There are two options for creating the output data that will be used as input to Control Center.
The output of data to the standard //ATHDATA sequential file continues to be supported for compatibility with user’s procedures and older versions of Acquire, and a means of creating data for Control Center to use directly is also available.
The standard naming convention for input data for Control Center is as follows:
YYYYMMDDhhmmss_<A><T><P><S><target>.<suffix>
Where
YYYYMMDD is the date, e.g., 20170131
hhmmss is a time, e.g., 141500
<A> is a for ASCII data and e for EBCDIC data - as Syncsort Capacity Management sees it, not as it may be stored on the target system. The file will be written in EBCDIC on the mainframe, but the process of copying it with FTP will convert it to ASCII on the Windows machine running Control Center. If the file is created by Acquire and USSCOMPRESS=Y is in effect the first character will become an e as when it is transferred to Control Center it will be done in binary and will still be coded as EBCDIC.
<T> represents the type of data, s for standard and z for compressed data
<P> represents the platform, z for System z
<S> denotes the source of data, currently s for z/OS system or d for z/OS disk occupancy
<target> is an eight-character number that uniquely identifies the system, and is predefined using the System Manager interface to Syncsort Capacity Management.
<suffix> is any numeric value - this value is not used for anything in the z/OS environment, but must be present
So example files for z/OS might be:
20170131141500_aszs00000237.1
20161104001500_ezzs00010410.22
In z/OS it is possible to create datasets with these names using the UNIX System Services (USS) component that is a standard part of all z/OS environments. Facilities like TCP/IP and FTP require a USS environment to be available.
From a z/OS point of view, USS files are single datasets. From within USS they appear to have data stored in the typical tree-structure of a UNIX or Linux system.
For Acquire to create these files, a control card of USSPATH= is used to point it to the directory in the USS environment where they should be created.