The next SHARE conference will be held in the Pittsburgh Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from Sunday, August 4th to Friday, August 9th. You can get more information about the conference here: https://event.share.org/. Cheryl and I will be presenting a double-session on the latest news about IBM’s container pricing initiatives (DevTest Containers and Tailored Fit Pricing), as well as…
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…
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. …
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…
