Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter
A Planet Mainframe Brand
See You At SHARE in San Jose
See You At SHARE in San Jose! I can tell already that this is going to be one of my worst SHAREs ever. You see, I'm not very good at handling too much choice. I can spend 15 minutes in a Hagen Dazs shop trying to choose between Vanilla and Vanilla Chocolate Chip. So I was looking at the list of sessions for the upcoming SHARE, selecting the ones that I would like to attend as I went along. You would normally expect to get to 6 sessions in a day. And the conference is 4.5 days long, so...
z/OS 2.3 Previewed, SCRTPro Service, SHARE Discount
z/OS 2.3 Preview Announced As you are probably aware, IBM issues two announcements for new z/OS releases. The preview is normally issued in the spring and contains just a list of line items that IBM is confident will be in the release. The actual full announcement with all line items is issued in the fall. IBM just provided their preview for z/OS 2.3 on February 21, 2017 – US Announcement 217-085, and it’s full of goodies that we’ll be covering in future Tuning Letters. The announcement...
SHARE in San Jose and New IBM Pricing Announcement
SHARE Conference in San Jose Now that we have Tuning Letter 2016 No. 4 behind us, Cheryl and I are busy working on our presentations for SHARE in San Jose that starts on March 5th. I'm aiming to achieve one of my lifetime ambitions - to have at least ONE of my presentations finished before I arrive at the conference (where would we be without in-flight wifi?). If you’ll be at SHARE, please drop by one of our sessions to say hello. These are our sessions and times for this SHARE: 3/6, Mon,...
Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2016 No. 4 Published
We emailed Tuning Letter 2016 No. 4 to our subscribers on February 8. This issue provides all you wanted to know (and probably some stuff you didn't want to know!) about z Systems Collocated Application Pricing (zCAP). It also discusses the recently-announced z Systems Workload Pricing for Cloud (zWPC), and how you can use Workload Manager to gather the CPU time for your MWP-qualifying and zWPC-qualifying workloads and feed that directly to SCRT without having to process millions of...
Newly Scheduled “Containing z/OS Software Costs” Class
We’re happy to announce that we’ve scheduled a new Containing z/OS Software Costs class. This class will be held in Sarasota, Florida, on August 28-30, 2017. With IBM's latest 4% increase in z/OS software, we're sure that this class will help you contain that increase. This 3-day class discusses a multitude of ways to reduce your IBM software bill. Because z/OS software frequently accounts for up to 1/3 of the cost of running a mainframe, it’s the easiest place to achieve savings. So no matter...
Correction, Red Alert, New Function APARs, and Spark Presentation
SSR Correction In our blog post on November 6 (http://watsonwalker.com/two-red-alerts/) and our Tuning Letter 2015 No. 3, we incorrectly specified the default status of SSR as disabled. The default is actually for it to be enabled if the associated Space Constraint Relief data class function is enabled. We’ve corrected the blog entry, but you may need to refresh the page to see the correction. Thanks so much to Greg Saccomanno from Wells Fargo for pointing that out, and to Terri Menendez...
Watson & Walker Alliance with IntelliMagic
We all know that SMF data is one of the unique strengths of the mainframe. We have clients that produce terabytes of SMF data every day. SMF can tell you just about anything you could want to know about your z/OS system – if you have the right tools to turn raw SMF data into information. When we perform a health check for our customers, we want to spend our time applying our experience to the information we get from SMF, not wrestling with a multitude of programs just to get the information...
Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2016 No. 3 Published
We emailed Tuning Letter 2016 No. 3 to our subscribers on November 8. This issue covers an introduction to Analytics and shows you step by step how to gain immediate access to SMF records using a new (no-charge) Spark package from IBM and Rocket. It also provides a thorough introduction to Java on z/OS, as well as the first part of an extensive article on tuning VSAM RLS. As the number of Java and VSAM RLS users grows each month, we’re sure these two articles will be quite well received. Our...
Two Red Alerts and Secondary Space Reduction (SSR) – Corrected
Things have been relatively quiet in the Red Alert area until this week when three problems surfaced. Most installations have at least one person who subscribes to Red Alerts, but we think it’s important for more people to be aware of these. You can subscribe yourself at https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/redAlerts/home.html. Red Alert 2016.11.02 – HIPER APARs for z/OS 2.2 Users IBM has issued Red Alert 2016.11.02 – Two Important Recommendations for z/OS V2R2 Users. This Red...
IBM Annual Software Price Increases
You may remember that back in August 2014 IBM announced that they were migrating to a strategy of annual price increases for their z Systems Monthly License Charge (MLC) software, and that the increase for each year (effective January 1) would be announced at least 90 days in advance. The objective of this strategy was to give customers sufficient notice so they could adjust their budgets for the following year accordingly. Well, it is that time of year again, when your friendly Finance person...