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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
