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…
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…
We emailed Tuning Letter 2016 No. 2 to our subscribers on August 6. This issue covered IBM’s recent Continuous Delivery strategy, provided an introduction to Blockchain, introduced IBM’s Doc Buddy app for iPhone and Android that lets you look up most z/OS messages even if you don’t have access to the Internet, together with Brocade’s…
