Greetings from beautiful (and sunny!) Sacramento, California, home to the 2018 Winter SHARE conference. Cheryl and I are here for the week. You might remember that Cheryl had to skip the last SHARE conference due to an impending knee replacement operation. But with that behind her (or maybe under her?), Bionic Cheryl is back and rarin’…
Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2017 No. 4 Available The 106-page 2017 No. 4 issue of Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter is now available on our www.watsonwalkerpublications.com website. Based on input from our readers, it seems that many sites are reviewing z14 proposals from IBM. Therefore, this issue provides articles that we hope will be particularly valuable…
Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2017 No. 3 Available The 122-page 2017 No. 3 issue of Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter is now available on our www.watsonwalkerpublications.com website. We have been getting lots of queries from readers about the new IBM z14s. Obviously the IBM proposal writers have been on overtime :). Given the interest from our…
SCRT V25 Now Required For anyone that is involved in submitting Sub-Capacity Reporting Tool (SCRT) reports to IBM, it should be old news that, effective from November 1, IBM will only accept SCRT reports that were generated using SCRT V25 and Java. To be fair to IBM, they have been telling people for the last…
Cheryl Watson’s 2017 z Systems CPU Chart Available We just delivered the updated version of our IBM z Systems CPU Chart to our subscribers, with information about the capacity of the new z14 boxes from just about every perspective you could think of. Total MIPS, MIPS per engine, MIPS per MSU, High RNI MIPS, Low…
To coincide with the launch of our new Publications website, Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2017 No. 2 was published on July 24th. This and future issues will only be available on the new site, but we think that you will agree that this is a much more usable, and mobile-friendly, delivery mechanism than the single…
Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter will know that we normally create a DVD every year, containing the Tuning Letters and other Watson & Walker material since Cheryl’s first Tuning Letter was published in 1991. This year, to celebrate the universe-wide migration to ‘the cloud’, we are replacing the DVD with a new subscriber-only online…
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…
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…
