SPARTA News June 2012

June 2012

SPARTA President’s Corner

by Brad Carson

Summer is here and so is the heat and humidity! Since our last meeting I've lost my office in the RTP datacenter due to server expansion. Unfortunately the new office space over on Miami Boulevard won't be ready for us until September (so they say). Until then I will be spending time at our Perimeter Park building and the northwest Raleigh annex (my home’s second floor). At least they aren't making me drive to Burlington five days a week.

Zamir Gonzalez from IBM visited us last month to talk about the latest additions to the zBX. IBM has been adding more and more to the zBX since it was announced. The recent additions for data mining and parallel query work look very interesting to us here at LabCorp. We have a large amount of data in DB2 that our analytics team would just love to do more with, but don't have the facilities to work with. I hope when we look at doing an upgrade from our z10 hardware our management will be open to looking at including some zBX hardware, but you know how these $$$ discussions will go.

Well we still haven't been able to get DB2 V10 into our last production subsystem. When we tried during our May 20th outage window, we still had batch performance issues and had to fall back to DB2 V8. So we still have some head scratching to do for our largest DB2. Since we only get a single 4 hour outage a month, we've decided to bring up our Disaster Recovery system (in house) on the Burlington system to continue testing. We don't activate the CBU for these "mini" DR tests, but we get all the proper production DB2 volumes and data to test with. We've made some headway here and it looks like the BMC AppTune product is involved with some of this. Management concerns for quarter-end have made a possible upgrade during the June outage impossible, so now we will target our July outage. I hope to have more information for you next month.

We have also started down the road of getting z/OS 1.13 running on one of LPARs so we can validate all the other software that runs on z/OS. Of course this has been a little fun since this is the same LPAR we run our DR system on, so we do a little bit of juggling to get some work done. Once we get z/OS 1.13 fully running on this LPAR, I plan on rebuilding the z/OSMF services from scratch since so much has changed here between z/OS 1.11 and z/OS 1.13.

This month our speaker will be David Lytle from Brocade to talk to us about FICON performance and FICON fabric (SAN) issues. See you on the 26th at LabCorp.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)


June 26 FICON Performance by Brocade
July 31 TBD
August 21 Durham Bulls at the DBAP

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.

2012-2013 SPARTA
Board of Directors

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

Ron Pimblett - Vice President
DTS Software 919-833-8426
4350 Lassiter at North Hills Ave, Suite 235
Raleigh, NC 27609

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 May 22, 2012 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Brad Carson, the Chapter President.
•The meeting was held at LabCorp in RTP, N.C.
•Eighteen (18) people were present of which thirteen (13) were members.
•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job functions.
•The minutes of the April 2012 meeting were approved as published in the May 2012 newsletter.
•Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer, gave the Treasurer's Report. As of May 8, 2012, the balance is $1208.81. 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.

•Brad Carson reminded everyone to leave the LabCorp conference room clean.

•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.

•The June SPARTA meeting will be June 26 at LabCorp in RTP.

•Food for the June 2012 meeting will be subs.

NEW BUSINESS

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

•Send any e-mail address changes to Brad Carson so he can update the SPARTA Listserv.

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 7:35 p.m.

•Zamir Gonzalez from IBM gave a presentation about the new z/BX server

• The reality is the cloud environment, hence the z/BX (z196 extended)
- zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX)
- The Unified Resource Manager holds it all together
- Can run multiple Operating Systems (z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, AIX, Linux, Windows)
- 42U of rack space
- All z support
- 10 GbE internal network
- Power 7 blades
- AIX 7.1 runs on Power 7 blades
- X86 - windows blades
- 112 Blades Maximum in 4 racks
- All hot swappable (in and out)
- URM Control Center (not VMware) (the competition)
- Windows Server 2008 only
- Linux RedHat 5.5, 5.8, and 6.0 supported
- There is a URL for all the supported environments
http://www.ibm.com/systems/zenterprise
http://www.ibm.com/systems/zenterprise196

• URM is the Platform Management for all environments
- Cloud in a box
- Hypervisor for energy management (shuts down unused blades)
- One Console - Single view for total management

• Management Suite
- Operations Control
- Have redundancy
- Power blades on and off dynamically
- Performance Management System
- Private 10 GB data network
- Energy Monitoring and Reporting.

• Gave examples of various configurations (also FAQ URL)
- Example Use Case scenarios
- Business and IT Applications
- URL http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/7/897/ENUS110-177/ENUS110-177.PDF

•Formal Meeting ended at 8:20 PM, but we gathered around Zamir and asked many specific questions.

Treasurer’s Report for June 2012

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $1113.27 as of June 12, 2012.

Financial Report
3/01/2012 through 06/12/2012

Items of Interest


SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2012

contributed by Tommy Thomas and Chris Blackshire

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


CICS TS 5.1 Open Beta Available July 13, 2012

contributed by Ed Webb

“The IBM® CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS® (CICS TS) V5.1 open beta introduces cloud-style CICS development, deployment, and operations.
This is achieved by delivering new Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities that can be used to host Software as a Service (SaaS)-based CICS applications. Foundational advancements in both capability and scalability will allow CICS applications to do more, more easily.”

See more about the Beta and how to participate at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/htp/cics/openbeta/


SHARE 2012 August in Anaheim

contributed by Ed Webb

You may have missed the early registration deadline (Friday, June 15) for SHARE in Anaheim, August 5-10, 2012, but don’t let that deter you! SHARE is still the best education and training value for “z people”.

Learn more about the Anaheim conference at SHARE.org including registration, hotel, and online schedule, available now.


Far From Extinct, Mainframes Will Rule...

contributed by Ed Webb

From mainframezone.com:

“The mainframe market collectively has invested 100's of billions in proprietary application development on the mainframe platform.  Moreover, that huge investment still runs at a level of reliability, availability, and serviceability that remains unique to the platform and which companies have built their business models to depend on.  It doesn't just work...it works amazingly well.  With all the critical challenges that large enterprise CIO's face at the moment, a mainframe conversion is a high risk/low reward proposition that isn't even worth the time to consider.”

Read the whole blog entry here.


Use z/OS Tracking Facility to Speed Your Move to EAV

contributed by Ed Webb

At SAS, we hear about Big Data everyday. In the mainframe arena, our current big data repository is IBM’s Extended Addressability Volume (EAV) architecture implemented on our DASD subsystem. And whether you are heading for these big volumes (greater than 65K Cylinders) or not, you might want to see what software is affected by a move to EAV.

A couple of z/OS releases back (about R11), IBM upgraded the Console Tracking Facility to be the z/OS Tracking Facility to identify those programs that used Open/Close/EOV and related services that might not handle EAV volumes correctly.

Are you running the Tracking Facility now? You should, just to start accumulating the data so it’s there when you need it.

The z/OS Command SETCON TR=ON cranks up the Tracking Facility (TR=OFF stops it). TF stores a table of possible EAV-sensitive programs in memory and can report the violators on SYSLOG in response to the D OPDATA,TRACKING command (abbreviated D O,TR for your convenience).

An list of programs to exclude from the in-memory table can be provided in SYS1.PARMLIB as CNIDTRnn (a sample is available in SYS1.SAMPLIB; the current IBM-updated one is online at ibm.com). If TF finds CNIDTR00 in PARMLIB, it will use it or you can issue SET CNIDTR=nn to change the exclusion list member that TF uses.

In our case, in addition to the usual suspects (pre-EAV-capable versions of SAS), the Tracking Facility kept telling us about Programs named *Pathname. As a major user of z/OS Unix, we suspected one or more programs running from a file system. But which program and where?

TF is not the most sophisticated tool provided by IBM so we had to call for support. IBM explained that to learn the full pathname to the program in question, we needed to run a GTF trace with a SLIP TRACE enabled:

SLIP SET,IF,EN,ID=JRH1,A=TRACE,LPAMOD=(CNZMTRIR,328),              
  TD=(STD,REGS,1R?,+50),END

General Purpose Register 1 (GPR1) in this case points to the word with the address of the CNZTRPL mapped area (which is documented) and from there, we can find the USS program(s) we need to investigate.

Run the Tracking Facility for a couple of days (minimal overhead, no I/O), issue the D O,TR command to get the report on SYSLOG and see whether your code is ready for EAV. And feel free to contact me if you have questions.


Humor


Your Duck Is Dead

contributed by Chris Blackshire

A woman brought a very limp duck into a veterinary surgeon. As she laid her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird's chest.

After a moment or two, the vet shook his head and sadly said, "I'm sorry, your duck, Cuddles, has passed away."

The distressed woman wailed, "Are you sure?"

"Yes, I am sure. Your duck is dead," replied the vet.

"How can you be so sure?" she protested. "I mean you haven't done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something."

The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room. He returned a few minutes later with a black Labrador Retriever. As the duck's owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked up at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.

The vet patted the dog on the head and took it out of the room. A few minutes later he returned with a cat. The cat jumped on the table and also delicately sniffed the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room.

The vet looked at the woman and said, "I'm sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck."

The vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman.

The duck's owner, still in shock, took the bill. "$150!" she cried, "$150 just to tell me my duck is dead!"

The vet shrugged, "I'm sorry. If you had just taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan, it's now $150."

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

7 p.m.

LabCorp in the RTP

Free Food: Subs, Drink, Dessert

Program:

FICON Fabric and Performance

Speaker:

David Lytle of Brocade

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

First Class Postage

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