Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter
Red Alert for Time Change
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 Required Starting Nov 1, 2017 Along With New Prices
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...
New CPU Chart, SHARE Presentations, and the Impact of Hurricane Irma
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...
Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2017 No. 2 Published
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...
New Watson & Walker Publications Website Launched
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...
IBM’s z14 and z/OS 2.3 Announcements
IBM's New z14 By now you've all heard all the marketing hype about IBM's newest mainframe, the z14. What we'd like to do is look at the announcement from the techie's point of view. First, there is a lot of confusion over the difference between the z14 and 'IBM Z'. This confusion is easy to explain. Prior to the z13, IBM called their line of mainframes the 'System z'. So 'System z' referred to the z9, z10, z196, z114, zEC12, and zBC12. When the z13 came out, IBM renamed 'System z' to 'z...
IBM zCouncil and z/OS Security Health Check Offering
IBM Customer Outreach (Free local education) [From Cheryl] I was very pleased to be invited by Lih Wang of IBM to present at their Chicago z Systems Customer Council event on May 9th. I had a great time and got to meet over a hundred local z customers and IBMers. I learned a lot, and so did the other attendees. The topics included Top Mainframe Trends (by Glenn Anderson, who rocked it, as usual!), Making Blockchain Real for Business (by Robert Brinkman), Upgrading Legacy CICS Transaction...
IBM Technical Bulletin, anyone?
Hopefully all our readers are familiar with the beloved IBM Redbooks. But our younger readers might not be familiar with Redbooks' older cousins - Orange books, Yellow books, Blue books, and Green books. These books (called IBM Technical Bulletins) were very similar in concept to Redbooks, however they were published by IBM's Systems Centers rather than the International Technical Support Organization (ITSO). Sadly, they were discontinued in the mid-1990s and (to my knowledge) were never...
CICS TS 5.3 Red Alert
IBM announced a Red Alert for CICS TS 5.3 on June 19, 2017 (the first one in nearly 7 months). This Red Alert is the result of a bug whereby two CICS transactions can be given the same Unit of Work ID (UOWID). The problem arises when the duplicate UOWIDs are passed to a subsystem that CICS is connected to. The subsystems listed in the Red Alert are: DB2 IBM (I assume this should be IMS) WebSphere MQ Coupling Facility Data Tables (CFDT) Shared Temporary Storage Server Named Counter Server...
Considerations for Over-Provisioning z Systems CPCs
Our Tuning Letter subscribers have probably read our article on A Holistic Approach to Capacity Planning in our Tuning Letter 2015 No 4 (pages 55-75). Or you might have seen our SHARE presentations (one is The Cheryl & Frank zRoadshow, SHARE 2016 in San Antonio) where Frank discussed activating more CPs in order to reduce the CPC utilization, lower the RNI, and lower MLC costs. Todd Havekost from IntelliMagic also covers this in his conference presentations (see Achieving Significant...