation of PTFs for OA30025 or OA34009 should be considered as suspect.
Please see APAR OA35260 (Media Manager) & OA35296 (PDSE) for additional information.
The referenced APARs are:
OA30025 (DFSMS 1.10-1.12, 5Aug2010) – New Function: zHPF Response Time Reduc-tion. The correcting APAR is OA34009 (DFSMS 1.11-1.12, 17Aug2010), and indicates that OA29017 is a pre-req for 1.11-1.12.
OA35260/OA35296 (HIPER, DFSMS 1.10-1.12, 1Jan2011) – ABEND0C4 PIC04, PIC10, PIC11 in IGWBLMRD (UA48501) +1148, and ABEND0F4 RC24 in IGWDSAAC or IGWISRCH 11/01/07 PTF PECHANGE.
Stay Tuned!