z/OS Version 1 Release 11

Announcement letter

Pressures on the global economy create business risks requiring increased focus on improving time-to-market, reducing costs, and optimizing profit. Yet, the expectations of customers and employees have never been higher, requiring a personalized and responsive environment. You need technologies that are smart, adaptive, trusted, and efficient. You need a dynamic infrastructure that can respond quickly to change while reducing cost and driving profit.

Now more than ever System z and z/OS are the right choice for your infrastructure and workload needs. You have neither the time nor the resource to spend on "throw away" solutions, "rip and replace" systems, or yet another technology trend. The epitome of investment protection, z/OS goes to great lengths to keep applications and data available, system resources secure, server utilization high, and programming environments adaptable while maintaining compatibility for existing applications.

With this foundation, z/OS middleware (such as IBM WebSphere® Application Server, WebSphere MQ, CICS® Transaction Server, DB2®, and IMS™) is highly integrated, tuned, and efficient. Industry and de facto standards make it possible to implement XML and SOA and to extend core systems -- helping you to provide a lower cost per end user and lower cost per transaction.

As you look to uncover savings in your IT budget, consider the benefits of deploying business intelligence workloads on the System z platform. Recent solutions, such as the IBM Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting (SAFR) and IBM's InfoSphere Warehouse offering, can allow you to simplify and support your warehousing requirements using a reliable, highly secure environment for your corporate data. In addition to the inherent efficiencies of the System z platform, these solutions can help produce real results and make a difference to your bottom line. The IBM Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting generates reports based on operational data and supports investment decision-making, sales growth analysis, and fraud detection. The IBM InfoSphere Warehouse on System z is expected to help you to reduce the cost and increase the performance of your information management systems. By deploying business intelligence databases directly on the z/OS platform, you can create a business intelligence structure that is close to the original data source, uses complete and timely data, and has simplified reconciliation, restatement, backup, and recovery processes.

Investment protection, solution longevity, and a trusted foundation for business are just some of the reasons why customers choose z/OS. This latest release of the operating system expands on its foundation and is planned to deliver advanced technology and virtualization to help deliver improved performance, availability, security, efficiency, simplified administration, reduced risk, improved service, and enhanced flexibility, all of which can ultimately help you reduce costs and drive profit.

Resilient and adaptive, Parallel Sysplex is many clustering solutions in one. It is used for scalability, availability, software migrations, and disaster recovery and can be considered the first cloud computing environment ever. While other platforms are just beginning to grasp the cloud concept, Parallel Sysplex has been providing a dynamic environment where resources and workloads can seamlessly move to where they are needed. For z/OS V1.11, updates to Parallel Sysplex include improved scalability, performance, recovery management, coupling link recovery, and GDPS® resiliency. GDPS takes cloud beyond the confines of a single site. See Software Announcement309-002, dated February 24, 2009, Sophisticated automation seamlessly manages z/OS, z/VM®, Linux® for System z, multiple storage technologies (both ECKD™ and fixed block), and tape resources for your enterprise -- putting disaster recovery back into your hands and under your control.

Resiliency and adaptability are at the core of z/OS and IBM is proud to introduce new innovative predictive failure capabilities. Beyond error checking, first failure data capture, and recovery routines, predictive failure analysis means your z/OS system will be designed to learn heuristically from its own environment and is able to anticipate and report on potential system issues (however rare) before they are an impact to your business. The initial exploiter of the predictive failure infrastructure is for the CSA (common service area) for the detection of abnormal usage of common storage (planned to be available March 2009, with z/OS V1.10). Additional exploitation is planned for z/OS V1.11.

Trusted for decades, z/OS continues to expand on its security features. z/OS Security Server (RACF, enhanced for z/OS V1.11) can provide centralized authentication (with IBM Tivoli Directory Server for z/OS) and coupled with mature logging and reporting capabilities (via SMF) provide an amazing record of user and system resource accesses that can help build a comprehensive audit and risk management plan. Centralized certificate lifecycle management (via z/OS PKI Services and enhanced with z/OS V1.11) takes the cost of digital certificates out of the hands of third-party vendors and applies it back to your bottom line. Enterprise tape and disk encryption key management is centralized and streamlined with IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (5698-B35), a new unpriced product that leverages world-class z/OS security, management, and reporting capabilities. In addition to drive-level encryption and centralized key management support, the latest IBM System Storage™ DS8000™ introduces solid state drives expected to provide performance for certain kinds of high-use data, with SMS and SMF support designed to help you manage data placement and take the best advantage of this new feature. Refer to Hardware Announcement 109-120, dated February 10, 2009. Also, SMF data collection and reporting capabilities (planned to be enhanced in z/OS V1.11) are so powerful they quite possibly meet and exceed your most stringent audit, compliance, and risk management requirements.

IBM's commitment to simplify the mainframe environment continues with a statement of direction for the z/OS Management Facility, planned to facilitate the task of managing the various sources of data related to software problems for new and less-skilled system programmers and system administrators.

z/OS is responsive to your business needs. Storage capacity is enhanced by allowing an additional data set type to exploit the whole capacity of an extended address volume (EAV). Enterprise-wide tape management is planned to be improved with designs for better search capabilities and simplified monitoring and management functions. Network communications for multitiered applications is streamlined by allowing the Sysplex Distributor to route requests to z/OS targets based on availability, performance, and capacity metrics for multiple application tiers in each z/OS target, thereby helping you improve availability and performance.

Performance for your major workloads is improved a number of ways. New compiler options in XL C/C++ allow your existing C/C++ applications to take advantage of IBM System z10 instructions for run time prefetch performance improvements without application rewrite. Large page support in Language Environment® means applications using JVM and XL C/C++ (in AMODE64) can benefit from this improvement in memory management.

Price performance, or economics, may be improved with new specialty engine exploitation as well. z/OS is planned to be updated to enable z/OS CIM (Common Information Model) server processing to run on the System z Integrated Information processor (zIIP). This means CIM client applications that use the CIM server on z/OS for cross-platform system management, such as the System z Capacity Provisioning Manager and the z/OS Management Facility problem determination capability (see Statement of general direction) can benefit. CIM Client applications that are Java-based are already eligible to execute on the System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP).

Though many know of System z hardware technology dividends, few know that z/OS in and of itself had its own form of "technology dividend." For the past several releases, z/OS has provided a modest release-to-release performance improvement by systematically reducing or eliminating constraints and inefficiencies within the base operating system. Imagine going to a new release of the operating system and not needing more system resource - z/OS is probably the only operating system that can deliver this. Add the 10% technology dividend announced for the System z10 servers and you have a significant amount of computing power at no additional cost.

The smart, adaptive technologies of z/OS can provide a secure, resilient, and dynamic infrastructure that integrates business needs and IT capabilities. Work smarter with z/OS.