Get started with the IBM Mobile Workload Pricing for z/OS

A couple of months ago I wrote about the announcement of the new Mobile Workload Pricing mechnanism for z/OS. I also told you that this was going GA in July but so far I didn't see much of it on the IBM Software Pricing page I usually turn to when I'm looking for information on z/OS pricing.

So I started asking about a bit and David Chase from IBM who gave such a clarifying presentation about the topic during the System z Technical University in Budapest pointed me in the right direction. And yes, the Users Guide and the tool itself are already online. You can find the 'IBM Mobile Workload Tool' (mwrtool.exe) over here. And the 'IBM Mobile Workload Reporting Tool Users Guide' can be found over here. The Users Guide explains step by step how you have to set up the tool (on a Windows 7 64-bit), how you collect the necessary input, how you use the tool and how you submit your report to IBM.

Of course there's a bit more to this. Before you can start submitting the report be sure that you fulfill the requirements. Have a look at my previous post and the announcement to refresh your memory. And then there remains one more question : how do you separate the mobile workload from the rest. This will of course be different per customer. As a matter of fact, you are the only one who knows your shop and can determine this. And this is exactly how it will be done. You will make up a list of your mobile workload and how you can trace it. This will be the basis for an agreement you sign with IBM after a meeting with your IBM representative.

Then one more thing : what will be the benefits ? This is how I understand it for the moment. Suppose you have an LPAR running z/OS and CICS reporting 400 MSU for billing purposes. You will measure the CICS usage and let's say this is 200 MSU. The mobile part of that is e.g. 50% of that 200 MSU. You can subtract 60% from that mobile use. 60% of 100 MSU is 60 MSU so you keep 40 MSU for you mobile workload. 100 MSU plus 40 MSU means you keep 140 MSU of the original 200 MSU. But here comes the beautiful part of the system. You can subtract the 60 MSU from your billing total. So, of the originally reported 400 MSU you only keep 340 MSU for that partition. So where SCRT calculated the Rolling 4-Hour Average, MWRT will make an adjustment to that. As a matter of fact, MWRT will make this adjustment by the hour and then calculate a new Rolling 4-Hour Average. This also implies that it's not only e.g. CICS that benefits from this pricing but z/OS and other softwares as well.

So, as I said in the title of the post : Get Started !