EOY 2023 Mainframe Quiz

January saw Mainframe Hardware take delivery of two brand new processors onto the data centre floor. These processors would go on to provide significant reduction metrics supporting our carbon footprint challenge. What model were they :

• z14

• z15

• z16

February saw the Batch team decommission the highest ever number of production jobs in a single month. These removals reduce mainframe CPU utilisation, ensure faster batch completion and removal of legacy which all have cost savings. How many jobs were removed :

• 1117

• 967

• 592

March as always saw the Mainframe Clock Change event take place. A significant challenge was thrown at our teams when it was decided to remove the planned Site Swap event from scope. How many days notice period did we receive to meet that challenge :

• 4

• 9

• 11

April saw the DB2 team carry out another large tranche of conversions of tables to Universal Table Space (UTS) format. UTS offers better space management, data availability and improved performance, which is crucial given the criticality of enterprise data and the speed at which we need access to. April saw over 1200 conversions but how many were done over the course of the year to complete work :

• 25k

• 35k

• 45k

May Capacity reporting showed us that we had in fact hit a peak day processing for the bank at the end of April. This peak was the highest we had seen in over 12 months. Capacity reporting and active month end reporting make these peak days seamless to our customers as the platform deals with the higher demand. For one of our key customer services Mobile Banking, how many logins per minute did we see at this peak time :

• 20k

• 15k

• 10k

June saw the AO team work with Capacity to increase the RMF data collection period during peak batch processing to reduce MIP utilisation. This work saved over 800mips and mitigates the risk of batch (rather than online processing) driving our peak processing and therefore avoiding unnecessary hardware costs. What was the data collection period increase :

• 10 seconds to 60 seconds

• 30 seconds to 45 seconds

• 45 seconds to 90 seconds

July saw the Network Software complete a piece of work to remove redundant/unused ports on the system. Unused ports can be reclaimed and reused so critical to controlling the growth and complexity of the network. Due to the nature of Dev / Sandpit systems this proved a challenging task, however after an extensive review to identify ports no longer required the team deleted how many unused ports :

• 3897

• 4596

• 8903

August saw more great work done by the Storage team to reclaim capacity on our disk estate. This is continual work that removes unused space across various data types and ensures that future disk growth is available and reduces cost of additional growth needing to be purchased. In 2023 the team has worked to reclaim capacity worth how much in real money :

• £327,289

• £287,297

• £198,269

September saw the CICS team complete more of the migrations to the CICS v6.1. This month saw another 250 Production regions complete and by year end the team will have completed over 900 of the 923 production CICS environments. However,  does anyone know how many CICS development regions have also been migrated to CICS v6.1 :

• 8963

• 12676

• 14353

October save the zSeries Software team roll out the latest Levelset (63A) across all the zVM guest systems. This completed the zOS2.5 rollout for 2023. How many zVM images were upgraded on October :

• 35

• 42

• 55