1. zSeries Shipments
2. Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2000, No. 5 Summary

1. zSeries Shipments

The majority of questions I’ve received lately are asking whether the zSeries machines have been delayed. There was a news item recently that said that IBM was delaying some shipments of the z900s, expected to be in GA by December 18, 2000. Several people took this to mean that IBM was having problems with the z900 and wasn’t able to make the ship dates. IBM (and several of my readers) tell me that this isn’t so. The problem is simply that there’s too much demand. Many orders will not be filled until January due to a shortage of supplies, but several machines will be shipped mid-December. Some of my readers confirm that they’ve received the final confirmation from IBM. We are still awaiting the final LSPR ratings.

2. Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2000 No. 5 Summary

The 2000, No. 5 TUNING Letter issue has just being completed. Electronic subscribers should have received their TUNING Letter on November 20.
Printed issues were mailed November 27.

IBM’s New Hardware and Software
Much of this issue addresses IBM’s October 3rd announcement of their new hardware (zSeries) and software (z/OS). The zSeries, or z900 models, are based on 250 MIPS uni-processors and provide a maximum capacity of 2550 MIPS on their 16-way. This is very close to the capacity of the HDS 262 MIPS Trinium, with its maximum 16-way capacity of 2969 MIPS. But remember, HDS withdrew from the mainframe business earlier this year, saying it would no longer market new mainframes. The new zSeries machines are obviously targeted at the larger customers, providing faster processors, 64-bit architecture (which will help performance on large workloads like DB2), and a software pricing technique that should reduce software costs in the future. The goal of both the hardware and software is to provide a secure and reliable platform for e-business work.

The new operating system, z/OS (pronounced zee-o-ess), is the next generation of OS/390. z/OS provides three major enhancements: 64-bit real addressing, IBM’s License Manager (ILM), and the Intelligent Resource Director (IRD). ILM will provide a new pricing algorithm that allows you to determine (IBM) software prices based on the size of the LPAR the software is running in, rather than the capacity of the entire machine. IRD will allow the system to manage LPARs in a sysplex dynamically by adjusting CPU and I/O resources based on WLM goals. See page 26 for a full discussion of these new announcements.

Amdahl’s Mainframe Withdrawal
Amdahl is withdrawing from the mainframe market. This comes as a big blow to mainframe customers who do not want to see a single-vendor environment. I wouldn’t worry, however, that costs will skyrocket. IBM’s main competition for the last couple of years has not been Amdahl and HDS – it’s been Sun and HP. The distributed platforms have done much more to force down the price of mainframe computing than Amdahl or HDS. I don’t think it’s the end of the mainframe, nor do I think that Amdahl customers are in trouble. More information can be found on page 43.

Our MIPS Versus Theirs
The MIPS in our CPU Charts don’t match those of the Gartner Group and other published MIPS. Why not? See why we think our MIPS are more accurate. Page 49.

Elsewhere in This Issue
Our focus article this issue describes the metrics used in managing and analyzing Virtual Tape Servers (VTS). Ned Diehl, from Information Systems Manager, provides a description of the metrics and many examples of how to report and understand these systems (page 9). Our S/390 News warns about a DB2 Copy corruption problem, a failing CF rebuild, provides some APAR warnings, and gives some pointers to useful IMS V7 presentations (page 4). Norman Hollander’s Expo 2000 Trip Report also provides some handy tips. Page 51.

Stay tuned!