Sampling Techdocs : February - March 2008

With the z10 announcement and the z/OS 1.10 preview in February, some documents have been reworked and there are of course new documents discussing the new functionalities of the z10. I already discussed one of them into more detail (Basic HyperSwap), but there's of course much more. Here's a selection :

• Presentation : A System Programmer Productivity Tool Bag
  This is such a useful document I just have to mention it from time to time. "It is designed to point to and describe various information to assist in planning, aid in finding pertinent information, tools which are available to make a systems programmer job a bit easier".


• Technical document : IBM System Storage DS8000 FlashCopy SE Implementation Considerations and Recommendations
  I know I mentioned this the previous time too, but it has been updated and and it gives a great description of how FlashCopy SE works, where you can use it and where it's better not to use it. Some examples : it is not recommended to use it when data changes more than 20% between two FlashCopies. Do not use it either when you are running update jobs on the same data just after the FlashCopy SE. These circumstances might have a negative influence on your performance.


• Presentations : WebSphere for z/OS - Version 6.1 Handouts for WBSR6 Wildfire Workshop
  I promised to try and pay some attention to products I'm less familiar with, so here are all the presentations and hands-on labs for the Wildfire Workshop on WebSphere Application Server for z/OS Version 6.1. The topics covered are an overview, Building the Deployment Manager, Standalone Servers and Federation, Data Resources (CICS and DB2), Clustering and Security Implications of Adding Servers, Comparison of HTTP Front-End options for WebSphere Application Server. This should provide a great introduction to the Websphere Application Server and I will surely work my way through it.
  
  
• Tool : Getting Started with zPCR (IBM's Processor Capacity Reference)
  Most people are already familiar with this tool or know at least what it does. It's a great capacity planning tool for System z and since one (or perhaps already two years) it has been made available to the customer. It now provides support for System z10.
  
  
• White Paper : z/OS: Planning Considerations for HiperDispatch Mode
  This was one of the new features that raised many questions when the z10 was introduced as it was not very clear what this was really about. Basically "z/OS workload management and dispatching have been enhanced to take advantage of the System z10 hardware design. A new mode of dispatching called HiperDispatch has been implemented to provide additional processing efficiencies. This White Paper describes planning considerations related to HiperDispatch".
  

As I always say : just check them out !