Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter

Are you attending the IBM Systems Technical University event in sunny Orlando this week?  If so, we hope that you are enjoying the vast selection of interesting sessions and making the best of those invaluable networking opportunities. If you are already thinking about ways to convince your manager to let you attend the next event, what better way to achieve that than to arrive home, brimming with ideas to reduce your costs?  Well, you are in luck!  Cheryl is presenting two sessions tomorrow...

Just because you have outsourced your mainframe environment, that doesn’t mean that you no longer need to be concerned with it.  It probably still runs your critical applications, houses your corporation’s data, and services your colleagues and customers. It also still accounts for a sizeable chunk of your IT budget.  So you still have responsibility to make sure that performance and availability service goals are being achieved, and that the service is being delivered as cost effectively as...

Greetings from beautiful (and sunny!) Sacramento, California, home to the 2018 Winter SHARE conference.  Cheryl and I are here for the week.  You might remember that Cheryl had to skip the last SHARE conference due to an impending knee replacement operation.  But with that behind her (or maybe under her?), Bionic Cheryl is back and rarin' to go. We sat down yesterday afternoon to look at which sessions we would like to attend.  Fortunately, there is a little less pressure this time around - we...

Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter 2017 No. 4 Available The 106-page 2017 No. 4 issue of Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter is now available on our www.watsonwalkerpublications.com website. Based on input from our readers, it seems that many sites are reviewing z14 proposals from IBM.  Therefore, this issue provides articles that we hope will be particularly valuable to anyone planning for, and implementing, a new CPC. As you know, the interaction between your workloads, your configuration, and the...

Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter 2017 No. 3 Available The 122-page 2017 No. 3 issue of Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter is now available on our www.watsonwalkerpublications.com website.  We have been getting lots of queries from readers about the new IBM z14s.  Obviously the IBM proposal writers have been on overtime :).  Given the interest from our readers, and the level of marketing activity from IBM, we felt it appropriate to nearly dedicate this issue to the z14. We start with a 39-page review...

Red Alert for Time Change IBM has just released a new Red Alert relating to the time change, which is scheduled in the USA for November 5 and Europe this weekend:  2017.10.27 - Daylight savings time adjustment may not be reported correctly by Language Environment (LE) callable services if PTFS UI48771 / UI48801 / UI48802 are applied. It appears that the problem is related to COBOL and PL/I programs accessing LE functions. If you have applied PTFs for APAR PI78252 (z/OS 2.1/2.2/2.3, closed...

SCRT V25 Now Required For anyone that is involved in submitting Sub-Capacity Reporting Tool (SCRT) reports to IBM, it should be old news that, effective from November 1, IBM will only accept SCRT reports that were generated using SCRT V25 and Java.  To be fair to IBM, they have been telling people for the last year to migrate to the Java version of SCRT, and that the old Classic version is going away. If you are already using the Java version of SCRT, as we have been recommending for over a...

Cheryl Watson's 2017 z Systems CPU Chart Available We just delivered the updated version of our IBM z Systems CPU Chart to our subscribers, with information about the capacity of the new z14 boxes from just about every perspective you could think of. Total MIPS, MIPS per engine, MIPS per MSU, High RNI MIPS, Low RNI MIPS, and over 35 other facts about each processor – you name it, and it is in there. The current chart contains data on over 1,730 processors, and is sent in both PDF and Excel...

To coincide with the launch of our new Publications website, Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter 2017 No. 2 was published on July 24th.  This and future issues will only be available on the new site, but we think that you will agree that this is a much more usable, and mobile-friendly, delivery mechanism than the single large PDF that we emailed to subscribers previously. This issue of the Tuning Letter contains information about the new WLM 'metering and capping' capability that was released (using...

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter will know that we normally create a DVD every year, containing the Tuning Letters and other Watson & Walker material since Cheryl's first Tuning Letter was published in 1991. This year, to celebrate the universe-wide migration to 'the cloud', we are replacing the DVD with a new subscriber-only online repository of all our material. This new website, www.watsonwalkerpublications.com, contains the same treasure trove of documents that we had in...