Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

1. they had been using Fusion Software which is used to send the files to different servers inside the company. This can be achieved with the native FTP also. I am in talks with the infrastructure team on this to know the charges being paid for this software and the CPU utilization of the existing jobs. If removing those with FTP is cheaper, it'd would make sense to remove Fusion.
   
   Said that, do you think there should be different approach for such a task.
2. They use a lot of 'zip software' on mainframes. Not sure why they had been using so many of them while they also have PKZIP, which can possibly replace any other option.

Robert Sample wrote: Fri Jun 15, 2018 4:52 pmReplacing Fusion Software with FTP sounds like it is an option. However, a full analysis of the costs involved will require someone determine how much it would cost to find all the Fusion Software executions in jobs and replacing them with FTP. This could be a very expensive task since it requires people time to manually review things.

Robert Sample wrote: Fri Jun 15, 2018 4:52 pmz/OS does not have any easy way to identify unused software. At a previous employer, I wrote a system that analyzed the weekly SMF 30 records, extracted the executed programs, and updated a data base (actually a VSAM data set) with execution counts for the week. After a year or two of running this system, we could identify the unused programs fairly accurately. Remember that programs may be executed daily, or weekly, or biweekly, or monthly, or quarterly, or annually -- so getting rid of a program that has not been used since January 2018 may mean your company loses the ability to print 1099 statements (which the IRS would not be happy about).

Robert Sample wrote: Fri Jun 15, 2018 4:52 pmAre you sure about the company having PKZIP? PKZIP for mainframes is not a free product -- and hence not all sites have it available! Mainframes will have tar and pax and much of the time gzip (gzip was in the Ported Tools package for a long time and hence not installed as part of Unix System Services; I'm not sure if it still is) but not PKZIP (unless it is purchased).

How can I guesstimate the CPU utilization of FTP Jobs compared to existing Fusion Jobs? Any direction on that? I can get the CPU utilization of Fusion Jobs from existing Jobs but what is the good number of Jobs of FTP to compare a "replaced Fusion Job with FTP" from CPU (MSU) utilization point of view?

Robert Sample wrote: Mon Jun 18, 2018 8:41 pmThis can be tricky. The SMF record types 118 and 119 record FTP information (among other things); the 118 is the "old-style" record that has been deprecated and is being replaced by the 119 record type. However, neither record type records CPU time for the FTP -- starting date / time and ending date / time of the FTP, yes. But CPU time, no. So assuming you're looking at batch jobs, you have to match the type 30 records to the type 119 records to be able to capture CPU time.

1. FTP uses 9.11MIPS/hour on average. Fusion uses 3.73MIPS/hour on average. This is based on data from 4/25 to 5/14 and is for PROD LPAR1/2.
2. FTP does not have automatic retry capabilities. If it cannot connect, it fails.

//MYFTP  EXEC FTP,PARM='IP=xx.xx.xx,RETRY=03'

enrico-sorichetti wrote: Thu Jun 21, 2018 12:11 amdid You ever consider that Fusion might implement more facilities than FTP ?

1. Send files across as is.
2. Append the timestamp to the file name and send it across.

• FTP
• SFTP (we've USS)
• Fusion
• Connect: Direct