Reminder : z10 End of Marketing on June 30. 2013

I've written about this before (here and here). The End of Marketing (EOM) of the z10 was announced in July 2011. There were actually two dates : one for hardware upgrades and one for microcode upgrades. Hardware upgrades are already EOM since June 30, 2012. This concerns mainly features like connectivity cards, memory and extra books.

Now, as of June 30, 2013 field install features and conversions that are delivered solely through a modification to the machine's Licensed Internal Code (LIC) will no longer be possible either. So if you still want to add a specialty engine (within the same book) or you want to do a microcode only upgrade or even downgrade, then I can only say : now is the time. After June 30, this will no longer be possible.

If your company has no intentions of upgrading soon, you might want to take a look at your Capacity on Demand records. If you have e.g. a z10 BC A01 CBU machine with CBU records, then you should check out the expiration dates of these records. Say you have a CBU record that expires on June 30, 2015 with 2 tests left. You can e.g. extend it by three years until June 30, 2018. This automatically includes three extra tests which come at a certain price of course. But it might give you some extra breathing space. Anyway, after that it's finished.

z9 BC GA2 announcement and CBU

In my post on the z9 BC GA2 announcement, I put some exclamation marks after the CBU item stating that "the z9 BC Model R07 will allow CBU to all S07 capacity settings".
In fact this is important, as there had been some kind of break with the z890 CBU settings. Up to the z890, the CBU had always been a full engine issue. So if you had e.g. a z890-260 (390 mips) as production machine and you wanted to buy a machine in cold standby with CBU, you could buy a z890-110 (the smallest z890 with 26 mips) with one CBU. When the CBU was activated, the z890-110 engine and the CBU were set to full capacity giving you a z890-270. You can find a detailed explanation in the redbook 'IBM eServer zSeries 890 Technical Introduction'. This was an affordable DR solution.
Z9 BC broke in two ways with this possibility. CBU was no longer a full engine thing as you can now order CBU up to a certain capacity. I guess anyone can live with that. There was however also a split of the z9 BC into two models : the R07 and the S07. And it was impossible to buy the smallest R07 (R07-A01 with 26 mips) and have a CBU capacity for a S07. Similar to our z890-260 example, the same customer would now have a z9 BC S07 N04 (409 mips). So as opposed to the z890, you could no longer buy the smallest z9 BC machine which meant a much larger investment for the customer. The lowest possible model in this case was the smallest S07, the S07 R01 with 193 mips.
So this limitation has now been lifted. The redbook (draft) 'IBM System z9 Business Class Technical Introduction' has already been modified accordingly.