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1. Highlights of Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 2007 No. 5
2. How to Succeed in Business (and in Life)
3. Rumors of a new IBM System z Processor
4. Google Search Trends

1.  Highlights of Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 2007 No. 5

The forty-two page 2007 No. 5 TUNING Letter was emailed to subscribers on October 31, 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:

CPU Variance
Do you think it is possible for the same job to experience a 30% variance in processor consumption, based on the time of day when it runs?  You might be surprised to learn that this is not uncommon, although the variation is usually less than this.  The repeatability that used to be associated with resource chargeback no longer seems to exist for many of today's complex systems.  Make sure to read our User Experiences article on page 33 where we explore this topic in more detail.  You will learn why this is not uncommon, and we also provide some suggestions for changing your chargeback systems so that this becomes less of an issue for your users.

More zFS Migration Options
In our last issue we described some tools that make it easier to migrate to the newer zFS data sets that are used to contain z/OS UNIX files.  Since then, IBM has come out with yet another tool that will assist you in this process.  Please read our update in the article that starts on page 36.  This new option has some advantages over previous tools, including the fact that it is supported for operating system releases prior to z/OS 1.7.

SHARE in San Diego
Although we mentioned some SHARE highlights in the last issue, you will find our full SHARE Trip Report on page 14 of this issue.  We realize that many of you attend SHARE too, so we try to pass along those items that you might have missed, and provide more detailed information about topics that we found particularly interesting.  In this trip report, we pass along some critical maintenance related to data management, mention some useful sessions that you might not have attended, and describe some changes relating to the use of the IBM support services.  Then on page 21 you will find a summary of our Cheryl's Hot Flashes #18 presentation.  We have included things here that have not appeared before, or that have been updated since they were mentioned in previous issues.

Important Software Maintenance
IBM will create a Red Alert when they have discovered a software problem that has the potential to cause severe problems.  This does not happen very often, and there have only been five Red Alerts created so far in 2007.  But one of these is new since our last issue, affects those who are running IMS 9.1, and can lead to database damage.  We provide all of the details on page 38.  You should also check out the New Function Maintenance area of our News section on page 4, where we pass along information about maintenance that delivers new functionality between z/OS releases.

Elsewhere in this Issue
On page 28 we provide more information about a recent IBM recommendation related to the Real Storage Manager (RSM).  For users in certain environments, following these suggestions could reduce RSM overhead and improve your performance. • We have been following a nasty catalog problem that has been open for almost a year, and we provide all the details on page 31.

2.  How to Succeed in Business (and in Life)

One of the things that makes our TUNING Letter so valuable is that our readers have always been willing to pass along their experiences - both good and bad.  We usually take their experiences and do some of our own research, sometimes adding a little background information, and then pass along all of the findings to our reader community.  Although we study a lot of different materials and are involved in a lot of projects, we cannot possibly duplicate the experiences of all of our readers.  So we really appreciate those readers who take the time to document their experiences so that all of us can benefit.

Regular TUNING Letter readers should be familiar with Jerry Urbaniak from Acxiom.  You will find him mentioned in just about every issue, because he is always alerting us to new maintenance or passing along his interesting experiences.

Recently Jerry shared with us some of his philosophies about the value of information:
 

I am a firm believer in not hoarding knowledge.  During my career I have seen a lot of inter-personal and technical problems develop because someone thought someone else should "learn the hard way."  If someone feels so insecure that sharing some of their knowledge will compromise their value to an organization or reduce their own self-esteem, they desperately need to expand that knowledge base!
 
I have just finished a book "What Got You Here Won’t Get You There" by Marshall Goldsmith.  He declares that not sharing information is one of "The Twenty Habits That Hold You Back from The Top."  The book is based on his coaching experiences with corporate executives, but the 20 bad habits apply to all of us to one degree or another.


The full title of the book is What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith.  There are 133 reviews for it on Amazon, and the average rating is five (out of five) stars.  There are ten different chapters in the book, organized into three different sections: The Trouble with Success, The Twenty Habits That Hold You Back from the Top, and How We Can Change for the Better.

This sounds like a great book, and it certainly provides some useful tips for success in both our careers and our lives.  We have already added it to our holiday wish lists.  Thanks to Jerry for the recommendation.  And thanks to all of our readers who so freely share good information with the rest of the community.

