Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter
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...
SHARE in San Jose and New IBM Pricing Announcement
SHARE Conference in San Jose Now that we have Tuning Letter 2016 No. 4 behind us, Cheryl and I are busy working on our presentations for SHARE in San Jose that starts on March 5th. I'm aiming to achieve one of my lifetime ambitions - to have at least ONE of my presentations finished before I arrive at the conference (where would we be without in-flight wifi?). If you’ll be at SHARE, please drop by one of our sessions to say hello. These are our sessions and times for this SHARE: 3/6, Mon,...
Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2016 No. 4 Published
We emailed Tuning Letter 2016 No. 4 to our subscribers on February 8. This issue provides all you wanted to know (and probably some stuff you didn't want to know!) about z Systems Collocated Application Pricing (zCAP). It also discusses the recently-announced z Systems Workload Pricing for Cloud (zWPC), and how you can use Workload Manager to gather the CPU time for your MWP-qualifying and zWPC-qualifying workloads and feed that directly to SCRT without having to process millions of...
Newly Scheduled “Containing z/OS Software Costs” Class
We’re happy to announce that we’ve scheduled a new Containing z/OS Software Costs class. This class will be held in Sarasota, Florida, on August 28-30, 2017. With IBM's latest 4% increase in z/OS software, we're sure that this class will help you contain that increase. This 3-day class discusses a multitude of ways to reduce your IBM software bill. Because z/OS software frequently accounts for up to 1/3 of the cost of running a mainframe, it’s the easiest place to achieve savings. So no matter...
Correction, Red Alert, New Function APARs, and Spark Presentation
SSR Correction In our blog post on November 6 (http://watsonwalker.com/two-red-alerts/) and our Tuning Letter 2015 No. 3, we incorrectly specified the default status of SSR as disabled. The default is actually for it to be enabled if the associated Space Constraint Relief data class function is enabled. We’ve corrected the blog entry, but you may need to refresh the page to see the correction. Thanks so much to Greg Saccomanno from Wells Fargo for pointing that out, and to Terri Menendez...
Watson & Walker Alliance with IntelliMagic
We all know that SMF data is one of the unique strengths of the mainframe. We have clients that produce terabytes of SMF data every day. SMF can tell you just about anything you could want to know about your z/OS system – if you have the right tools to turn raw SMF data into information. When we perform a health check for our customers, we want to spend our time applying our experience to the information we get from SMF, not wrestling with a multitude of programs just to get the information...