Friday, December 9, 2011

Potential DS8700/DS8800 Loss of Access due to repeating device recovery with the PTFs for OA34661 installed on z/Os

Call this a Red Alert for the DS8700 and DS8800 (DS8100 and DS8300 are not affected by this). This is the entire title 'Potential DS8700/DS8800 Loss of Access and Job Abends on Release 6.2 due to repeating device recovery with the PTFs for OA34661 installed on z/Os releases 1.11 through 1.13. Also base z/OS 1.13 clients are exposed' and you can find all details over here.

In short, people running z/OS 1.11 or higher who are using zHPF and have Release Code 6.2 installed on their DS8700 or DS8800 should read on.

The content of the notification gives you a clear view of what's happening :
"With z/OS OA34661 support and Release 6.2 DS8700/DS8800 microcode, System z High Performance FICON (zHPF) supports additional workloads using QSAM, BPAM, and BSAM access methods as well as provide improvements for DB2 list prefetch processing. These changes expand the type of applications that can now use zHPF, including applications performing format writes. The zHPF support must be in both the host system and DS8000 in order for the new functions to be allowed. In general, the access methods exploiting the new zHPF support do not use format write/update write intermixed in the same channel program. However, Media Manager does have the ability to generate zHPF channel programs with format write/update write intermixes, and the new support for format writes allows it to be done using zHPF. When such an intermix is processed in the control unit using a zHPF channel program, repeating panics will occur leading to fenced host adapter cards and potentially a loss of access issue."

Have a look at the notification page on how to avoid or resolve this particular problem.

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