1. Education survey competition winner
2. Have you had your Hadoop today?
3. Upcoming IBM webcast (June 17)
4. Cheryl’s SMF Reference being updated
5. IBM’s Mobile Workload Pricing (MWP)
6. Call for SMF Postprocessor Information
7. Call for z/OS 2.1 SMF data
1. Education survey competition winner
You might recall that we had a little competition for participants in our education survey – anyone that wanted could be entered in a draw for either tuition-free attendance at one of our classes, or a year’s free subscription to Cheryl’sTuning Letter.
Well, we held a very scientific drawing (we printed the list of people that requested to be entered in the draw, cut the list up, and put all the names in a hat…). And, the lucky winner was John Russo from CSC in Maryland.
John will not be attending the upcoming SHARE, so he opted for the free Tuning Letter subscription. We hope that John and his colleagues find the Tuning Letter informative and entertaining and hope that he will join many of our other readers in sharing his experiences and tips with us. Welcome to the Tuning Letter family John.
2. Have you had your Hadoop today?
OK, I admit it – when I first heard someone mention “Hadoop”, I had this mental picture of an exotic dessert, served up with super-strong coffee in some little back street Turkish bazaar. But then maybe I did spend too much time in Amsterdam in my youth, because it transpires that Hadoop is an open-source framework for analyzing non-relational data. As soon as I say that term “non-relational data” I can immediately see our IMS friends perk up (there was once a joke going around that IMS was going to be rebranded as “Non-relational DB2”). However, in this context, non-relational could mean nearly anything – z/OS syslog that is fed into zAware is considered non-relational data, for example.
Why do we mention this here? And why should you care? As you well know, “big data” and “analytics” are the buzzwords of the day at the moment. 75% of the respondents to a recent survey said that their companies were involved in big data projects. So this appears to be a buzzword that is getting some traction as the marketing departments go into frenzied overdrive to figure out what is the most common color in teenagers’ dreams. And one of the up-and-coming analytics tools to help them do that is Hadoop. In fact, the response to our recent Tuning Letter survey included requests that we cover Hadoop in a future Tuning Letter article. There is also a very interesting article about it called “The Elephant on the Mainframe” by IBM and Veristorm. Unlike a lot of articles about the trendy flavor of the day, this one actually contains good, useful, information, aimed at a mainframe audience. We think it is well worth 15 minutes of your time to find out more about what the future may hold for you.
3. Upcoming IBM webcast (June 17)
We thought that you might be interested in an upcoming IBM webcast on June 17 (3:00pm EDT) – “IBM Transaction Analysis Workbench: The Sherlock Holmes of analysis for transaction performance and behavioral problems”. This product (which works with CICS, DB2, IMS, and WebSphere MQ) has been available since 2010 and is still on its first release (1.1.0), so it is interesting that IBM would hold a webcast at this stage in the product’s life. Nevertheless, even if you are not interested in purchasing the product, you might be interested in the principles behind what it does, especially if you want to reduce the time it takes for your first responders to diagnose transaction problems.
If you miss the webcast, you can replay it at your convenience. For information about other upcoming webcasts, refer to the IBM System z Calendar of Events.
4. Cheryl’s SMF reference is being updated
There is just no keeping that woman down. I thought that she might return from her vacation in Ireland nice and relaxed. Instead, she came back bursting with ideas for new things we can do. I think that the rest of this year is going to be a very interesting one for us.
One of her ideas was to do a series of articles about SMF for Enterprise Systems Media. The articles will, we hope, appeal to both ends of the spectrum – from those that have not seen their 25th birthday yet, to those that have seen it twice over (and then some!). It will provide introductory and background information, as well as the latest enhancements.
In tandem with those articles, Cheryl is updating her SMF Reference Summary. And as part of that update, we are appealing to ISV vendors, and our readers that use ISV products, to let us know if your product creates SMF records. The more feedback we get, the more comprehensive and valuable our reference can be. The information that Cheryl would like is:
- Vendor name
- Product name
- Link to product web site
- SMF record number, and whether that can be controlled by the customer.
Any information you can send us would be most welcome. Please send your infor-mation or your questions to technical@watsonwalker.com.
5. IBM’s Mobile Workload Pricing (MWP)
Let’s say you’re a bank and a competing bank has just released an app for mobile users. The app lets users check on their balances at any time, and you’d like to provide an even better app. But the designers come back and say “We can do it, but that’s going to raise our 4-hour rolling average and the cost will be outrageous. Besides, these are just inquiries and don’t provide any revenue to us.” This scenario is happening today in all industries in all countries.
In order to keep the mainframe competitive in the mobile world, IBM has announced a new ‘Mobile Workload Pricing’ (MWP) initiative. MWP lets you subtract 60% of the 4-hour rolling average of the reported mobile transaction general purpose processor time consumed by the Mobile Workload Pricing Defining Programs from the traditional sub-capacity MSUs for all sub-capacity eligible programs running in the same LPAR(s).
The US announcement was 214-223 on May 4, 2014. The offer applies to mobile activity occurring on a zEC12 or zBC12, running under CICS TS V4-V5, DB2 V9-V11, IMS V11-V13, WAS V7-V8, and MQ V6-V8. The Value Unit Editions (VUE) of each of these subsystems are also eligible. A new Mobile Workload Reporting Tool (MWRT) will be available by June 30, 2014, and will replace the current SCRT. You will need some way to separate mobile transactions from other transactions, so you should start looking into that now. You can start this analysis with transactions starting on June 1 in order to change the billing effective with August 1, so don’t wait on this! It’s important that you contact IBM to confirm that you are collecting the correct data.
For users of MXG, Barry Merrill and Al Sherkow are providing MXG tools to help you collect this data. Please see the MXG Newsletter SIXTY-FOUR at www.mxg.com for more information.
6. Call for SMF Postprocessor Information
As Cheryl was looking at products that produce SMF records, I thought it would be useful to identify all of the products that process SMF records. So we are asking software vendors, and any individuals who have such products to provide information that we can collect into a catalog of SMF Postprocessors.
This will not review the products; it will simply be a listing, showing the product name, company name, a link to the product’s web page, a list of the SMF records that it processes, information about the type of output it produces (tabular reports, graphic reports, XML, CSV, etc), whether it populates the SMF data into some form of database, whether it includes sample reports, and whether it supports the ability to create your own reports. If you have such a product, please provide this information by the end of August. We will send a draft of the article to the owners of all tools that we identify for their approval before we publish it. Please fill out the following information for each product that processes SMF records and send to technical@watsonwalker.com.
- Product name:
- Company name:
- URL:
- Contact phone:
- Contact email:
- SMF records processed:
- Output:
- User reports:
- Product description:
Thanks so much for your help!
7. Call for z/OS 2.1 SMF data
Finally, as part of the process of updating the SMF reference and preparing the new SMF articles, we are wondering if any customers would be kind enough to share some of your z/OS 2.1 SMF data with us? Obviously all the data would be anonymized before we would present it anywhere. And if our use of the data includes any type of performance analysis, we would be very happy to share our findings with you. We would appreciate one hour of data of all record types, and are happy to fill out a non-disclosure form for you. If you have a sysplex, it would also be useful to have the type 70-79 records from all LPARs in the sysplex. Contact us at technical@watsonwalker.com for instructions on methods of sending data.
Stay Tuned!