z/OS Version 1 Release 12

Announcement letter

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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 IBM System z^® and z/OS^® are the right choices 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.

Previewing z/OS Version 1 Release 12*

Imagine, an IT system that knows your priorities and can make suggestions - even decisions - that can benefit your business. IBM previews z/OS Version 1 Release 12. With this latest release of z/OS, IBM heralds a new direction of smart operating systems by creating an environment that can proactively work for you to help promote improved operations, availability, and manageability through innovative self-learning, self-managing, and self-optimization capabilities. z/OS is designed to learn heuristically from its own environment to anticipate and report on system abnormalities, predicting problems before they occur with its innovative Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) capability. For example, PFA can be used during application testing to identify previously unknown potential problem areas before the application is put into production or can be used in production systems to help identify issues before they become serious

In the event of an issue, z/OS can help you be responsive with real-time decision making assistance. A new z/OS Run Time Diagnostics function is planned to analyze key indicators on a running system quickly, and help identify the root causes of system degradations. The Run Time Diagnostics function is anticipated to run in as little as one minute, to return results quickly enough to help you choose between alternative corrective actions and help you maintain high levels of system and application availability.

In some situations, your operations may be so critical that human analysis and intervention may not be fast enough, and the system must have the ability to act instantly and decisively. In a Parallel Sysplex, the GRS and XCF components are planned to have the ability to automatically initiate actions to preserve sysplex availability so as to help reduce the incidence of sysplex-wide problems that can result from unresponsive critical components. The system can take action to fence, or stop and start critical members automatically in seconds, preventing small problems from becoming major problems.

And in still other situations, z/OS keeps your system available automatically and transparently. z/OS will be designed to avoid data fragmentation and planned outages for data reorganizations. With the new CA (Control Area) Reclaim capability, applications that use VSAM key-sequenced data sets (KSDS) can benefit from improved performance, minimized space utilization, and improved application availability though the avoidance of planned outages that used to be required to defragment and reorganize this data.

Manage data easier with z/OS V1.12. DFSMS is planned to support additional data set types on Extended Addressing Volumes (EAVs), inluding sequential (both basic and large) data sets, partitioned (PDS/PDSE) data sets, catalogs, and BDAM data sets. Overall, EAV helps you relieve storage constraints as well as simplify storage management by providing the ability to manage fewer, larger volumes.

z/OS V1.12 is planned to support many cryptographic standards, such as: Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which is regarded by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as a faster algorithm and a smaller key as compared to similar RSA cryptography; Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2), which is a more streamlined and efficient method of IPSec dynamic key exchange than the currently-available IKEv1; and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) FIPS 140-2 security requirements for cryptographic modules.

Simplify the management and administration of z/OS with z/OS Management Facility (z/OSMF). The z/OS Workload Manager (WLM) Policy Editor functionality is planned to be integrated into z/OSMF V1.12, which can facilitate the creation and editing of WLM service definitions, installation of WLM service definitions, and activation of WLM service policies, and monitoring of the WLM status of a sysplex and the systems in a sysplex.

z/OS V1.12 can save you time and money. This ability to discover, decide and resolve issues automatically and in a fraction of the time can keep your organization nimble and responsive to changing business needs.