Hot Topics Newsletter - Issue 27

I'm glad to see that the Hot Topics Newsletter is back with a new issue. For some or other reason they skipped the February release, but luckily they're back with an issue largely focusing on z/OS V2R1 and the new System z Enterprise functionalities like Flash Express, IBM zAware, large pages ...

Let's have a look at some articles on z/OS 2.1. Hot Topics is after all subtitled 'a z/OS newsletter'. There's a general introduction to z/OS 2.1 but there's more. How about a new approach to your migration levels. I'll just give you a little teaser with this illustration.

Marne Walle gives you a quick introduction on how to prepare your next move : migrating to z/OS 2.1. But I'll come back to that in one of my next posts. The last one I want to mention is an article on JCL enhancements : 'Limits on JCL PARm - solved!', 'Batch Job Parallelism - increased!', 'JCL needing system symbols - enhanced!' . . . 

There's also news on z/OSMF. Good news seem to be that it has "a new slimmer look". 'The new version is rebased on the Websphere Application Server for z/OS V8R5 Liberty profile and includes only the features of Websphere needed for z/OSMF, making the  package much lighter (...) It’s approximately 350+ MB rather than the 1+ GB it was before'. I've also read somewhere that it's using considerably less resources too. Another teaser ? 'Wouldn’t it be nice to check the IBM z/OS Workload Manager (WLM) service definition quickly when you notice that  workload performance is suffering? Wouldn’t you like to view the performance results of the service definition changes that you made? Now with z/OSMF, you can do all this with one mouse click!

As I always say, just check it out !