Jack works for IntelliMagic as a Senior Consultant – z/OS. He has enjoyed working for a variety of organizations and has been involved in IT Infrastructure optimization for over 30 years. Jack has been involved with high transaction environments as a technical lead for enterprise technology delivery organizations in travel and transportation, retail, and government sectors. Much of that time was devoted to supporting mainframe technologies. He has authored a number of IBM requirements that were helpful for performance and capacity management practitioners.
Having worked for organizations that have transformed technology platforms and delivery models, he has some interesting stories and perspectives that enable collaborative consulting across marketing, operations, engineering, architecture, development, and delivery teams to effectively manage business risk, application performance, and IT costs.
He is a life-long learner that has continued learning from participation in organizations and conferences in a variety of disciplines and has earned an MBA from the University of Denver, BSChE from the University of Michigan, and a BSLE from Calvin College.
Resources created by Jack Opgenorth
Why Am I Still Seeing zIIP Eligible Work?
zIIP-eligible CPU consumption that overflows onto general purpose CPs (GCPs) – known as “zIIP crossover” - is a key focal point for software cost savings. However, despite your meticulous efforts, it is possible that zIIP crossover work is still consuming GCP cycles unnecessarily.
Mainframe Software Cost Savings Playbook
Learn how to effectively reduce mainframe costs and discover strategies for tracking IBM software licensing metrics to minimize expenses.
Tuning TCB Switches for CICS Cost Savings
CPU 'tuning' exercises often focus on unnecessary TCB switches. In this case, changes made that reduced TCB switch time saved a ton of CPU - up to 2,000 seconds.
How A Db2 Newbie Quickly Spotlights the Root Cause of a Db2 Slowdown
This blog explores how a non-Db2 expert quickly identified latch contention arising from a Data Sharing Index Split as the root cause of a Db2 delay/slowdown.
How an Unexpected Drop in Response Time Led to a Quick Permanent Replication Improvement
Learn how a recent unexpected drop in asynchronous response time led to the discovery that one of the network links used for asynchronous replication went down and a permanent performance improvement.
Is Some Automation Unnecessary Noise or Just Lower Priority Work?
Computers are great at doing what we tell them. They don’t get tired, bored, or complain about the endless work we have them doing. But sometimes automation is running in not so obvious places. Learn some practical guidance for managing those workloads.
An Update on zEDC and the Nest Accelerator Unit (NXU)
Advancements similar to the NXU are likely to become more commonplace since raw processor speeds have plateaued. Specialized processing drives new metrics to manage an already complex system. What’s affected? How will you keep up?
A Better Mainframe Gearbox for your DevOps Environment
DevOps is here, and it will continue to evolve. Learn how to optimize your DevOps environment and how to integrate your teams into the DevOps oriented environment.
New Year Health Assessment for Your IT Systems
A suitable ongoing ‘health assessment’ for Coupling Facility activity provides a proactive stance and positioning to address the cost and complexity of your major mainframe applications.
Mainframe encryption causes higher demand in TCP/IP address space
Many shops are using IBM’s pervasive encryption to protect their mainframe's integrity, but how do we get in front of the mainframe impacts or know which encryption methods might meet security requirements at lower cost?
Stretched in 2020?
This year has certainly stretched everyone. Learn some ways to overcome some new and unexpected challenges that likely weren’t even on your radar in January.
AI: Too Much of a Good Thing
Solution providers will continue to entice us with bigger and better real-time analytics. Some of these should be employed, but first try to understand the logic you may be activating when you implement.
Smart Data Spelunking
Splunk has proven extremely useful in many areas of business analytics and has opened up a wide variety of data views and analysis options, but processing vast amounts of mainframe data with Splunk may not be the best approach.
Soldiering through z/OS Outsourcing, Insourcing and Change
Despite the growing number of reports that raise concerns with maintaining your mainframe performance while outsourcing z/OS infrastructure, the appeal of outsourcing's promised benefits has yet to wear off.
Is Vampire Demand Stealing Your IT Resources?
IT resource vampires put a drain on IT resources and lead to higher IT costs with nothing of value to deliver to the business.