clist117.html

Cheryl's List #117 -
September 4, 2007

1. Highlights of Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 2007 No. 4
2. Latest SHARE Proceedings Now Online
3. Index of Withdrawn z/OS Functions
4. Best User Session Award

1. Highlights of Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 2007 No. 4

The forty-five page 2007 No. 4 TUNING Letter was emailed to subscribers on August 30, 2007. You may visit our Web site at http://www.watsonwalker.com to obtain single issues for $155 each. The following is a summary of just some of the contents of this latest TUNING Letter:

JES2 Features in z/OS 1.8
Some recent surveys have shown that most of our readers are running z/OS 1.8, or plan to be running that release in the near future. We have presented several articles dealing with z/OS 1.8 in previous issues, but have not said much about JES2. We correct that oversight in this issue, as we present some of the new improvements users will discover when they run JES2 in z/OS 1.8. There really are some nice enhancements in this release, and you can read all about them in our Focus article that begins on page 17. We pay special attention to those features that relate to the performance and reliability of the product.

Management of z/OS UNIX Data
For many years users have been able to run selected UNIX workloads under z/OS. The code that supports this function has had several names, including OpenMVS, OpenEdition, and (currently) z/OS UNIX. Many z/OS products such as TCP/IP and WebSphere use these services and store portions of their data as UNIX files. The files and directories that comprise the UNIX file system actually reside in special-purpose MVS data sets in the HFS (Hierarchical File System) format, or the newer zFS (zSeries File System) format. The HFS format has been around since the first version of UNIX support, and has been stabilized by IBM. That means that it will continue to be supported, but will not be enhanced. The newer zFS format will be the focus of all future enhancements, and IBM has done a lot of work to improve the performance and reliability of these data sets. Because of this, many users are in the process of converting their older HFS data sets to the newer zFS format. Please make sure to read our HFS to zFS Migration article on page 36 if you are doing this. We describe the enhancements that IBM made in z/OS 1.7 to make this process easier, describe a migration utility that is available in that release, and also provide some hints for making the process easier. Also, whether your UNIX data resides in an HFS or a zFS, there is a new UNIX tool that allows you to manage it better. Please read our Nuggets from the Forums section starting on page 7 to learn more about this free resource.

SHARE in San Diego
Earlier this month we attended the summer SHARE conference in San Diego, California. The weather and attendance were great, and most of the sessions we attended were outstanding. Our full SHARE trip report will be included in the next issue, but we did want to pass along some of the information that we thought was really critical. Please see page 25 to read our SHARE Highlights article, where we focus on important maintenance and the availability of new performance resources.

Elsewhere in this Issue
Since our previous issue, IBM announced the availability of z/OS 1.9. Please read page 42 to learn about some of the key dates associated with this release. • Page 35 describes a recent Red Alert that applies to those running JES2 under z/OS 1.8. • Our readers share some of their observations related to security on the z/OS platform and the use of the RMF Data Portal feature. These useful suggestions are contained in the User Experiences section that can be found starting on page 30.

2. Latest SHARE Proceedings Now Online

Even if you did not attend the latest SHARE conference (August 12-17, 2007 in San Diego, California) you can still benefit from the knowledge and experience of the speakers. The proceedings from most of the sessions are available for browsing or downloading from the SHARE Web site at http://www.share.org. SHARE asks that the speakers submit their files in PDF format, so that anyone can easily view or download them.

From the main page, select the link 'San Diego Proceedings Available'. From the Proceedings page, you can then search for sessions by session number (e.g. 2500), topic track (e.g. Getting to the Latest z/OS), Program and Project (e.g. MVS) or speaker (e.g. Watson, Cheryl). You can also search all sessions based on specific keywords. Even if you didn't attend and are not a member of SHARE, you can still access the proceedings from the most recent conference. There is no password or other authorization required. This is a great resource for anyone who works with z/OS and related platforms. Those who have a SHARE membership and password can also access the proceedings from previous conferences, going all the way back to the San Francisco conference that was held in August of 2002.