3.  Rumors of a new IBM System z Processor

Have you heard any of the rumors about the IBM z6 chip, which is supposedly the next generation of processor designed for mainframe systems?  There has been a lot of discussion about this on some of the online discussion groups, and if you search the Internet for 'IBM z6 processor' or 'IBM z6 chip', you will find a lot of information and speculation.

The fuel for many of these rumors is a document that can be downloaded from IBM at http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/IBM-z6-mainframe-microprocessor-Webb.pdf.  This is a presentation that was given by Charles Webb of IBM.  The title of the presentation is IBM z6 - The Next-Generation Mainframe Microprocessor.  Although the presentation gives no indication of the venue where it was presented, some of the other Internet sources state that this was given at Hot Chips 19, an annual gathering for processor designers sponsored by Stanford University.  This year's conference was held in August, and was attended by approximately 600 people.

Here are some of the details of this processor, as taken from this presentation:
 

• The internal project name of 'z6' was chosen because the new chip is a sibling of the Power6 chip.  The Power6 is considered to be one of the most sophisticated chips in the industry today.
• The z6 has a z/Architecture design, can run at speeds up to 4.7 GHz, is built around a quad-core design (four cores per die), and each chip contains 790 million transistors.
• There are three accelerator engines that are used for data compression, cryptographic functions, and decimal floating point operations.
• It supports 894 different instructions, 668 of which are implemented entirely in the hardware.  More than 50 instructions have been added to improve the efficiency of compiled programs.
• There is support for 24- bit, 31-bit, and 64-bit addressing modes.
• Support is provided for the processing of 1 MB page frames.
• Full hardware support is provided for decimal floating point operations.

 
This is a fast processor, considering that it is almost three times the speed of the 1.7 GHz delivered by the current state-of-the art chip - the z9-EC. 

Most of the rest of the presentation targets the specific design of the processor, with subjects such as branch prediction, instruction pipelines, and improved error detection and correction.

What does all of this mean?  It is obvious that IBM has invested a lot of time and money into this research, and the design of the chip is specific to the System z architecture.  We are not sure when or if this processor will be announced, or whether it will be called the z6 or some name that has more marketing zing.  It has been more than two years since the last big iron processor was announced (the z9-109 was announced in July of 2005), so it would not be unexpected to see something within the next year.  Some of the online IBM watchers are predicting an announcement later this year or during the first part of 2008. 

None of this information is based upon any insider knowledge, but was simply extracted from online searches, email discussion groups, and the materials referenced in this article.  None of our IBM sources have hinted anything about a new processor in the near future.  But as one industry watcher noted, it's when things are quiet at IBM that you need to pay particular attention.

4.  Google Search Trends

A recent newspaper article alerted us to yet another feature provided by the inventive folks at Google.  It appears that they keep statistics about what search terms people have been using, and they are more than happy to show those to you so that you can spot demographic trends.  These are not detailed statistics, so you don't need to worry that your neighbor can snoop on your searches.  But it does break down the search frequency by the country, city, and language of the searcher.

The link http://trends.google.com can be used to access this new facility.  The home page looks similar to the regular Google search page, except that when you enter a search argument, you get back statistics related to that argument.  For example, we searched using the phrase 'z/OS' and found that most of the searches for that term came from these countries, in order of frequency:

 
1.  India 
2.  Switzerland 
3.  Germany 
4.  United States 
5.  Austria 
6.  Belgium 
7.  Australia 
8.  Canada 
9.  Japan 
10. Netherlands


The returned statistics also include the ten most popular cities where people have been searching for that term.  Yamato, Japan gets the award for the most 'z/OS' searches, followed by Bangalore, India.  Also, most of the z/OS searchers are looking for pages written in German, followed by English, Dutch, and then Japanese. 

For each entry in the country list shown above, you can click on the country name and get a further breakdown by regions or states within that country.  For example, the record for the number of 'z/OS' searches in the US is held by Palo Alto, CA, followed by Baltimore, MD, and then Raleigh, NC.

You also get a nice little graph that shows you how many searches have been made for your search term between 2004 and the present.  If there are any news articles found for your search term, Google will also provide links to them, and will indicate on the graph when the articles were published.  For example, a spike in searches for 'IBM' occurred at the same time that IBM announced their PC business was being sold to a Chinese company.

If you have a Web-based business, this could be a useful tool to track your demographics and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.  Even if you don't use the Web for business, using this new facility makes it fun to see what people have been looking for, and where those people live.  Big Brother is indeed watching, and his name is Google.

Stay Tuned!

Cheryl Watson
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