Three Billboards?

You could consider presentations as advertising – either for what you’ve done or for what something can do. Generally my presentations are in the category of “Public Service Announcement”. Which rather combines the two:

• What I’ve found I can do – that you might want to replicate.
• What I’ve found a product can do – that you might want to take advantage of.

Sometimes it’s a “Public Health Warning” as in “you’d better be careful…”

Anyhow, enough of trying to justify the title of this post. 🙂

(I will say Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is an excellent movie. I first saw it on an aeroplane on the usual tiny screen and it worked well even there.)

So, I have three presentations, two of which are brand new and the other significantly updated this year:

• What’s The Use? With Scott Ballentine
• zIIP Capacity And Performance
• Two Useful Open Source Tools

I’ll post the abstracts below.

The first two are for IBM Technical University Virtual Edition (registration here). This is run by IBM and is premier technical training, including over 600 sessions on IBM IT Infrastructure.

As I’m a big fan of user groups I’m delighted to say the first and third are for GSE UK Virtual Conference 2021. In both cases these are “live” – which, frankly, I find more energising.

Scott and I recorded last week – as the Tech U sessions will be pre-recorded with live Question And Answer sessions at the end. So these are “in the can” – which is a big relief.

The third I’ve just started writing but I have a nice structure to it – so I’m sure it’ll get done, too.

So here are the abstracts…

What’s The Use – With Scott Ballentine

For many customers, collecting the SMF type 89 subtype 1 Usage Data records are an important and necessary part of Software Licencing, as they are used by SCRT to generate sub-capacity pricing reports.

But Usage Data has many more uses than that – whether in SMF 89 or SMF 30.

Customers can get lots of value out of this data – if they understand what the data means, and how it is produced.

Vendors can delight their customers – if they produce the right usage data, knowing how it can be used.

This presentation describes how Usage Data is produced, how a vendor can add value with it, and how customers can best take advantage of it.

zIIP Capacity And Performance

zIIP Capacity Planning tends to be neglected – in favour of General-Purpose Engines (GCPs). With Db2 allowing you to offload critical CPU to zIIPs, and the advent of zCX and z15 Recovery Boosts, it’s time to take zIIP capacity and performance seriously.

You will learn how to do zIIP capacity planning and performance tuning properly – with instrumentation and guidelines.

Two Useful Open Source Tools

You will learn how to use two open source tools many installations will find extremely useful, covering System and Db2 Performance:

Db2 DDF Analysis Tool – which uses Db2 SMF 101 Accounting Trace to enable you to manage DDF work and its impact on your system.

WLM Service Definition Formatter – which uses your WLM XML file to create some nice HTML, enabling you to see how the various parts of your Service Definition fit together.