Previewing z/OS Release 10

Announcement letter

In today's world, Information Technology (IT) is woven into almost everything we do. The demands on IT solutions are greater than ever--often requiring the delivery of more service, value, or capabilities, in less time or with fewer resources. Accomplishing "more with less" can be achieved by adopting a platform solution that is designed to drive efficiencies and economies of scale; accommodate business needs through flexible, virtual, and autonomic capabilities; help reduce the risk of lost productivity, downtime, or security breaches; and enable business innovation through the extension of existing investments and adoption of newer technologies.

Get the most of your IT investment with z/OS. The marriage of z/OS and the System z platform delivers advanced scalability, resiliency, security, workload management, and autonomic capabilities, while minimizing excesses and waste of system resources and operations. System z and z/OS redefine investment protection by going to great lengths to keep applications and data available, system resources secure, server utilization high, and programming environments adaptable.

Today, IBM previews z/OS Version 1 Release 10. In this release of the z/OS operating system, IBM plans to build on its leadership capabilities by not only enhancing time-tested technologies, but leveraging deep synergies with the new IBM System z10 Enterprise Class™ (z10 EC) server and IBM System Storage™ family of products.

z/OS V1.10 and the new z10 server together deliver tremendous economies of scale and adaptability of resources. With support for up to 64* engines in a single logical partition (also available on z/OS V1.9) and up to 1.0 terabyte (TB) of real memory per logical partition (also available on z/OS V1.8 and V1.9), your application and data serving requirements may not have to be partitioned on unnatural boundaries. In z/OS V1.10 (and available with z/OS V1.9), the memory architecture is extended to allow large (1 MB) pages to be used in addition to the existing 4 KB page size. This is expected to reduce memory management overhead for exploiting applications. Just as important as system scalability, is how it performs with that scalability. Planned for z/OS V1.10 and with z10 server is HiperDispatch (also available on z/OS V1.7 and later), a capability that can provide intelligent dispatching of z/OS workloads, to help improve the performance for higher n-way systems. A new Capacity Provisioning Manager planned for z/OS V1.10, and available on z/OS V1.9 with APAR OA20824, can monitor z/OS systems on z10 servers. Activation and deactivation of temporary capacity can be suggested or performed automatically based on user-defined schedules and workload criteria.**

This release of z/OS and the IBM System Storage family of products together are designed to deliver improvements to scalability, availability, and productivity. Planned for z/OS V1.10 is Extended Address Volumes (EAV), a capability that enables support for over 54 GB of addressable storage, removing a limitation in place today. Initially EAV is planned to support up to 262,668 cylinders (up to 223 GB of addressable storage) per volume allowing you to simplify storage management by providing the ability to manage fewer, large volumes as opposed to many small volumes. In future releases EAV will continue to expand on this strategy. The new Basic HyperSwap™ capability (to be enabled by TotalStorage® Productivity Center for Replication Basic Edition for System z), provides a low-cost, single-site, high-availability disk solution which allows the configuration of disk-replication services using an intuitive GUI from z/OS.** The world-class z/OS Global Mirror disaster recovery solution is now enabled to exploit the IBM System z10 and System z9® Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) specialty engine. The zIIP essentially becomes a z/OS data mirroring engine that can provide better price performance and improved utilization of resources at the mirrored site. Availability is improved not only for storage and data. With z/OS V1.10, IBM plans to continue refining its error checking, fault tolerance, isolation, error recovery, and diagnostic capabilities by introducing improved console processing, JES2 Dynamic exit capability, automatic dump and re-IPL capability, new Health Check services, automatic restart of NJE connections, a new capability for tracking users of large amounts of fixed storage, as well as improvements in Parallel Sysplex® function.

z/OS V1.10 not only helps reduce the risk of downtime, but can help reduce the risk of security breaches as well. z/OS System Integrity — IBM's long-term commitment to protecting key z/OS system resources — together with enhancements to z/OS Security Server (RACF®), SSL, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Services, and encryption, make z/OS a highly secure hub for your data and applications. With z/OS V1.10, the z/OS Communications Server takes network security to the next level with its plans to provide improvements to policy-based networking components of NSS, IPSec, and AT-TLS. Building on its history of Intrusion Detection Services (IDS), the z/OS Communications Server also introduces new defensive filtering capability. Defensive filters are evaluated ahead of configured IP filters, and can be created dynamically, for added protection and minimal disruption of services in the event of an attack.

Productivity can be improved with simplified operations and z/OS V1.10 is planned to provide improvements in the areas of simplifying diagnosis and problem determination; network and security management; as well as overall z/OS, I/O configuration, sysplex, and storage operations. Planned improvements include: the Configuration Assistant for IBM z/OS Communications Server adds file import capabilities and support for IP address group definition to make the Configuration Assistant more responsive to networking needs; Health Checker provides not only more checks for RACF, z/OS UNIX® System Services, XCF/XES, and CINET, but also support for log browse and saving data across IPLs, both of which can help improve analysis and problem determination; Hardware Configuration Manager is to include support for configuration packages and importing and exporting I/O configuration data similar to that of HCD, as well as improved named views support; and HCD will provide the ability to read and update an IODF by multiple users at the same time.

In z/OS V1.10, SMP/E is planned to help simplify the task of verifying required software fixes identified in Preventive Service Planning (PSP) buckets. PSP buckets identify required software fixes for new hardware devices, toleration and coexistence of new software releases, and for enabling new functions. More specifically, IBM plans to consolidate the lists of required fixes from PSP buckets and produce SMP/E-consumable meta-data in the form of HOLDDATA to identify those fixes. SMP/E will use the new HOLDDATA to identify what fixes are missing in a current software environment. In addition, SMP/E will help to simplify the task of selecting and installing the required fixes identified by the HOLDDATA.

Viewing the individual functional enhancements of z/OS over the years does not reflect the full scope of the holistic nature of the platform. Taken together, the improvements provided by z/OS V1.10, the z10, and DS8000™ can mean significant scalability, resiliency, security, workload management, and price performance capabilities for your workloads. For example, just to focus on DB2® for z/OS and IMS, these workloads can gain benefit from improvements from many of the following: hashed DSAB searches; EAV; Basic HyperSwap; HiperDispatch; IBM System Storage DS8000 AMP (Adaptive Multi-stream Prefetching); and the z10 server's processors, memory, I/O and network bandwidth. IBM DB2 V9.1 for z/OS (DB2 9) workloads can benefit from z/OS V1.10's additional XML exploitation of the zIIP specialty processor, and the z10 server's hardware implementation of decimal floating point functions. Of course, other applications and subsystems can benefit from the deep synergy of the System z platform too.

z/OS V1.10 is the next step in the evolution of the System z mainframe. It raises the bar and redefines scalability, performance, availability, and economics for the platform. It provides control over system resources, flexibility and autonomics for unforeseen demands, world-class security and availability, and deep synergies within the platform. z/OS provides a solid foundation for extending existing applications, adopting new technologies, and above all leveraging your IT investment.

* The total number of processors defined in a z/OS logical partition is the sum of general-purpose processors (CPs), System z9 Application Assist Processors (zAAPs), and IBM System z9 Integrated Information Processor and IBM System z10 Integrated Information Processor (zIIPs). This support is also available on z/OS V1.9.

** All statements regarding IBM future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.