Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter
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...
Latest Tuning Letter Emailed to Subscribers
We emailed Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter 2017 No. 1 (140 pages) to our subscribers on May 10. This is a summary of the main articles: This issue included an article by one of our readers, Ronald Kristel (with invaluable input from IBM's Tom Wasik) about selecting the optimal JES2 checkpoint configuration. If you are fed up getting teased by your distributed colleagues about z/OS' 'green screen' interface, take some time to read our guide to getting IBM zEvent up and running on your system and...
SHARE Presentations Added to Website
We had a great week at the SHARE conference in San Jose. Frank had 125 sessions that he decided he wanted to attend (he didn't quite achieve that goal!). We had a vendor session for our new SCRTPro service, presented two EXECUforum sessions in addition to our zRoadshow session on Friday (thanks to all those that attended and for your very kind comments!), and we had a booth in the Technology Expo. As a result, we were even busier than usual, but it was a very fruitful and enjoyable...
New Watson & Walker SCRTPro Service
Have you ever been frustrated by the disconnect between MSUs and Dollars (or Euro or Yen or Pesos or whatever)? I expect that many of us have been in the position of trying to explain why reducing your z/OS workload by 10% will not reduce your software bill by 10%. Or, conversely, that increasing your workload by 10% will not increase your software bill by 10%. We know that the change will be less than 10%, but trying to put a precise number on exactly how much the difference will be is not...
See You At SHARE in San Jose
See You At SHARE in San Jose! I can tell already that this is going to be one of my worst SHAREs ever. You see, I'm not very good at handling too much choice. I can spend 15 minutes in a Hagen Dazs shop trying to choose between Vanilla and Vanilla Chocolate Chip. So I was looking at the list of sessions for the upcoming SHARE, selecting the ones that I would like to attend as I went along. You would normally expect to get to 6 sessions in a day. And the conference is 4.5 days long, so...
z/OS 2.3 Previewed, SCRTPro Service, SHARE Discount
z/OS 2.3 Preview Announced As you are probably aware, IBM issues two announcements for new z/OS releases. The preview is normally issued in the spring and contains just a list of line items that IBM is confident will be in the release. The actual full announcement with all line items is issued in the fall. IBM just provided their preview for z/OS 2.3 on February 21, 2017 – US Announcement 217-085, and it’s full of goodies that we’ll be covering in future Tuning Letters. The announcement...