New Statement of Directon on ESCON channels

I was following some courses last week and so I see I have some more catching up to do now. Here's a first interesting piece of news. If I remember correctly, IBM already had a statement of direction that the z196 would be the last server to offer ESCON. It wasn't clear about carrying forward ESCON channels to a next generation. This has now been clarified although it has been a bit hidden in the announcement on 'IBM WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 for zEnterprise (ZG11-0019)'. Here's what it says :

IBM plans not to offer ESCON channels as an orderable feature on high-end System z servers that follow the z196 (machine type 2817). In addition, ESCON channels cannot be carried forward on an upgrade to such a follow-on server. This plan applies to channel path identifier (CHPID) types CNC, CTC, CVC, and CBY and to feature numbers 2323 and 2324. System z customers should continue migrating from ESCON to FICON. Alternate solutions are available for connectivity to ESCON devices.

I think this will not be a problem as most customers already switched to FICON. We saw some customers still taking them along as they upgraded to z10 but so far I haven't seen any customers still using ESCON on z196. Mind you, the text explicitely states 'high-end System z servers' and you know what I told you about (not) filling in the blanks in a previous post.

For those interested in the WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance, I should come back to this in a future post.