Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter

Good news for all our Tuning Letter subscribers that were wondering what you could find to keep you busy over the weekend.  Just when you thought that you might 'have' to go to the beach, or do some long over-overdue Spring cleanup, we have great news for you - the latest, 148-page, Cheryl Watson Tuning Letter is available on our www.watsonwalkerpublications.com web site! So, you could go to the beach to catch up on your tan, or read about IBM's Container Pricing.  Or you could go to your...

Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2018 No. 1 We apologize for the delay in getting this issue out.  I had some family medical issues which threw all my plans out the window.  But the issue is finished now, and the publisher is working their magic on it, and we will hopefully have it available on our publications site (www.watsonwalkerpublications.com) later this week. But don’t worry, the delay didn't impact the size of the issue – you’ll have plenty of beach reading with this 140+-page barn...

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...