Tuesday, 18 January 2011, IBM announced Integrated Workload Pricing (IWP) that may reduce the billable MSUs for CICS and IMS if they are executing in LPARs that also are running certain other WebSphere products. The announcement letter is number 211-011 with a full title of 'IBM Integrated Workload Pricing for zEnterprise clients can significantly improve price/performance of collocated workloads on z/OS'. Further prerequisites are z196 servers, and z/OS 1.10. The lists of CICS, IMS and WebSphere products are in the announcement letter at these hyperlinks:
http://tinyurl.com/5w8g6xt http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias? subtype=ca&infotype=an&appname=iSource&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS211- 011 IBM refers to the WebSphere programs as 'Integrated Workload Pricing Defining Programs.' At this point all the 'Defining Programs' are of IBM's 'WebSphere' brand. You may have heard me discuss or present that IBM's Variable Workload License Charges (WLC) can be thought of as 'Container License Charges'. It is the size of LPARs as containers of software products that determines the charges for a product. (WLC has nothing to do with the traditional concept of mainframe 'workloads' or the 'workloads' of the z/OS Workload Manager). This announcement makes the 'container' smaller for CICS and IMS by determining the 4 hour rolling average of WebSphere products based on their own CPU time. This is the CPU time of these 'Defining Programs', as recorded in the SMF89 data. The 'Defining Programs' 4HRA is subtracted from the traditional 4HRA of VWLC for the LPARs. The smaller container of IWP is only for the CICS and IMS products in the announcement letter. Through IWP the billable MSUs reported by SCRT for the CICS and IMS products should be reduced, leading to reduced software charges. Any IPLA Reference-based products related to CICS or IMS as parents will have a reduction in the number of Required Value Units. Integrated Workload Pricing does not change the charges or value unit requirements of the WebSphere products. The 'value' is in reduced software charges for CICS and IMS. SMF APAR OA31615 is required for some of the WebSphere 'Defining Programs'. It provides enhancements to the SMF89 data. An additional area of enhancement in this APAR is inclusion zIIP and zAAP CPU time which are added together and referred to as the 'Product Offload Engine Time' in the SMF89 data. At this point I haven't yet analyzed real data to provide an example. If you have SMF APAR OA31615 installed I'm looking for some test data! Best regards, Al Al Sherkow, I/S Management Strategies, Ltd. Consulting Expertise on Capacity Planning, Performance Tuning, WLC, LPARs, IRD and LCS Software Seminars on IBM SW Pricing, LPARs, and IRD Voice: +1 414 332-3062 Web: www.sherkow.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
