SPARTA News January 2012

January 2012

SPARTA President’s Corner

by Brad Carson

Happy New Year and welcome to 2012. I hope that all of you had a good holiday season; Martha and I sure did. Visiting with our families in eastern NC and getting to spoil my nieces and nephew! Now we'll just be working until April to pay off the outstanding bills.

Our November meeting was held at SAS Institute and the speaker was Joe Hatcher, who spoke to us about SAS' ITRM product. Joe not only talked to us about the ITRM product, but also showed us about it using live data from SAS. For those of you worried about analyzing performance data from various resources (not just the trusty 'ol mainframe), their ITRM product is a very good fit. Nobody has just one platform to manage, monitor, or report on anymore.

We've made some big steps in our DB2 V10 migration project since the last newsletter. In early December we tried to convert our CICS regions from using plans to packages and had a little issue with the CA:Gen based programs (which have multiple DBRM's per plan). Seems that somewhere in our source management system there was a breakdown and we ended up with multiple versions of certain DBRM's with the same name. Needless to say it was hello -805 city with these on cutover day. All the COBOL based programs had no problems so we only had to back out one of our three production CICS regions while this issue was addressed. I'm happy to say that on January 6th, we completed the cut over for that last CICS region to packages and we can now retire our old DB2 dynamic plan exit! The current plan is to convert our largest (and last) DB2 subsystem to V10 during an outage window on the 22nd. I'll let you all know how that goes in next month's newsletter.

Our z/VM 6.2 order was received on the 9th and we are getting our 2nd level z/VM guests ready for the upgrade from 5.4 to 6.2. Of course with our "world class" network we were unable to fully complete the downloads, so we dropped back and ordered the DVD distribution (we have no 3590's here). This will be the major item of work after the DB2 V10 project.

This month our speaker will be Mike Fitzpatrick from IBM to talk to us about IP V6. See you on the 31st at LabCorp.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)


Jan. 31 IPv6 by Mike Fitzpatrick of IBM
Feb. 28 CICS Updates by Ed Addison of IBM
Mar. 27 SHARE Conference Reports by SPARTA members

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.

2011-2012 SPARTA
Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President
LabCorp 336-436-8294
3060 S. Church St.
Burlington, NC 27215

Ron Pimblett - Vice President
MDI DataSystems 919-426-6518

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
3060 S. Church St. 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 Brad Carson; if you have corrections or problems receiving your meeting notice, contact Brad at 336-436-8294.

December 2011 “CBT Tape” Shareware Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V483 (dated December 25, 2011) 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 November 29, 2011 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Brad Carson, the Chapter President.
•The meeting was held at SAS in Cary, N.C.
•Seventeen (17) people were present of which eleven (11) were members.
•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job functions.
•The minutes of the October 2011 meeting were approved as published in the November 2011 newsletter.
•Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer, gave the Treasurer's Report. As of November 9, 2011, the balance is $893.16. Motion was made and approved to accept the Treasurer's Report as published in the 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 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.

•Future Speakers and Topics (subject to change based on internal politics, budget, the weather):

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

•Ed Webb reminded everyone to leave the SAS area as clean as we found it.
•The January SPARTA meeting will be January 31 at LabCorp in RTP.
•Food for the January 2012 meeting will be chicken.

NEW BUSINESS

•Thanks to SAS and Ed Webb for hosting the meeting.
•If you have any Listserve issues, contact Brad. Also update him with any e-mail address changes.
•The business portion of the meeting was conducted after the presentation.
•The presentation by Joe Hatcher of SAS - “SAS IT Resource Management”

• What is IT Resource Management?
SAS IT Resource Management is an IT performance management and capacity planning solution that enables the analysis of any IT data source.

• SAS IT Resource Management 3.X
Provides access to and domain intelligence for IT
Fully leverages the SAS Intelligence Platform
Operates on z/OS, Unix and Windows Systems

• IT Resource Management Data Flow

• Prior Release Support Plans

• SAS IT Resource Management Roadmap

• ITRM Product Plans

ITRM 3.3 Plans
New adapters
Features to handle high data volumes
In-memory aggregation performance enhancements
New statistics: percentiles, moving averages
User templates for staging and aggregation
Copy aggregation feature

ITRM 3.4 Plans
Exception Analysis
New adapters
ITRM system administration tooling and user Interface enhancements
Many Gallery Manager enhancements

• Question for The SPARTA Team: Much discussion and opinions about:
Software MSUs and MIPS
Values are assigned to boxes to accommodate IBM marketing and sales
Hardware MSU and MIPS
Hardware MSUs are calculated using the System Resource Manager (SRM) constant as expressed by SUSEC and is associated with a machine.
Issue - Values are apples and oranges with the math between the two will never match.
Why and Which value should ITRM use?

• Great Discussions and no really good conclusion

The presentation will be posted on the SPARTA website.

• Meeting ended at 9:02 PM.

Treasurer’s Report for January 2012

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $840.81 as of January 11, 2012.

