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…
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…
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. …
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…
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…
