Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter

If you've been working from home and haven't made it into the office, you might not have seen the August 24 snail mail from IBM announcing a price increase of 5% on MLC (Monthly License Charge) prices. We want to bring this up because many people are completing their budgeting process for 2022, and they might be using IBM's prior 4% annual increase in their budgeting. In addition to the MLC increase, there is also a 6% increase on OTC (One-Time-Charge) and S&S (Subscription and Support)...

Watson & Walker, the mainframe industry's leading independent performance consultants, are delighted to announce our latest software product, the Watson & Walker Application Profiler for Z (AP4Z). Are you a performance analyst, frustrated by seeing a generic program name (with no indication of what program is actually being executed) when you use SMF type 30 records to identify your heaviest CPU-consuming batch jobs? Are you an application developer, working with an object-oriented...

This year’s Summer SHARE conference will once again be held as a virtual event. Access to pre-recorded ‘on-demand’ sessions was provided to registered ‘attendees’ starting last Monday (August 2nd), with the live sessions starting next Monday (August 9th).  You can find the impressive list of on-demand sessions here.  And the Technical Agenda is available here.  You do not have to be a registered attendee to view the agenda, however you will need to be registered to download the session...

We just published the latest 153-page issue of Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter, available to subscribers on our publications site. As usual, we aimed to have a mix of articles, with some covering important upcoming changes in z/OS 2.5, and others getting into more detail about functions that have been with us for a while, but that you might not be exploiting. Hopefully you and your colleagues will find information in here to benefit you (by making your job a little easier or more interesting)...

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the 149-page Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter, 2021 No. 1, issue on our publications website (https://watsonwalkerpublications.com/).  The last quarter has been an action-packed one, so regardless of which group you work in, we believe that you'll find information in this issue to make your job a little easier or a little more interesting.  In this issue we have: The latest installment in Todd Havekost's series of articles about what you can...

Here at Watson & Walker we love SMF data.  And judging by the volumes of it that most z/OS sites generate, we are not the only ones.  SMF can tell you just about anything you could want to know about what is happening on your systems.  The downside of having that vast sea of information is that it takes up lots of space - we have clients that generate over 2.5TB of SMF data per day.  And if you are like nearly every other z/OS customer, you send at least some of that data to distributed...

In case you have missed it, effective April 30, 2021, IBM is removing support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 from its software download servers, and all connection attempts after that date will have to use TLS 1.2. If you currently download files using HTTPS, then you should not be affected.  However, if you use FTPS to download the files, then you will need to make some changes to your system.   The details are too long to go into here, so you should refer to Marna Walle’s excellent SHARE Blog post...

[vc_row][vc_column][us_single_image image="2647"][vc_column_text]In this crazy world in which we find ourselves, it is easy to lose track of familiar milestones - for example, the annual SHARE Winter conference.  If you haven't been keeping abreast of developments in SHARE, there are a lot of things about this year's Winter SHARE that you should be aware of: It starts today!  And it will run until March 24th. It is virtual.  So, no travel costs, and no 4-hour flights sitting beside someone...

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest, 123-page, issue on our publications website (https://watsonwalkerpublications.com/).  In her Cover page introduction, Cheryl said “You'll find this newsletter to be jam-packed with so many tuning recommendations that I think it will be one of our most popular issues ever.” We hope that you will agree. Specifically, in this issue we have: A ‘News’ section that is even more information-loaded than ever.  Some of the topics that it...

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest, 140-page, issue on our publications website (https://watsonwalkerpublications.com/).  No matter what your job role (or 'persona', to use the 'in' terminology) is, if you work with z/OS, we’re sure that you will find interesting and valuable information in this issue.  Specifically, we have: Information about the new Z Sort Acceleration function on the z15. Exactly how does it work?  What performance benefits does it provide? ...