Episode 6 "Expect the Unexpected"

Here are the show notes for Episode 6 "Expect The Unexpected".  The show is called "Expect The Unexpected" for two reasons: 

• We really didn't expect to be recording an episode in this timeframe.
• The Performance topic lends itself to such a title.

We had one piece of follow up:  

• IBM zEvent has been updated to 3.0.0 ("The Cat") on both Android and iOS. It has enhancements in lots of areas. The one we both noticed was the ability to show and scan QR codes for connections.

Mainframe

Our "Mainframe" topic was a discussion on IBM Doc Buddy - available for iOS and Android. It's a tool for looking up error messages and is now enhanced with z/OS Unix Reason Codes. It enables retrieving z Systems message documentation and provides the allows you to look up message documentation without Internet connections after downloading desired files. It's available for z/OS, as well as other products like CICS, and IMS, and for many releases of those products. 

Performance

Our "Performance" topic was about what happens when unexpected work appears on your beloved mainframes. A number of themes were discussed, including: 

• Not knowing mobile workload was appearing - leading to potential loss of savings on Mobile Workload Pricing.
• When unannounced work arrives, leading to implications for e.g. Security, Performance Management, and Capacity Provisioning.

In reality how you handle this is a governance and culture question, but we want you to think about the problem.

Topics

In our "Topics" section we discussed two items: 

• iTunes - where you can now find our podcast here. We hope some of you find this new way to subscribe easier.
• Liberated Syndication (or LibSyn for short). This gives us some interesting statistics about our listenership.

On The Blog

Martin posted to his blog, since our last episode:

• What Do I Know?

Contacting Us

You can reach Marna on Twitter as mwalle and by email. 

You can reach Martin on Twitter as martinpacker and by email.