Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter
Articles
We often publish new articles or reprint articles from our Tuning Letter here.
LPAR Weight Management
This article is based on Jim Horne’s well-received and thought-provoking SHARE presentation about an alternative method for managing LPAR weights. Jim’s methodology is designed to make it easier to manage your HiperDispatch topology – an important consideration for any modern mainframe configuration. We encourage our readers to take this opportunity to consider Jim’s methodology.
Outsourcing
Here are two articles written by Cheryl on outsourcing:
Outsourcing – Article from Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2013 No. 1
Cheryl Watson’s z/OS 101 Primer
A compilation of z/OS articles for those new to the mainframe or new to performance. Originally published in Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter, these articles are part of series addressing performance, capacity planning, data center reporting, and charge back areas. Check back regularly to download the most recent compilation as installments will be added every few months.
z/OS 101 Primer 2009
z/OS 101 Primer 2010
z/OS 101 Primer 2011
z/OS 101 Primer 2012
Obtaining SMF Counts
This article was published in our Tuning Letter 2008 No. 6, and describes how to report SMF subtypes. In our ongoing Tuning Letter series on SMF records, we have been trying to accumulate statistics by SMF subtype, in addition to SMF types. If you are willing to send us information about the SMF subtypes that you collect, we would certainly appreciate it.
Rotting ROTS
This article originally appeared in Tuning Letter 2007 Issue No. 2. Portions of the article were also included in Cheryl’s Hot Flashes #17, which was presented at the SHARE user conference in Tampa where it won a Best Session Award.
Positioning for Goal Mode
This article on Positioning For MVS SP 5 was written for our September/October 1994 Tuning Letter. The section of the article on preparing for Workload Manager is as useful today as it was then for sites who are preparing to move to WLM goal mode. The suggestions will help you prepare your IPS and ICS for an easy migration. If you plan to use IBM’s Goal Mode Migration Aid (GMMA) from their Web site http://www.s390.ibm.com/wlm, then also read the GMMA documentation before modifying the comments of your ICS.
Why Tune?
This 12 page article, from the 1999 No. 4 issue of Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter, shows why we believe performance tuning can save you huge amounts of money, even in the face of ever cheaper hardware. We give real life examples, and show how to cost justify your tuning projects for management.
Why Go to Goal Mode?
It takes only hours – at most a few days – to start a test system running in goal mode, and the benefits can be enormous. Here’s an article (in PDF format) to help justify to management (and yourself) the effort of migration. This article was previously published in our 1999, No. 5 issue.
Getting to Goal Mode – Step by Step
This is a simple checklist of how to get to a monoplex environment and run in goal mode.
Why Your CPU Capacity May Not Match Your Vendor’s Estimate
IBM publishes their Large Systems Performance Reference (LSPR) ratings, and Amdahl and HDS publish their relative performance ratings for new processor speeds and capacity. Do these ratings match your workloads and will your work experience the performance differences as published by the vendors? This paper provides an explanation of why (and why not) your performance may match the vendor’s performance results.
Processor Upgrades
Another article you might find interesting is called “Processor Upgrades” and was the focus of our 1998, No. 6 issue. It deals with the problems encountered when you move to fewer, but faster, CPs. The entire issue(1998, No. 6) is downloadable.