IBM’s New z14 By now you’ve all heard all the marketing hype about IBM’s newest mainframe, the z14. What we’d like to do is look at the announcement from the techie’s point of view. First, there is a lot of confusion over the difference between the z14 and ‘IBM Z’. This confusion is easy to…
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…
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…
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…
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. …
