SPARTA News February 2007

February 2007

SPARTA President’s Corner

by Brad Carson

February is here and so is the colder weather that was missing last month. I hope everyone was able to use the information from last month that we got from Kay Adams of IBM. She gave a good presentation about sub-capacity pricing on z/Series hardware. We have been taking a serious look at software pricing at LabCorp (but who hasn't these days) and I was very interested in this topic.

We are still underway with our z/OS 1.7 roll-out at LabCorp. We now have 1.7 running in three of our 5 LPARs with a target date of May 20th for completion in production. Right now we are spending a lot of time working with SA/390 V3.1 and SCLM. There were a large number of changes to SCLM between z/OS 1.4 and 1.7. As for SA the automation policies here have been altered so much that there are a number of problems with them and we are starting from scratch with new policies. This is also giving me the time to train someone else on the care and feeding of SA.

I've also been busy looking for a DB2 systems programmer for our group. There have been a few good resumes so far. If any of you know of a good DB2 sysprog looking for work (or one that is looking for a change), please let me know.

One of the other big things that has people (management) worried here is the upcoming time change. We've had to run around and check that all our software was patched/fixed/whatever for the daylight savings time changes. For z/OS we had to apply a PTF for LE (basically C runtime support). This was for any USS task that uses the TZ variable. Other than that we were ready (after a quick check from our other software vendors). The UNIX, LINUX and Windows folks had a little more work to do and even more work if JAVA was involved. Oh well we will see who has the right time on March 11th!

This month we will be taking a break from the standard meeting format and attending a Carolina Hurricane's game as a group. I look forward to seeing you all on the 27th.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)


Feb. 27 - Ice Hockey by the Carolina Hurricanes at the RBC Center
Mar. 27 - SHARE Conference reports by Duane Reaugh of DTS Software and Ed Webb of SAS

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 Ron Pimblett by phone as noted below.

2006-2007 SPARTA
Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President
LabCorp 336-436-8294

Burlington, NC 27215

Ron Pimblett - Vice President
Dignus, LLC 919-676-0847
8354 Six Forks Road
Raleigh, NC 27615

Mike Lockey - Secretary
Guilford Co. Information Services 336-641-6235
201 N. Eugene St.
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
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 e-Mailings

The SPARTA policy is to e-mail a monthly notice to our SPARTA-L Group. The newsletter is posted to the website about five (5) days before each meeting so you can prepare. The SPARTA-L Group is maintained by Mike Lockey at (336) 641-6235; if you have corrections or problems receiving your meeting notice, contact Mike.

February 2006 CBT Tape Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V471 (dated February 28, 2006) are available from www.cbttape.org.

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

Minutes of the January 30th, 2007 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:03 PM by Brad Carson, the Chapter President.

•Twelve (12) people were present; eight (8) were members.

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

•The minutes of November 2006 meeting were accepted as published in the January 2007 newsletter.

•Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer, gave the Treasurer's report. As of January 13, 2007, the balance is $1324.11. Motion was made and approved to accept the Treasurer's Report as published in the January 2007 newsletter.

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

•Brad Carson reminded everyone to keep the conference room clean.


NEW BUSINESS

•Future Speakers and Topics:
(subject to change)

February 2007 Hurricanes at RBC Center
March 2007 SHARE conference reports by Ed Webb and Duane Reaugh
April 2007 CICS

If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact Ron Pimblett.

•The February SPARTA meeting will be held at the RBC Center during the Carolina Hurricanes ice hockey game. The game starts at 7p.m.; it was suggested that those going to the hockey game could meet at LabCorp at 6p.m. and carpool to the game.

•Food for the February meeting will be bumped to March and so on.

•Brad reminded everyone to pay their annual dues.

•Brad talked about forming a nominating committee for the 2007 SPARTA Board of Directors.
Must have nominations by March 2007 meeting so that they can be published and voted on at the April meeting.

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

•Please remember to invite others to the meeting.

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 8:25 p.m.

•Kay Adams of IBM gave a presentation about how IBM’s sub-capacity pricing for z/OS. Some of the topics she discussed were:

Software Pricing

Old way - Licenses based on physical machine

New way - Workload license
rolling 4 hour averages

Defined Capacity
limit rolling 4 hour average

Group Defined Capacity

Kay will provide an electronic version of her presentation.

•The meeting was adjourned at 9:10 p.m.

Treasurer’s Report for February 2007

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $ 1253.07 as of February 20, 2007.

Financial Report
3/01/2006 through 2/20/2007

Items of Interest

SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2007

contributed by Tommy Thomas and Chris Blackshire

Feb. 27 - Buy your own
Mar 27 - Subs
Apr 24 - BarBQ
May 22 - Pizza
June 26 - Chicken
July 31 - Subs
Aug. 28 - BarBQ
Sept. 25 - Pizza
Oct. 30 - Chicken
Nov. 27- Subs


Readings for January Speaker Topic

contributed by Ed Webb

Midrange Workload License Charges for IBM z/VSE V4

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/swprice/mwlc.html

IBM System z New Application License Charges

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/swprice/znalc.html


Daylight Saving Time Change in 2007

contributed by Duane Reaugh

IBM has launched a new website for alerts regarding cross platform issues. The URL is http://www.ibm.com/support/alerts/us/ and the first alert is regarding the Daylight Saving Time change in the U.S. next year. IBM is thinking this as a mini-Y2K issue. There are actually more changes than you would think. You may have to add both software and microcode changes to support the new DST dates. This first alert has different sections for the different Operating Systems, tapes, printers as well as storage devices and Hardware Management Consoles (HMCs). A new RMF reporting APAR was added in the just the past week or so.


