SPARTA News May 2004

May 2004

SPARTA Chapter President’s Corner

- by Brad Carson

April showers bring May flowers they say, but here it's April showers brings May heat and humidity. What happened to spring this year? It sure went by quickly, like the wink of an eye. So now its on to the dreaded triple H of a Carolina Summer (Hazy, Hot, and Humid).
Last month we had a good in depth look at the new IBM Enterprise Storage Subsystem (SHARK) 750 that was introduced on April, 7th. Like its big brother, the ESS 800, it is a very capable box and looks to be a good fit for the smaller z/OS, z/VM and z/VSE markets. It has almost all the goodies that the 800 has except for XRC, but if you really need XRC you should be able to afford an ESS 800 (GSK has this for MERPS production use).
At GSK I've now gone into the teaching business. Right now I'm instructing two coworkers on the joys of SA/390 in our MERPS environment. This also means that these two people are being introduced into the wonderful world of change management that must be followed for these systems (Gee, isn't this fun). Once they get done with all the DR testing up in King Of Prussia (KOP), I'll be able to use the test LPAR on that hardware to really let them go at the SA/390 policy and see what they/we can do to it. It's always best to learn by doing.
Over at DDA I've managed to get IMS running on the demo system and am now in the process of reworking their compile CLISTs into REXX execs using ISPF services. This is proving to be a bit of a challenge since I have to work on it a little at a time. The good thing about this is I'm learning how DDA builds and distributes their products for the z/OS environments. After that I'll start on the VSE side and see what can be done there in REXX (Oh joy, now I get to fight with ICCF!!!).
As some of you could tell by the e-mails that have gone to SPARTA-L we have a few members looking for work. If any of you hear or see anything that might help, please post a message to SPARTA-L@yahoogroups.com so we all can be informed.
Our speaker this month will be from Dignus Software with “Everything you wanted to know about IFLs but were afraid to ask”. I look forward to seeing you all on the 25th at LabCorp RTP. Be sure to ask for Tommy Thomas. Subs, drinks, and dessert will be provided.

P.S. Annual dues of $20 are due now.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)

May 25 - All About IFLs by someone from Dignus Software
June 29 - IBM’s April 7th Announcements by Dan Myers of IBM.
July 27 - TBA

We need ideas and volunteers for future speakers. Presentations don’t have to be fancy, just informative and interesting. Even a 5 or 10 minute talk can start an interesting interaction. Contact Duane Reaugh by phone as noted below.

2004-2005 SPARTA
Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President
GlaxoSmithKline 919-483-2348
5 Moore Drive; D.111
RTP, NC 27709

Duane Reaugh - Vice President
DTS Software 919-833-8426
2913 Wake Forest Road
Raleigh, NC 27609-7841

Mike Lockey - Secretary
Guilford Co. Information Services 336-641-6235
201 N. Eugene St. 336-227-2021 (Home)
Greensboro, NC 27401

Tommy Thomas - Treasurer
LabCorp 336-436-4178
231 Maple Ave, Koury Ctr 3rd Fl. 919-361-7267
Burlington, NC 27215

Ed Webb - Communications Director
SAS Institute 919-531-4162
SAS Campus Drive 919-362-0232 (Home)
Cary, NC 27513

Meetings

Meetings are scheduled for the last Tuesday evening of each month (except no meeting in December), with optional dinner at 6:15 p.m. and the meeting beginning at 7:00 p.m.

These monthly meetings usually are held at LabCorp’s Center for Molecular Biology and Pathology (CMBP) near the Research Triangle Park (see last page). Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn right onto Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right into LabCorp complex and turn Left to the CMBP Building. In the lobby, sign in as a visitor to see Tommy Thomas. Tommy will escort you to the conference room.

Call for Articles

If you have any ideas for speakers, presentations, newsletter articles, or are interested in taking part in a presentation, PLEASE contact one of the Board of Directors with your suggestions.

Newsletter Mailings

The SPARTA chapter policy is to mail a copy of the monthly chapter newsletter to each SPARTA member, NaSPA national, each advertiser, persons who have requested a copy, and to other chapters who send us a copy of their newsletter. The newsletter is mailed about the 20th of each month so you can prepare for the meeting. The mailing list is maintained by Mike Lockey at (336) 412-6235; if you have corrections or problems receiving your newsletter, call Mike.

