Bigger Savings Using New z Technologies

Fabio Massimo Ottaviani
October 2008

To guarantee the VWLC expected savings IBM introduced the possibility of setting both a defined capacity limit at the LPAR level and a group capacity limit (since z/OS 1.8) at the CPC level. Aggressive use of these parameters could allow to a further reduction in software costs.
A technique is presented to:
>  analyze the 4-hour rolling average by WLM workload importance,
>  evaluate optimal “defined” and “group” capacity limits penalizing lowest important workloads,
>  estimate possible MSU savings.
Additional savings could be obtained through a full exploitation of AAP and IIP technology; a similar technique is presented to analyzing the eligible workload running on standard CPUs and decide if buying AAP and/or IIP engines will enable you to reduce the MSU used and save money.