Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter
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...
Upcoming DB2 Continuous Delivery Strategy Webinar
Subscribers to Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter will know that we had a large article about IBM's Continuous Delivery strategy in the most recent issue (2016 No. 2). You might think that this is a bit of a ho-hum topic, but that article stretched to nearly 20 pages. And at the time we wrote that article, IBM had only announced its strategy for CICS, MQ, and z/OS - the other major subsystems (DB2, IMS, and WAS) were still waiting in the wings. Well, now it seems that IBM is about to announce...
JES2 CPU Increase in z/OS 2.2
For those of you that don't follow IBMMAIN (Cheryl follows everything - I think the NSA follow Cheryl to reduce their own workload!), there has been some recent discussion about an issue in JES2 whereby it consumes 2-3 times as much CPU in z/OS 2.2 as in z/OS 2.1. In an ideal world, you would have spotted that during your normal review of system activity and CPU usage, especially following an upgrade (the additional CPU time shows up in the JES2 address space, in the IAXIS module). But who...