May 2004 CBT Tape Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V465 (dated May 2, 2004) are available from www.cbttape.org.

If you need help obtaining one or more files, contact Brad Carson at GlaxoSmithKline or Ed Webb at SAS (see Board of Director’s list for contact info).

Minutes of the April 27th, 2004 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Brad Carson, the Chapter President.

•Fourteen (14) people were present; thirteen (13) were members.

•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job function.

•The minutes of March 2004 meeting were accepted as published in the April 2004 newsletter.

•Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer, gave the Treasurer's report.

As of April 27, 2004, the balance is $1453.52. Motion was made and approved to accept the Treasurer's Report.

OLD BUSINESS

•Articles are needed for this newsletter. If you would like to write an article for this newsletter, please contact Ed Webb. Keep in mind that you don't really need to write the article, it can be an article that you read that you would like to share with the membership.

•The SPARTA Web page is available. To access the SPARTA Web page, point your Web browser to this site: http://www.spartanc.org. Please send any comments or suggestions about the Web page to Mike Lockey. Be sure to check the Web page every once in a while to see any new or changed information.

•Brad reminded everyone to continue keeping the conference room clean.

•Brad reported that he had trouble linking to the April newsletter from the SPARTA home page. Mike Lockey will look into this problem.

NEW BUSINESS

•Future Speakers and Topics:
(subject to change)

May 2004 IBM z890 by Dan Myers of IBM

If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact Duane Reaugh.

•Brad reminded everyone that it is time to pay your SPARTA dues. Dues are $20.00.

•The May SPARTA meeting will be held at LabCorp in RTP.

•Thanks to Tommy Thomas of LabCorp for hosting the April meeting.

•Food for the May meeting will be subs, soda and dessert.

•Brad asked if the were any nominations from the floor for the 2004-2005 SPARTA Board of Directors. A motion was made to nominate by acclamation the current board as the 2004-2005 SPARTA Board of Directors. The motion was seconded and unanimously approved.

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 7:50PM.

•Tom Rydzewski of IBM talked about IBM's April 7th announcement concerning the IBM ESS 'Shark' model 750. Tom discussed the features and functions of the ESS model 750. This new model offers enterprise storage functionality at midrange prices.

The meeting ended at 8:45 p.m..

Treasurer’s Report for May 2004

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $ 1449.52 as of May 16, 2004.

Financial Report
2/01/2004 through 05/16/2004

Items of Interest

SPARTA Food Menu for 2004

contributed by Chris Blackshire

May - Subs
June - BarBQ
July - Pizza
Aug. - Chicken
Sept. - Subs
Oct. - BarBQ
Nov. - Pizza


SCMG Notes

contributed by Jim Horne

Thursday, April 22, 2004

Hy-Perform-ix vendor presentation by Cindy Stephens, Russell Jaggears
•Simulation tool – does not live in the production environment
•Not a monitoring tool – relies on collection from other tools for input data
•Seems to be focused on network but no mainframe
Website is http://www.hyperformix.com

Peter Enrico – Introduction to J2EE and Websphere on z/OS

• No real updates since I saw this at CMG but Peter is explaining it very clearly using MVS terminology and I’m understanding it more clearly
  
• Peter teaches a week long class on this topic
  
• Java Bytecode is neither ASCII nor EBCDIC – the JVM converts that bytecode to machine dependent JAVA bytecode for the machine the JVM is running on
  
• JIT (Just In Time Compile) is expensive only for the first time but will be recouped later – in Websphere on z/OS, programs are interpreted 2000 times before the JIT compiler will be invoked for them
  
• Applets can only control screen presentation – no other functions
  
• Servlets run on a server waiting for requests to come in and then reply to them – from a performance point of view, servlet response time is very important
  
• Servlets can do more than this; they can be full-function programs but they will generally just perform request response functions
  
• The business logic of the application is typically done in Java beans
  
• Web page creation is typically done in JSP (JavaServer Pages)
  
• A bean is just an junk of code and there are many types of Java beans
  
• Conversational state versus persistent state – does data exist for life of transaction or is it permanently maintained?
  