Financial Report
3/01/2011 through 01/11/2012

Items of Interest


SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2012

contributed by Tommy Thomas and Chris Blackshire

Jan. 31 - Chicken
Feb. 28 - Subs
Mar. 27 - BarBQ
Apr. 24 - Pizza
May 22 - Chicken
June 26 - Subs
July 31 - BarBQ
Aug. 21 - DBAP Buy Your Own
Sep. 25 - Pizza
Oct. 30 - Chicken
Nov. 27 - Subs
Dec. 25 - No Meeting, Happy Holidays


Mandatory 10-digit Dialing Coming to Triangle in March

contributed by Ed Webb

(Ed. note: the following is an excerpt from the Skyline Membership Corp.’s newsletter Connections dated January 2012)

To accommodate the need for additional telephone numbers in the geographic area served by the 919 Area Code, the North Carolina Utilities Commission has approved the addition of the new 984 Area Code to cover the same geographical area as the 919 Area Code.

The 919/984 geography covers the north central portion of North Carolina and serves communities such as Apex, Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Garner, Goldsboro, Raleigh, Sanford, Smithfield, and Wake Forest....

The permissive dialing period has begun, which means that callers based in the 919 Area Code region may now use 10-digit dialing for all local calls. By March 31, 2012, mandatory 10-digit local dialing will be required for callers based in that area.


VSAM Demystified (3rd Edition)

contributed by Ed Webb

IBM is working on a new edition of the classic VSAM Demystified Redbook. Currently in draft form, this third edition moves from the DFSMS/MVS V1R4 to the z/OS DFSMS V1R12 level. In particular, a new chapter titled “Best Practices for ICF Catalog and VSAM” is being written.

The draft is at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/pdfs/sg246105.pdf. Give it a look today and provide some feedback.


System z Built For Speed

contributed by Ed Webb

The legendary (at least in our z world) Bob Rogers has put his recent SHARE presentation into an article for IBM Systems Magazine.

“The latest IBM mainframe processors still execute programs written in the 1960s—and do so thousands of times faster. Of course, this phenomenal speed-up has been fueled by advances in chip technology, but that’s not the whole story.

Processor designers have devised some clever techniques to provide a good chunk of this improvement. Let’s examine some of these interesting tricks. Programmers who know little about internal processor design will be surprised to learn how a zEnterprise* 196 actually executes programs.”

For more of Bob’s overview and links to more detailed information, check out this link to IBM Systems Magazine: http://ibmsystemsmag.com/mainframe/administrator/performance/cpu_pipeline/?page=1


Just Say No to Direct-Attached FICON

contributed by Ed Webb

MainframeZone.com - IT Management: The Merits of Switched FICON vs. Direct Attached: A Business Perspective

If you are using FICON, particularly FICON 8 on z196 or z114 z machines, consider the issues raised in this provocative article that suggests that Switched FICON is the way to go for the future: http://www.mainframezone.com/it-management/the-merits-of-switched-ficon-vs.-direct-attached-a-business-perspective


Humor


Who Is Responsible for the English Language?

contributed by Chris Blackshire

Who is responsible for the English Language?? Could it be the English?? And if they are really responsible for such a disaster in all fairness could they then be deemed to be "responsible people" .... I would think not!
 
The English Plural by George Carlin (1937-2008)
 
We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
 
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
 
Then one may be that, and there would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!
 
Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England.
 
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing,
Grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
 
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them,
What do you call it?
 
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
 
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
Should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
 
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship...
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
While a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
 
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns down,
In which you fill in a form by filling it out,
And in which an alarm goes off by going on.
 
And in closing...
 
If Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop.???


Twenty-Eight Engineering Conversion Factors

contributed by Tom Schwartz

01. Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter = Eskimo Pi
02. 2000 pounds of Chinese Soup = Won ton
03. 1 millionth of a mouthwash = 1 microscope
04. Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement = 1 bananosecond
05. Weight an evangelist carries with God = 1 billigram
06. Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour = Knotfurlong
07. 365.25 days of drinking low calorie beer = 1 Lite year
08. 16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Sterling
09. Half a large intestine = 1 semicolon
10. 1,000,000 aches = 1 megahurtz
11. Basic unit of laryngitis - 1 hoarsepower
12. Shortest distance between two jokes - a straight line
13. 453.6 graham crackers = 1 pound cake
14. 1 million microphones = 1 megaphone
15. 1 million bicycles = 1 megacycle
16. 365 days = 1 unicycle
17. 2000 mockingbirds = two kilomockingbirds
18. 10 cards = 1 decacard
19. 52 cards = 1 deckacard
20. 1 kilogram of falling figs = 1 Fig Newton (From our Laboratory Engineer Emeritus, #20 is quite incorrect. Since 1 kilogram(force) = 9.8055 Newtons, then 0.101971621 kilogram of falling figs = 1 fig Newton)
21. 1000 grams of wet socks = 1 literhosen
22. 1 millionth of a fish = 1 microfiche
23. 1 trillion pins = 1 terrapin
24. 10 rations = 1 declaration
25. 100 rations = 1 C-Ration
26. 2 monograms = 1 diagram
27. 8 nickels = 2 paradigms
28. 5 nautical miles of intravenous surgical tubing at Yale University Hospital = 1 I. V. League

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

7 p.m.

LabCorp in the RTP

Free Food: Chicken, Drink, Dessert

Program:

All About IPv6

Speakers:

Mike Fitzpatrick of IBM

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

First Class Postage

SPARTA Corporate Sponsors: