Hi All, It is hard to believe that the 2024 Winter SHARE conference is half-over already.  And what a conference it has been – our very own Cheryl Watson was presented with the SHARE Distinguished Service Award at the opening session on Monday morning. This honor recognizes Cheryl’s 47 years’ of contributions and dedication to the SHARE organization, its members, and the mainframe platform.  In addition, SHARE presented my colleague Mario Bezzi and me with the John Ehrman Award for our work on delivering technical education and guidance to SHARE members.  I have to say, wh ..read more

The 2024 Winter SHARE conference will be held in the Rosen Center hotel in Orlando, Florida, starting this coming Sunday, March 3.  This one is a 5-day conference, with the last day (Thursday) being a full day.  If you are attending, check out the agenda and download the SHARE app for your mobile device. I don’t have the Technical Agenda from a previous SHARE conference to hand, but it seems like there are more sessions in parallel than normal (for example, there are 13 sessions all at 9:15 on the Monday morning); maybe it is my imagination, or maybe it is because the conf ..read more

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 114-page issue, 2023 No.4, on our publications website (https://watsonwalkerpublications.com/). In this issue, you will find the following articles: Cheryl and Tom’s blog post announcing their plans to retire and close the Watson & Walker company and cease publication of Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter.  This is truly the end of an era.  Many of our friends and readers have pointed out that Cheryl and Watson & Walker have been there for their entire working lives.  But no one can de ..read more

By now, I expect all our readers will have heard the news about Cheryl and Tom retiring.  Of course, Cheryl’s ‘We’re Retiring’ blog post thanked everyone for all the friendship and support they’ve given her over the years, but she didn’t say anything about the thanks we all owe her.  So I’m going to take a minute to do that. I want to thank Cheryl for being such a force for good in the mainframe world.  She always put the interests of her customers first – an example many of her fellow CEOs could learn from.  Cheryl always had the courage to speak her mind, but always in a ..read more

Dear Watson & Walker customers and friends, We have some really big news – at the end of 2024 we’re retiring and shutting down our business and the Tuning Letter. Tom and I would like to thank you all for being such fantastic customers and friends for the past many years. We especially want to thank our many Tuning Letter subscribers who have been with us since the very first issue. When we started Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter in 1991, we never dreamed it would be such a success.  We’ve made so many friends around the world since we started Watson & Walker in 1987 that we f ..read more

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 114-page issue, 2023 No.3, on our publications website (https://watsonwalkerpublications.com/). In this issue, you will find the following articles: Our Recovery at Scale article in Tuning Letter 2023 No. 2 caused quite a stir, with numerous readers commenting that it made them aware of challenges they didn’t even know they had.   Well, the latest installment in this series of articles (one reviewer called them “Frank’s Horror novel”) is unlikely to leave you in a better humor than the last one.  A ..read more

We are now just over half way through the 2023 Summer SHARE conference. As I expected, my biggest problem is in trying to decide between which of the excellent sessions I will attend – I have a minimum of three competing sessions in most slots.  It is a big help having Mario here with me – I can’t imagine how people handle it when they are the only attendee from their company. Our last blog post provided some suggested sessions for Monday through Wednesday.  This one will cover Wednesday (there are some changes) through Friday.  I (Frank) will be presenting or co-presentin ..read more

The 2023 Winter SHARE conference will be held in the New Orleans Hyatt Regency hotel starting tomorrow.  This is a traditional 5-day conference.  If you are attending, check out the agenda and download the SHARE app for your mobile device. I (Frank) will be co-presenting two sessions: Wednesday, 16:00, Empire C, I will be moderating the ‘Observability Shootout’ session, with presenters from BMC, Broadcom, EPS, IBM, IntelliMagic, and Rocket Software. Friday, 09:15, Empire D, I will be co-presenting our ‘Watson & Walker’s 2023 zRoadshow’ session with my colleague Mario ..read more

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 112-page issue, 2023 No.2, on our publications website (https://watsonwalkerpublications.com/). In this issue, you will find the following articles: “We considered that by using disk replication and GDPS we were safe. But when I try to answer all the questions you make in the Loss of Volume(s) section I feel powerless.”  and  “I thought we were in good shape, but I’m less than half way through your list of recovery considerations and I’m on my second Prozac already.”  These are some of the comments ..read more

The latest edition of Cheryl’s CPU Chart is now available to subscribers on our publications website.  This update adds the information for the 156 z16 A02/AGZ models to the existing database that reaches all the way back to the z900 models (a total of 2810 IBM mainframe models).  In addition to the spreadsheet that contains over 40 attributes for each model, the accompanying PDF discusses key performance characteristics, as well as providing invaluable background information about the workloads used by the IBM LSPR measurement team.  The CPU Chart should be used ..read more