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Articles and Presentations
Presentations

We often present sessions at the SHARE user conference and other venues. These are all available to you in PDF format in this section. A highlight has been Cheryl's Hot Flashes session presented on Friday morning at SHARE for several years. All of the items in the Hot Flashes were either published in past TUNING Letters or will be presented in greater detail in the TUNING Letter immediately following SHARE.  Each Hot Flashes presentation is unique. Click here to view the presentations.

Articles:

Rotting ROTS
This article originally appeared in Tuning Letter 2007 Issue No. 2. Portions of the article were also included in Cheryl's Hot Flashes #17, which was presented at the SHARE user conference in Tampa where it won a Best Session Award.   

Positioning for Goal Mode
This article on Positioning For MVS SP 5 was written for our September/October 1994 TUNING Letter. The section of the article on preparing for Workload Manager is as useful today as it was then for sites who are preparing to move to WLM goal mode. The suggestions will help you prepare your IPS and ICS for an easy migration. If you plan to use IBM's Goal Mode Migration Aid (GMMA) from their Web site http://www.s390.ibm.com/wlm, then also read the GMMA documentation before modifying the comments of your ICS. 

Why Tune?
This 12 page article, from the 1999 No. 4 issue of Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter, shows why we believe performance tuning can save you huge amounts of money, even in the face of ever cheaper hardware. We give real life examples, and show how to cost justify your tuning projects for management. 

Why Go to Goal Mode?
It takes only hours - at most a few days - to start a test system running in goal mode, and the benefits can be enormous. Here's an article (in PDF format) to help justify to management (and yourself) the effort of migration. This article was previously published in our 1999, No. 5 issue. 

Getting to Goal Mode - Step by Step
This is a simple checklist of how to get to a monoplex environment and run in goal mode. 

Cheryl's Quickstart Service Policy
Provides a standard set of service classes and goals that you can easily use to create your initial Workload Manager goal mode policy. 

Why Your CPU Capacity May Not Match Your Vendor's Estimate
IBM publishes their Large Systems Performance Reference (LSPR) ratings, and Amdahl and HDS publish their relative performance ratings for new processor speeds and capacity. Do these ratings match your workloads and will your work experience the performance differences as published by the vendors? This paper provides an explanation of why (and why not) your performance may match the vendor's performance results.

Processor Upgrades
Another article you might find interesting is called "Processor Upgrades" and was the focus of our 1998, No. 6 issue. It deals with the problems encountered when you move to fewer, but faster, CPs. The entire issue (1998, No. 6) is downloadable. 

Cheryl Watson's SMF Reference Summary
This handy SMF Reference Summary was last updated in January of 2006 and includes information up through z/OS 1.7. It includes a listing of SMF record types and subtypes, a listing of the SMF exits, and other useful information related to the management of this important resource.

Sample Issues
For many other articles, please don't miss our sample TUNING Letter issues. We continue to post some of these older issues, not only to show the scope of a typical TUNING Letter, but because the information is still current and because we receive frequent requests regarding their topics. A good example is the 2004 issue on z990 performance.
 
 

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