Use IBM EPSP Tool for z/OS 1.8 Migration Help

contributed by Ed Webb

IBM has updated the ZOSGEN subset of the ZOSV1R5-ZOSV1R7 PSP buckets so that you can use the Enhanced PSP Tool to check your current z/OS system for compatibility and toleration service for z/OS 1.8. At this PSP website (http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/psp/srchBroker), you can get the EPSPT to install on your system and pull the ZOSGEN subset extract file for your current z/OS release. Run EPSPT with the extract file against your current SMP/E target zone and the tool determines what z/OS 1.8 toleration and compatibilty service you do not have received or applied.

New IBM Migration Checker available

contributed by Ed Webb

A new set of tools to automate some z/OS release-to-release migration checking is now available as a web download at http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zos/downloads/#mchecker. Originally designed to help with migration from z/OS R7 to R8, it is very helpful if you are jumping from an earlier release to R8.

The Migration Checker makes no changes to your system but produces very helpful migration suggestions for various system components. Download and try it today!


Redbooks: All Worth A Look

contributed by Ed Webb

Redbooks

z/OS Version 1 Release 8 RACF Implementation
Published: February 13, 2007
ISBN: 0738489859 146 pages
More details are available at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247248.html

IBM Tivoli System Automation for z/OS Enterprise Automation
Published: January 23, 2007
ISBN: 0738494631 182 pages
Explore the book online at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247308.html

Communications Server for z/OS V1R8 TCP/IP Implementation Volume 3: High Availability, Scalability, and Performance
Published: January 19, 2007
ISBN: 0738489840 274 pages
More details are available at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247341.html

IBM System z Strengths and Values
Published: January 23, 2007
ISBN: 0738489530 250 pages
Explore the book online at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247333.html

Redpaper

z/OS UNIX Security Fundamentals
Published: February, 5, 2007
More details are available at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/abstracts/redp4193.html


Humor

Bill Gates Goes To Heaven

contributed by Chris Blackshire

I rarely pass these kind of things on, but this one explains it all:


Bill Gates died and, much to everyone's surprise, went to Heaven.

When he got there, he had to wait in the reception area, which was about the size of Massachusetts. There were millions of people living in tents. Food and water were being distributed from the backs of trucks, while staffers with clipboards slowly worked their way through the crowd.

Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until, finally, a staffer in his late teens approached him. The young man was wearing a blue T-shirt with the words TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in large yellow letters.

"Hello," said the staffer in a bored voice. "My name is Gabriel and I'll be your induction coordinator."

Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, I'm not the Archangel Gabriel. I'm a guy from Philadelphia named Gabriel who died in a car wreck at 17. Now give me your name, last name first, unless you were Chinese, in which case it's first name first."

"Gates, Bill."

Gabriel started searching through the sheaf of papers on his clipboard, looking for Bill's Record of Earthly Works.

"What's going on here?" asked Bill. "Why are all these people here? Where's St. Peter? Where are the pearly gates?"

Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. "It says here that you were the president of a large software company. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"Well do the math! When this St. Peter business started, it was easy. Only a hundred or so people died every day, and Peter could handle it by himself."

"But now there are over five billion people on earth. When God said to 'go forth and multiply,' he didn't say 'like rabbits!' Ten thousand people die every hour, over a quarter-million a day. Do you think Peter can meet them all personally?"

"I guess not."

"You guess right. So he had to franchise the operation. Now, Peter is the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. Franchisees like me handle the actual inductions."

Gabriel looked though his paperwork some more and then continued. "Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a background like yours, you'll be getting a plum job assignment."

"Job assignment?"

"Of course. Did you expect to spend eternity sitting on your bum and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to pull your weight around here!"

Gabriel took out a triplicate form, had Bill sign at the bottom, and then tore out the middle copy and handed it to Bill. "Take this down to induction center no. 23 and meet up with your occupational coordinator. His name is Abraham--and no, he's not that Abraham."

Bill walked to induction center no. 23 and met with Abraham after a mere six-hour wait.

"Heaven is centuries behind in building its data-processing infrastructure," explained Abraham. "As you've seen, we're still doing everything on paper. It takes us a week just to process new entries. Your job will be to supervise Heaven's new data processing center."

"We're building the largest computing facility in creation. Half a million computers connected by a multisegment fiber-optic network, all running into a back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel. Fault tolerant, distributed processing, totally isolated multiprocessing, the works."

Bill could barely contain his excitement. "Wow! What a great job! This is really Heaven!"

"We're just finishing construction, and we'll be starting operations soon. Would you like to go see the center now?"

"You bet!"

Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the Astrodome. Workers were crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fiber optic cables properly installed.

But the center was dominated by the computers. Half a million computers, arranged nearly row-by-row, half a million ...
Macintoshes ... all running Apple software! Not a PC in sight! Not a single byte of Microsoft code!

The thought of spending eternity using products he had spent his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill.

"What about PCs???" he exclaimed. "What about Windows??? Excel??? Word???"

"You're forgetting something," said Abraham.

"What's that?" asked Bill plaintively.

"This is Heaven," explained Abraham. "If you want to build a data processing center based on PCs running Windows, then you'll have to go elsewhere!"

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, February 27, 2006
7 p.m.

Special Location: RBC Center in Raleigh

Take I-40 to Edwards Mill Road exit and go south. Follow the signs to parking (fee).

Fee Food: Whatever You Can Afford

Program:

Ice Hockey in the Carolinas

Speaker:

Carolina Hurricanes of the NHL

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



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