1. Happy New Year!
2. Goodbye to Linda
3. Watson & Walker Change of Address
4. Upcoming Watson & Walker Classes
5. Upcoming Tuning Letter
6. SMF30 Support for zEDC
7. RFE for BCPii Support for Absolute Capping
1. Happy New Year!
Cheryl sent me an excerpt recently from an article about healthy eating (I think she was trying to give me a pre-holidays hint). But the bit that I really enjoyed was the last sentence, which read “when I get to heaven, I want to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming “WOO HOO” what a ride!” I can’t think of a phrase that better describes my last year.
We hope that all of you had as good a year in 2014 as we had, and that 2015 brings you and your loved ones good health, good luck, and many happy memories. And we look forward to hearing from you and hopefully meeting some of you during the coming year.
2. Goodbye to Linda
All of our customers have at one point or another been in contact with Linda May, our Business Manager for the last 21 years. Linda has recently resigned, and we wish her the best of luck in the future. We really appreciate Linda’s care of our customers, and her attention to detail. We’ll miss her. Please direct all future Watson & Walker business correspondence to admin@watsonwalker.com (not linda@watsonwalker.com or lmay@xmission.com).
3. Watson & Walker Change of Address
With Linda’s departure, we’re changing our company address to:
Watson & Walker, Inc.
1661 Ringling Blvd, PMB 49886
Sarasota, FL 34230-9998
The phone number remains the same: (941) 924-6565; fax: (941) 924-4892. Please make a note of this change, and pass it on to any billing or admin people who may need it.
4. Upcoming Watson & Walker Classes
It took us a little while to build up momentum, but now we are on a roll. We held the first run of our Exploiting New Features of z/OS to Minimize Costs class in Dallas starting on December 8, 2014. We had the nicest group of people in the class and lots of interaction. One of the comments we got was “An unbelievably content rich course. Very detailed and useful information. I’m amazed that so much information was so effectively delivered in such a short period of time.” It really makes all the effort you put into developing a class worthwhile when you get feedback like that.
Our next class will be in Seattle on Sunday, March 1, the day before the next SHARE conference and in the same hotel as the conference. This class will be our 1-daySYS1.PARMIB: Enhancements and New Features in z/OS 1.13 and 2.1 class. You can get more information about the class on our website at www.watsonwalker.com/SYS1.html. One of the reasons for running the class immediately before SHARE is that it gives you the opportunity to speak to developers and other users about topics in the class that you are particularly interested in.
This will be our third time to present this class, and we received very positive feedback from the students on the previous runs of the class (before SHARE in Pittsburgh and before the GSE conference in England). All of the students that completed an evaluation indicated that they would definitely attend another Watson and Walker class, and all indicated that they would recommend the class to a colleague. And, if all that isn’t enough to entice you to join us, we are offering a 50% discount on the second and subsequent students that any company sends to the class.
For our readers in the Northeast, or those that would like to visit the Northeast, we will be running two classes in New York City in the week of April 20. The first class, on the Monday and Tuesday of the week, will be our z/OS Software Pricing Strategies class. If you work in a company that is not interested in controlling software costs, then this class is probably not for you. For the other 99.99%, this is a class that you cannot miss. z/OS offers a bewildering plethora of products, facilities, techniques, and contract options that can potentially help you reduce your cost of ownership for z/OS.
But where to start? And which are the right ones to save you money? This class is specifically designed to get the z/OS techie and the contract management person from your site to sit down together and learn the opportunities and challenges that each face. If only one person attends the class, you will only be getting half the value. You can get more information about this class on our website at www.watsonwalker.com/Pricing.html. And this class also qualifies for the 50% discount for the second attendee from your company – ideal for this class.
