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…
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…
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…
You may remember that back in August 2014 IBM announced that they were migrating to a strategy of annual price increases for their z Systems Monthly License Charge (MLC) software, and that the increase for each year (effective January 1) would be announced at least 90 days in advance. The objective of this strategy was…
Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter will know that we had a large article about IBM’s Continuous Delivery strategy in the most recent issue (2016 No. 2). You might think that this is a bit of a ho-hum topic, but that article stretched to nearly 20 pages. And at the time we wrote that article,…
For those of you that don’t follow IBMMAIN (Cheryl follows everything – I think the NSA follow Cheryl to reduce their own workload!), there has been some recent discussion about an issue in JES2 whereby it consumes 2-3 times as much CPU in z/OS 2.2 as in z/OS 2.1. In an ideal world, you would…
We emailed Tuning Letter 2016 No. 2 to our subscribers on August 6. This issue covered IBM’s recent Continuous Delivery strategy, provided an introduction to Blockchain, introduced IBM’s Doc Buddy app for iPhone and Android that lets you look up most z/OS messages even if you don’t have access to the Internet, together with Brocade’s…
Readers of Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter will be familiar with Alain Maneville, from IBM France. Alain co-wrote an article about HiperDispatch for the Tuning Letter, and is also the author of the LPAR Design tool. The LPAR Design tool allows you to enter your LPAR configuration and model the impact that changes in an LPAR’s…
Cheryl and I just finished taking part in the 2.5-day Nordic GSE 2016 conference in Reykjavik. We really enjoyed the conference. Everyone made us feel so welcome, and it was great to have a chance to finally meet people that have subscribed to the Tuning Letter for many years. The organization was flawless, and they…
On May 13, 2016, IBM Flash10863 was updated to inform users that all internet delivery of z/OS product and service orders must use a secured download method by May 22. A summary of the flash was provided on May 5 by Marna Walle in her SHARE blog, “Are you electronic delivery secure?”. Essentially, you can…
