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…
We’re happy to announce that we’ve scheduled a new Containing z/OS Software Costs class. This class will be held in Sarasota, Florida, on August 28-30, 2017. With IBM’s latest 4% increase in z/OS software, we’re sure that this class will help you contain that increase. This 3-day class discusses a multitude of ways to reduce…
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…
We emailed Tuning Letter 2016 No. 3 to our subscribers on November 8. This issue covers an introduction to Analytics and shows you step by step how to gain immediate access to SMF records using a new (no-charge) Spark package from IBM and Rocket. It also provides a thorough introduction to Java on z/OS, as…
Things have been relatively quiet in the Red Alert area until this week when three problems surfaced. Most installations have at least one person who subscribes to Red Alerts, but we think it’s important for more people to be aware of these. You can subscribe yourself at https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/redAlerts/home.html. Red Alert 2016.11.02 – HIPER APARs for…