• An Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) only contains the business logic you want to execute while all the other code to do all the other JavaBean functions is external to it and put somewhere else such as Websphere – this is what Websphere is for
  
• J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) is a set of standards so that business logic can be written in a platform independent manner
  
• z/OS specifics
  
• controller regions and servant regions
  
• server is a controller region and its associated servant regions
  
• regions are scalable
  
• Websphere and Java work a lot like the old 4GLs – especially IBM’s old CSP product
  

• This is a copy of Peter’s CMG 2003 paper
  
• Peter has been involved in EWLM which is WLM extended to other platforms and will be the next generation of WLM
  
• Peter recommends reading his paper
  
• Email him at Peter.Enrico@EPStrategies.com
  
• Web site is http://epstrategies.com
  
• Four types of work managed by WLM
  
• Address space managed transactions
  
• Enclave managed transactions
  
• CICS and IMS – transaction oriented but managed at address space level
  
• Non-address space, non-transaction, non-enclave oriented work (partitions such as Linux)
  
• Enclaves produce no SMF Type 30 records and not all address spaces that run enclaves are charged enclave time
  
• Explained objectives of enclaves
  
• Enclaves allow different transactions in the same address space different dispatching priority.
  
• Enclaves allow work in multiple address spaces to be managed as one unit of work
  
• Application environments build on enclaves – AEs allow for transaction isolation
  
• AEs allow for scalability of enclaves
  
• AEs allow transactional prioritization by allowing different priority transactions to be in different AEs and hence in separate address spaces
  
• Almost all new workloads on z/OS will be enclave and AE driven
  
• Peter suggests thinking of address spaces as reporting entities
  
• Started tasks need velocity goals because each task the started task does does not count as a completed transaction to WLM – only STC termination is end of transaction
  
• Batch jobs are individual transactions within the address space of the initiators they run in
  
• USS forks into separate processes which are discrete units of work in separate address spaces
  
• fork is to USS as submit is to batch work
  
• Initiators are to JES as BPXAS is to USS
  
• USS forks accumulate time to the task that caused them
  
• Enclave creators accumulate TYPE 30 CPU time but not the TYPE 72 CPU time
  

• Dan Squillace of SAS recommends using zFS instead of HFS for Websphere files
  
• EXCP counts are much higher in zFS or HFS as opposed to traditional file systems
  
• On BATCHTST, plot CPU used versus elapsed time to see where pain is – I’ll need to find a set of jobs to use
  
• MXG has added Pat Artis’ steam gauge calculation to FICON utilization numbers
  

• Time to complete task as opposed to time consumed completing individual transactions – can include time for manual processes
  
• Problems can show up by seeing how long it takes to complete the process as opposed to the measured time of each transaction
  
  

Contributed by Chris Blackshire

(2004-05-18) -- Almost a day after phoning tech support to solve a software glitch, NASA's Mars Rover rebooted this morning and seems to be functioning normally.

Engineers at the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said the Rover dialed the tech support number for the vendor of its operating system software late Sunday night, but the automated phone system notified the Rover that "due to the unusually high call volume your estimated time on hold will be 72 hours, six minutes, 33 seconds."

"Actually, we were delighted that the Rover was able to get through to a tech support representative in only 23 hours," said an unnamed JPL spokesman. "There was an initial bit of confusion due to the Rover's difficulty comprehending the tech guy's Indian accent, but after the trouble ticket was written and the issue escalated only twice, the Rover was told to hold down its Control, Alt and Delete keys simultaneously. That did the trick."

The JPL source said the Rover spent most of the 23-hour hold time listening to a MIDI version of The Girl from Ipanema, interrupted by periodic assurances that the Rover's call was "important."

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Location: LabCorp in the RTP

Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn right onto Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right into LabCorp complex and turn left to the CMBP Building. In the lobby, sign in as a visitor to see Tommy Thomas. Tommy will escort you to the conference room.

Free Food: Subs, Drinks, Dessert

Program :

What to Know about IFLs

Speaker:

Dignus Software

SPARTA News
P.O. Box 13194
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3194












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