Finally, our 3-day Exploiting New Features of z/OS to Minimize Costs class (the one that we ran in Dallas in December) will be held on the Wednesday to Friday of that week (April 22-24), also in New York City. The class description is too long to repeat here, but basically the class covers all the enhancements in z/OS 1.13 and 2.1 that can help you increase the cost effectiveness of your z/OS environment. Some of the features are new functions that were not available previously. Some deliver ways to deliver the same function but with less CPU time. Others provide ways to make the users of your systems more efficient, so the same number of people can deliver more value to your company. For more information about the class, see the description on our website at www.watsonwalker.com/ExploitingzOS.html. Like our other clas-ses, this one is eligible for a 50% tuition discount for the second and subsequent students from a company.
Cheryl and I are really enjoying presenting these classes. They are a great way to pass on information about this platform that we love. It is also great fun getting together for a few days with like-minded individuals. Every time we meet someone we learn some new lesson that enriches our Tuning Letter and our classes. And in return, we hope that our combined experiences will help our attendees be more effective at their jobs. In the words of one of our students, “This was my first Watson and Walker class. With any luck, it will be the first of many.” We hope so too.
5. Upcoming Tuning Letter
Cheryl and I are flat out at the moment, working on finishing the next Tuning Letter. The topics that will be covered in this issue are:
- Mobile Workload Pricing and how you can exploit it in the real world.
- RLS-Managed Catalogs – IBM’s strategy for catalog management. Learn all about this interesting new capability and why you should get started now on positioning for it.
- zPDT. The mainframe for the unfortunate few that can’t afford their own per-sonal zEC12. We could not operate without it. This article introduces zPDT for those that are not familiar with it.
- Coupling Facility Control Code enhancements. Every new generation delivers a new CF Level with more enhancements. Fortunately, some get exploited by your software automatically, but others require an overt action on your behalf. This article describes the benefits you are already getting, and the others that await you.
- Plus, we will have the usual mixture of news, views, user experiences, and all the hottest APARs.
6. SMF30 Support for zEDC
OK, we admit it – we are unashamed fans of zEDC. However, for sites that rely on chargeback to fund the data center, zEDC had one big weakness – there was no way to determine who was using it, and therefore no way to charge them for use of that valuable capability.
Consider that you have a job today that compresses data sets using traditional SMS compression. If you install zEDC and implement its support for sequential data sets, the CPU time for that job will plummet because all the compression processing is now happening on the zEDC card. But up until now, the Type 30 records not only didn’t tell you how much zEDC capacity the job used, they didn’t even give an indication that zEDC was being used at all.
So, you can imagine our delight when we heard that IBM is about to ship the PTF for APAR OA45767. This APAR adds the following information about zEDC use to the Type 30 records:
- Total number of zEDC compression and decompression requests, both supervisor and problem state.
- Total number of Problem State zEDC compression and decompresion requests.
- Total queue time in microseconds.
- Total execute time in microseconds.
- Deflate Statistics for the number of bytes of uncompressed input and com-pressed output.
- Inflate Statistics for the number of bytes of compressed input and uncom-pressed output.
If you already have zEDC, make sure you apply this PTF. If you were put off installing zEDC because you didn’t have a mechanism to charge for its usage, that concern is now addressed.
7. RFE for BCPii Support for Absolute Capping
Readers of Cheryl’s Tuning Letter will know that we concluded a series of articles about LPAR capping options in the last Tuning Letter. One of the things we noted in that final article was that none of the capping products (including IBM’s own Capacity Provisioning Manager) are able to adjust the new Absolute Capping value that is available on zBC12 and zEC12 GA2 because BCPii currently does not support that capability. Since that article a number of readers have contacted us saying that they would like to have that function available to them. So we opened a Request for Enhancement on the IBM RFE system, requesting that IBM add Absolute Capping support to BCPii.
If this capability would be valuable to you, please add your support to the RFE. The Request ID is 61833, and you can access the RFE system at www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe. The more people that indicate their interest in this, the more likely it is that IBM will deliver a solution sooner rather than later.
And that’s it for this update. I suppose this is always a quiet time of year in terms of an-nouncements, but we have the feeling that things might get very interesting quite soon.
Stay Tuned!