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1. SHARE Proceedings (almost) Available
2. Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 2002, No. 6 Summary
3. Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 2002, No. 6 - GRS Update

1.  SHARE Proceedings (almost) Available

SHARE has published the proceedings from the San Francisco August conference on their Web site at http://www.share.org.  We don't know what went wrong, but you can't easily select by speaker.  Some of the speakers are listed by last name only, some by first name only, and some can be found under first or last name.  You'll have to be diligent to find the session you want.  (By the way, look for mine under 'Cheryl', not 'Watson').

2.  Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 2002, No. 6 Summary

The fifty-page 2002, No. 6 TUNING Letter was emailed to electronic subscribers today.  The print issues will be mailed as soon as they get back from the printer.  We've changed from a printing press to laser color copies.  The binding will be different, but now print subscribers will get full color printing in their issues.  We are also sending out the December 2002 CPU Chart, which contains all updates from 2002.  You can purchase a printed copy of the current TUNING Letter for $85 at http://www.watsonwalker.com.  The following shows what you can find in our latest TUNING Letter.  It's taken from our Management Summary.

What's New?
We think the most important management news in this issue is IBM's announcement of two smaller z800s, both capable of running z/OS in 64-bit mode and supporting Linux workloads.  This should remove the concern that IBM is abandoning the low-end market.  If you include emulator options, you can now run z/OS on machines from 8 MIPS to 2700 MIPS!  An embarrassing note for IBM is their announcement that they stopped development of the IBM License Manager (ILM).  This addition to z/OS was supposed to provide control of software licenses under z/OS.  After two years, the project has been stopped.  IBM indicates that the functionality of ILM will be provided by the Tivoli License Manager in a future release.  Although this has been traumatic for IBM and ISVs, it means little to customers.  The benefits of Workload License Charges, which were announced at the same time as ILM, continue to be available to the z/OS customer base.  It's very important to investigate the pricing options provided by WLC in any z/OS environment.  See our What's New? section starting on page 40.

MVS Mail
Email is part of everyone's life these days, and is an excellent method of communication.  It's relatively easy to get MVS itself to send you an email, and the overhead is negligible.  Wouldn't you like to be notified when something goes wrong?  Our article on page 24 shows you how to implement the technique on your MVS system. 

User Experiences
Much of this issue is devoted to user experiences.  Our readers tell us that these are some of the most valuable parts of the TUNING Letters.  You can find warnings here that don't even appear in APARs, and several entries that describe symptoms much better than the corresponding APARs.  See our items about GRS overhead problems in z/OS 1.2, WLM initiators, 64-bit experiences, and other topics in our Focus article starting on page 31.

Elsewhere in This Issue
We welcome Clark Kidd to our company on page 19.  Clark's experience in UNIX and WebSphere will prove invaluable in the coming months and years.  There are several new HIPER APARs that should be reviewed by someone in your staff (page 4), and some interesting items on page 9 from the discussion groups.  (Most installations don't have time to review these daily.)  Because many installations will be migrating from OS/390 R10 to z/OS 1.4, IBM is providing a new migration manual to address exactly that migration.  It's a great time-saver, and the link can be found on page 49.  Our Q & A in this issue includes questions on swapping out jobs, auxiliary storage sizing, and WLM report classes.  See page 44.

3.  Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter 2002, No. 6 - GRS Update

Here's some new information that just came in.  On pages 31 and 32 (GRS ISGNQXIT), we describe the overhead in GRS-related tools that can be seen when sites migrate to z/OS 1.2.  The overhead stemmed from the addition of the ISGNQXIT exit.  Larre Shiller of SSA was one of the MIM shops that had seen the overhead.  In the TUNING Letter (page 32), Larre had said that deactivating the exit(s) had reduced the overhead by half, but there was still overhead.  And not everyone can disable the exits.  Larre has just reported that SSA has applied the latest fixes from IBM and CA, re-activated the exits, and that they are seeing little to no additional overhead as compared to OS releases prior to z/OS 1.2.  The APARs are: IBM - OW56028 and CA - QI24715.  That's great news.  Thanks for the update, Larre.

Stay tuned!

Cheryl Watson
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