As we noted in Cheryl's List #114, many of the SHARE projects are sponsoring basic sessions designed for those new to the System z and z/OS platform. Many of these are held on Sunday afternoon, so they don't interfere with the regular SHARE sessions. The proceedings from these sessions are also available for download or browsing. When we browsed the sessions looking for the word 'Basic', here are some we found that look useful:

You can also use the SHARE Web site to locate information about upcoming meetings. The next conference will be held February 24-29, 2008 in Orlando, Florida. Please put it on your calendar now, and we hope to see you there.

3. Index of Withdrawn z/OS Functions

IBM regularly announces that support for certain z/OS functions will be withdrawn at a future date. Sometimes support will be dropped in connection with a future z/OS release, and sometimes the announcement is just a warning that support will be dropped in the future. These notifications are usually in the form of announcement letters, which can be found on the IBM Web site at http://www.ibm.com/news.

There was some confusion about this recently on the IBM-MAIN discussion group. Some participants indicated that they regularly get notices from IBM about these kinds of changes, while others reported that they never do. We suspect that the notices are being sent to the organizations, yet they never seem to trickle down the chain to the correct person who needs to see them and plan for the changes.

Another IBM-MAIN participant mentioned a good resource for such material that we have also recommended in the past. Bette Brody of the Washington Systems Center (WSC) maintains a document (Flash 10451) that keeps track of these functions that may be dropped in the future. Bette updates the document regularly, and the latest update occurred on August 9th. (This is also mentioned in our latest newsletter - TUNING Letter 2007 No. 4, page 12.) The current Flash contains tables of potentially discontinued functions that were announced as part of z/OS 1.5 through z/OS 1.9. For each item in the table, it also contains the number of associated announcement letters and the dates they were issued. This can be useful if you want to go back to the original source document and do more research.

The link http://www.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/FLASH10451 may be used to access this document. You may find it to be a useful tool when planning future migrations. Thanks for Bette for creating and maintaining this useful tool.

4. Best User Session Award

We were recently honored to learn that one of our SHARE presentations had received an award for being one of the best user sessions. This is determined based upon evaluations that are completed by the attendees and collected at the end of the session. The award was announced at the most recent SHARE conference, held in San Diego last month.

The session that received that award was our Cheryl's Hot Flashes #17 presentation, given by Cheryl at the conference in Tampa on February 16, 2007. If you would like a copy of the session handout, visit our Web site at http://www.watsonwalker.com. Many other presentations, including most of the previous Hot Flashes sessions, can be browsed or downloaded from our site. You don't need to be a customer or have any type of authorization to access these. Some of these SHARE sessions are also available on the SHARE Web site (http://www.share.org), but we suggest obtaining them from our Web site because sometimes they get updated or enhanced after we return from SHARE.

One of the topics presented in the Tampa session was Rotting ROTs. Those who do computer performance tuning often rely on Rules of Thumb (or ROTs) to help them determine whether performance is acceptable. For example, some installations might try to keep their processor utilization within a certain percentage range, such as between 80% and 90%. Two decades ago, you could develop ROTs that would apply to most organizations. But are ROTs still valid in today's more complex computing configurations, or should they be allowed to rot? These were some of the issues raised during our presentation, and this topic generated a lot of interest both during and after the conference.

When we returned from Tampa, we summarized and expanded upon the Hot Flashes presentation in the next edition of our newsletter (see TUNING Letter 2007, No. 2, pages 25-28). We also included another section devoted just to the Rotting ROTs topic (see TUNING Letter 2007, No. 2, pages 36-41). Because this latter section has proved to be so useful to our readers, we have decided to also make it available to everyone on our Web site. You will see the link to it from our home page, and we hope that you will find it helpful and thought provoking. We will continue to keep you informed as this topic evolves.

We are grateful for all of the people who attend our presentations, and who repeatedly give us good feedback and great evaluations. We have always believed that the loyalty of our readers is our greatest asset, and that continues to prove itself each day. Thanks again.

Stay Tuned!

Cheryl Watson
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