1.   About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2012 No. 3
2.   SHARE MVS Program Survey
3.   SHARE in Anaheim

1.  About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2012 No. 3

The 42-page 2012 No. 3 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on July 13, 2012. You may visit our website at www.watsonwalker.com to obtain subscription information and the table of contents. The following is the Management Summary from that issue, talking about some of the contents of this latest Tuning Letter:

Outsourced?
If your data center operations have been outsourced or you are thinking about using an outsourcer, Cheryl’s multi-part series of articles on setting service level objectives should be required reading. In this issue (Part 4), she delves into CICS and IMS. Unfortunately, too many outsourcers provide minimal service level objectives (SLOs) in their contracts, such as “average CICS response time will be less than 1.0 second, and availability will be over 95%.” Such an SLO would be extremely easy to provide if the average response time and availability is calculated over a day or week, but it doesn’t ensure that customers will be happy. Availability of 95% could allow a system outage of three hours during peak processing time and response times of ten seconds (agonizingly slow), but could still meet the contract SLOs.

Any outsourced data center should ensure that there is a technical staff still available to monitor the outsourcer and the contract commitment. These arti-cles are extremely helpful if you are just starting to look at outsourcing or are anticipating renegotiating your contract.

For those installations not considering outsourcing, then setting SLOs and meeting them is the easiest way to keep your customers happy.

Workload Manager (WLM)
Cheryl has provided recommendations on the best practices for using the Workload Manager (WLM) since 1995 when it was introduced. A few (not many) of her recommendations have changed along the way. In this issue, she provides a summary of all of her recommendations in one article. Setting Service Definition Coefficients (SDCs) are covered in multiple articles.

Elsewhere in This Issue
You’ll also find many other useful or interesting items throughout this newsletter: How the z/OS dispatcher works • Undocumented IPCS functions • Important publications and papers from IBM • New Function, SMF and HIPER APARs to help you identify useful maintenance.

2.  SHARE MVS Program Survey

The SHARE MVS Program has created a survey to determine which topics to include in upcoming conferences. The survey contains a list of z/OS enhancements that we think these should be implemented in most installations. But many installations have not done so, and we’re trying to determine the reason. The list itself is very interesting, and you’ll be able to compare your installation to others when the survey concludes.

Already a SHARE member? Go to www.SHARE.org/MVS and use your existing SHARE login and password. Or from www.share.org, you can select Our Community, and then select ‘MVS Program’ as the Area of Interest. You can then select the survey from the top of the page.

Not a SHARE member? It’s easy to create a web user profile!

  • Visit www.SHARE.org/membership.
  • Check to see if your company is already a SHARE member. If so, there’s no cost to you or your company to add yourself to the membership, and you’ll receive full member benefits!
  • If your company is not a member, select “Non-Member Account”. You’ll be asked to provide your contact information and optional demographic data. This should take less than 5 minutes to complete.
  • Your request to access SHARE.org will be approved within one business day. If you need to expedite this process, please call (888-574-2735) or email SHARE HQ (SHAREHQ@SHARE.org) and request immediate access.
  • Follow the instructions above to access the survey.

If you haven’t seen the new SHARE website, you’ll be impressed by the many new features such as a z/OS blog, user forums, access to prior years’ proceedings, free webcasts, and additional publications.

3.  SHARE in Anaheim

I can’t believe it but another SHARE conference is just around the corner – August 5-10 in Anaheim, California. I’ll be extra busy this SHARE. In addition to giving my “Hot Flashes #28” on Friday morning at 9:30 am, I’ll also be giving two new SMF presentations:

Session 11309 – The Many CPU Fields of SMF – Tuesday, 1:30 pm
Session 11264 – SMF 101 – Everything You Should Know and More – Thursday, 3:00 pm

You can register for SHARE and see the session schedule at www.share.org. Handouts for the sessions have just started to appear, but more will be added from now through the conference.

To prepare for my talk at SHARE, I’m looking for some SMF data (types 30 and 72) from sites that have zIIP and zAAP usage. None of the material will get published without getting cleansed and approved, but I’d like more examples for my analysis. If you’re willing to help out, just send an email to technical@watsonwalker.com.

Stay Tuned!