Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter

The 2024 Winter SHARE conference will be held in the Rosen Center hotel in Orlando, Florida, starting this coming Sunday, March 3.  This one is a 5-day conference, with the last day (Thursday) being a full day.  If you are attending, check out the agenda and download the SHARE app for your mobile device. I don’t have the Technical Agenda from a previous SHARE conference to hand, but it seems like there are more sessions in parallel than normal (for example, there are 13 sessions all at 9:15 on...

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 114-page issue, 2023 No.4, on our publications website. In this issue, you will find the following articles: Cheryl and Tom's blog post announcing their plans to retire and close the Watson & Walker company and cease publication of Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter.  This is truly the end of an era.  Many of our friends and readers have pointed out that Cheryl and Watson & Walker have been there for their entire working...

By now, I expect all our readers will have heard the news about Cheryl and Tom retiring.  Of course, Cheryl’s ‘We’re Retiring’ blog post thanked everyone for all the friendship and support they’ve given her over the years, but she didn’t say anything about the thanks we all owe her.  So I’m going to take a minute to do that. I want to thank Cheryl for being such a force for good in the mainframe world.  She always put the interests of her customers first – an example many of her fellow CEOs...

Dear Watson & Walker customers and friends, We have some really big news - at the end of 2024 we’re retiring and shutting down our business and the Tuning Letter. Tom and I would like to thank you all for being such fantastic customers and friends for the past many years. We especially want to thank our many Tuning Letter subscribers who have been with us since the very first issue. When we started Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter in 1991, we never dreamed it would be such a success.  We’ve...

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 114-page issue, 2023 No.3, on our publications website. In this issue, you will find the following articles: Our Recovery at Scale article in Tuning Letter 2023 No. 2 caused quite a stir, with numerous readers commenting that it made them aware of challenges they didn't even know they had.   Well, the latest installment in this series of articles (one reviewer called them "Frank's Horror novel") is unlikely to leave you in a...

We are now just over half way through the 2023 Summer SHARE conference. As I expected, my biggest problem is in trying to decide between which of the excellent sessions I will attend – I have a minimum of three competing sessions in most slots.  It is a big help having Mario here with me – I can’t imagine how people handle it when they are the only attendee from their company. Our last blog post provided some suggested sessions for Monday through Wednesday.  This one will cover Wednesday...

The 2023 Summer SHARE conference will be held in the New Orleans Hyatt Regency hotel starting tomorrow.  This is a traditional 5-day conference.  If you are attending, check out the agenda and download the SHARE app for your mobile device. I (Frank) will be co-presenting two sessions: Wednesday, 16:00, Empire C, I will be moderating the ‘Observability Shootout’ session, with presenters from BMC, Broadcom, EPS, IBM, IntelliMagic, and Rocket Software. Friday, 09:15, Empire D, I will be...

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 112-page issue, 2023 No.2, on our publications website. In this issue, you will find the following articles: "We considered that by using disk replication and GDPS we were safe. But when I try to answer all the questions you make in the Loss of Volume(s) section I feel powerless."  and  “I thought we were in good shape, but I’m less than half way through your list of recovery considerations and I’m on my second Prozac already.” ...