Cheryl's List #35 -
December 14, 1999
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1. REXX Dates
2. Late Y2K Redbook
3. Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 1999, No. 5 Summary
4. HFS and PDSE on Non-SMS Volumes
5. Quickstart Policy Question
1. REXX Dates
If Y2K comes and you find some of your REXX execs not working properly, you may find that the date processing logic is wrong. IBM has published a neat little summary and recommendations on processing date fields in REXX at:
http://www.ibm.com/s390/s390da/articles/rexxdate.html
2. Late Y2k Redbook
A new redbook was released last week to explain how you should "design, tailor, enhance, and configure your backup and recovery procedures and solutions to protect your data from the Year 2000 bug." I personally hope that you've got all this figured out by now, but if you just want to confirm that you've covered all the bases, you can get manual SG24-5358 - The Millennium Backup and Recovery from http://www.redbooks.ibm.com.
3. Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 1999, No. 5 Summary
The 1999, No. 5 TUNING Letter issue was just completed along with an addendum to 1999, No. 3. Current electronic subscribers (see Cheryl's List #28) will receive their PDF files via email today or tomorrow. Printed issues should be mailed before December 22.
The Management Issues section from the TUNING Letter is included here to give you a sense of the scope and contents of the issue. The page numbers refer to pages in issue No. 5. The TUNING Letter is published six times a year, with an average of forty pages per issue. Please see our Web page for details if you’re interested in subscribing.
Survey Results
I don't want to take the time to repeat them all here, but I'd like
to recommend that you take a look at the results of our recent Cheryl's
List survey on page 44. (You can find them online at http://www.watsonwalker.com/clist33.html.)
Of 190 responding installations, 57% were in goal mode. 45% of those not
in goal mode felt that they didn't have enough staff or time. Almost half
of the sites in goal mode said that it took less than two weeks to get
their first system into goal mode. It's really easier than you might think.
It was very interesting to see how current most sites are. 87% of the sites
responding had installed OS/390 Version 2 (that's Release 4 or higher).
I thought the results of the survey were quite enlightening.
Why Go to Goal Mode and Parallel Sysplex?
Two important questions are answered in this issue: Why go to goal
mode and why go to parallel sysplex? IBM is pushing both, but is there
a compelling reason for you to make the effort to convert? I believe that
both goal mode and parallel sysplex are strategic directions for new and
future IBM solutions, which means that you'll need to do the migration
at some point. But the real question is whether it pays to do it now. For
goal mode, the improvement in control and management of ill-behaved workloads
makes it worth the effort for most sites. And the improved amount of performance
data that is available makes it extremely desirable. I also describe a
free tool from an RMF developer to help you do the conversion even faster.
My article on page 14 gives you ten compelling reasons to go to goal mode.
As far as parallel sysplex goes, if you have multiple machines that are
parallel-sysplex capable, you can almost always justify the migration based
on the reduction in software license charges. My article on page 21 describes
all of the other benefits that you can expect from implementing parallel
sysplex, even in a single server configuration. The watch-word today is
"Five-Nines", the ability to keep your system available to users with a
99.999% availability (only 5 minutes of downtime a year!). This ability
to provide continuous availability for your users is one of the major benefits
of parallel sysplex. If you need some help justifying the expenditure,
I'm sure this article will help. One of the implementations of parallel
sysplex, data sharing, is also covered in a Focus article on page 28. And
don't miss two new Web-based tools that IBM has just released to help with
your move to parallel sysplex, on page 27.
Other Important Items
Bob Archambeault's CICS Performance Tips on page 52 gives some
important CICS Y2K tips. Check them out first. I've disparaged PDSE object
(i.e. load) libraries for several years now because of their instability.
But I think they've got their act together now and several sites are using
them successfully. See my retraction on page 5. Keep track of the IBM Alerts
Web site during the year 2000 rollover (page 7). WSC Flash W99047
is an important flash warning of ESQA shortages and system outages after
applying Shark maintenance.
Elsewhere
Other items in our S/390 News starting on page 4 include: CA PTF for
CA-ASTEX (one site saw increase of 50 MIPS); a wonderful new Web site for
VSAM; two changes in CICS which reduced CPU usage from 40 minutes to 6
minutes per day; how to find CPU busy over 100%; user experiences on OS/390
R8; a solution to classification of FTP work from the last issue; a DB2
APAR that's applicable to Datacom and others; tidbits from IBM-Main; WSC
Flashes; new white papers and presentations from WSC; a free e-commerce
service from Amdahl; and over a dozen new IBM online publications (with
two especially good publications on time management and an MQSeries primer).
Notes from other conferences on page 40 include: caution about using DB2
SRB time; SPEs for RMF; and APARs from IBM's recent S/390 Expo conference.
Finally, if you missed our Cheryl's List emails, you can find them on page
42 with: NEWWORK classification update; a CPU Chart correction; clarification
on WC=YES; IBM's MP3000 announcement; and clarification of HFS files on
non-SMS volumes.
4. HFS and PDSE on Non-SMS Volumes
In Cheryl's List #33, I said that IBM will issue a system center flash that will provide the APAR numbers to provide support for HFS and PDSE files on non-SMS volumes. The flash has not been issued yet, but an APAR is available for tracking. Keep track of APAR OW35441 (current target date of 12/31/99).
5. Quickstart Policy Question
We've had several hundred people download our Quickstart Policy from http://www.watsonwalker.com/qsp.html, but one person is having trouble with the download and I can't figure out what might be going wrong. He seems to have successfully downloaded a PDS with the appropriate member names, but when he accesses it in the WLM panels, it appears to be empty (no policy, services classes, etc.). It has the same PDS attributes I used when I created it under OS/390 1.3. He's running OS/390 2.5. Has anyone else had this problem and found a solution?
That’s all for now. Stay tuned!
Cheryl Watson
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