z/OS Version 1 Release 10

Announcement letter

Today, 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.

IBM announces z/OS Version 1 Release 10. In this release of the z/OS operating system, IBM delivers a platform 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.

z/OS V1.10 and the new IBM System z10™ Enterprise Class (z10™ EC) server together deliver tremendous economies of scale and adaptability of resources. This can help with consolidating enterprise data stores, co-locating applications close to the data, and reduce the incidence of siloed data in the enterprise. With support for up to 64 engines in a single logical partition¹ (also available on z/OS V1.9) and up to 1.0 terabyte (TB) of real memory per LPAR (also available on z/OS V1.8 and later), 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 support large (1 MB) pages in addition to the existing 4 KB page size, which is expected to reduce memory management overhead for exploiting applications. System scalability, by itself, is not enough. The system must also perform well. With z/OS V1.10 and the System z10 server is a new function, HiperDispatch (also available on z/OS V1.7 and later), that is designed to dispatch z/OS workloads intelligently and help improve performance for higher n-way systems. The new Capacity Provisioning Manager, also available on z/OS V1.9, can monitor z/OS systems on System z10 servers, and activate and deactivate temporary capacity automatically or by user input.

This release of z/OS and the IBM System Storage™ family of products together are designed to deliver improvements to data storage scalability, availability, and productivity. Extended Address Volumes (EAVs), a capability available only with z/OS V1.10 and IBM System Storage DS8000™, when available, enables you to define volumes as large as 223 GB. This capability can help relieve storage constraints and 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. ² A new Basic HyperSwap™ capability [enabled by IBM TotalStorage® Productivity Center for Replication for System z (5698-TPC) or TotalStorage Productivity Center for Replication Basic Edition for System z V3.4 (5698-TRB)], 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.

Total cost of ownership for the platform is improved with more exploiters for specialty engines. The world-class z/OS Global Mirror disaster recovery solution is enabled to exploit the IBM System z10 and System z9® Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) specialty engine, where 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. z/OS XML System Services exploits both zIIPs and zAAPs. The zIIP Assisted HiperSockets for Large Messages capability helps lower processor utilization for handling of large outbound messages, and helps make new workload traffic from XML, JAVA, and other languages - as well as general bulk data transfers - more attractive on the platform. The new IBM Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting™ (a service offering of IBM Global Business Services), can be enabled for the zIIP. This service custom architects an efficient and scalable business intelligence reporting solution on z/OS and uses your operational data store to create timely reports for critical decision making.

System z availability is legendary. With this release of z/OS IBM continues to refine its error checking, fault tolerance, isolation, error recovery, and diagnostic capabilities. These new capabilities include improved console processing, JES2 dynamic exit capability, automatic dump and re-IPL, new IBM Health Checker for z/OS services, automatic restart for JES2 NJE connections, identification of users of large amounts of fixed storage, and improvements in Parallel Sysplex® function.

z/OS V1.10 not only helps you 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 cryptography, including support for RSA key, ISO Format-3 PIN block, 13-Digit through 19-Digit PAN data, secure key AES, and SHA algorithms, 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, providing 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 administration and z/OS V1.10 provides improvements in the areas of simplifying diagnosis, problem determination, and migration; network and security management; as well as overall z/OS, I/O configuration, sysplex, and storage operations. Improvements include: the IBM Configuration Assistant for 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; IBM Health Checker for z/OS provides not only more checks, but also support for log browse and saving data across IPLs (both of which can help improve analysis and problem determination), as well as support for new Migration Health Checks; Hardware Configuration Manager now includes support for configuration packages and importing and exporting I/O configuration data in a manner similar to that of HCD, as well as improved named views. In z/OS V1.10, SMP/E helps simplify the task of installing new hardware and software by helping you identify required PTFs quickly without having to use the lists contained in Preventive Service Planning (PSP) buckets. IBM middleware plans to support simplified application development technologies as well. IBM CICS Explorer, the new face of CICS (Statement of Direction) ² is intended to help speed deployment of new CICS-based business applications on z/OS.

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 System z10 server, and DS8000 storage can mean significant scalability, resiliency, security, workload management, and price performance capabilities for your data serving, transaction processing, as well as Business Intelligence (BI) Applications and Data Warehouse (DW) workloads. For example, DB2® for z/OS and IMS™ 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 System 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 System 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.

With the addition of Business Intelligence (BI), Data Warehousing (DW), and reporting tools to z/OS V1.10, this platform, known for being the "best of breed" for OLTP, also offers a solid foundation for Operational Business Intelligence (OPBI) as well. There are many BI/DW solutions and tools available on System z today, including, DataQuant™, Alphablox™, as well as the newly announced IBM Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting™. With this host of solutions, BI /DW applications on System z can benefit from many of the platform's advantages to deliver faster access to data on z/OS, while offering a consolidated view of the data with DW, BI, and OLTP on the same platform. By leveraging z/OS and System z availability, security, resiliency characteristics, BI/DW applications can meet the operational requirements of businesses while offering TCO improvements from the exploitation of specialty engines.

z/OS V1.10 is the next step in the evolution of IBM's flagship System z mainframe operating system. It raises the bar on 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, expanding access to core data and adopting new technologies.

Copyright IBM Corporation 2008

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Produced in the United States of America August 2008 All Rights Reserved

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

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