Sampling Techdocs : February - March 2008

With the z10 announcement and the z/OS 1.10 preview in February, some documents have been reworked and there are of course new documents discussing the new functionalities of the z10. I already discussed one of them into more detail (Basic HyperSwap), but there's of course much more. Here's a selection :

• Presentation : A System Programmer Productivity Tool Bag
  This is such a useful document I just have to mention it from time to time. "It is designed to point to and describe various information to assist in planning, aid in finding pertinent information, tools which are available to make a systems programmer job a bit easier".


• Technical document : IBM System Storage DS8000 FlashCopy SE Implementation Considerations and Recommendations
  I know I mentioned this the previous time too, but it has been updated and and it gives a great description of how FlashCopy SE works, where you can use it and where it's better not to use it. Some examples : it is not recommended to use it when data changes more than 20% between two FlashCopies. Do not use it either when you are running update jobs on the same data just after the FlashCopy SE. These circumstances might have a negative influence on your performance.


• Presentations : WebSphere for z/OS - Version 6.1 Handouts for WBSR6 Wildfire Workshop
  I promised to try and pay some attention to products I'm less familiar with, so here are all the presentations and hands-on labs for the Wildfire Workshop on WebSphere Application Server for z/OS Version 6.1. The topics covered are an overview, Building the Deployment Manager, Standalone Servers and Federation, Data Resources (CICS and DB2), Clustering and Security Implications of Adding Servers, Comparison of HTTP Front-End options for WebSphere Application Server. This should provide a great introduction to the Websphere Application Server and I will surely work my way through it.
  
  
• Tool : Getting Started with zPCR (IBM's Processor Capacity Reference)
  Most people are already familiar with this tool or know at least what it does. It's a great capacity planning tool for System z and since one (or perhaps already two years) it has been made available to the customer. It now provides support for System z10.
  
  
• White Paper : z/OS: Planning Considerations for HiperDispatch Mode
  This was one of the new features that raised many questions when the z10 was introduced as it was not very clear what this was really about. Basically "z/OS workload management and dispatching have been enhanced to take advantage of the System z10 hardware design. A new mode of dispatching called HiperDispatch has been implemented to provide additional processing efficiencies. This White Paper describes planning considerations related to HiperDispatch".
  

As I always say : just check them out !

Announcement : DS8000 New Functionalities

IBM has made quite a few announcements today on various matters. Some of them are about the DS8000, some others on the DS6000 and I also briefly mention the DS4000 - but for a good reason.

Let's first focus on the DS8000. IBM is announcing it’s second major enhancements to the DS8000. After the intial announcement, the Turbo Models were the first major enhancement. Since the new turbo models announcements are duplicated. New functionalities are announced for the DS8000 2107 and for the DS8000 242x series. The same for the new FlashCopy SE functionality (1,2).

The announcement is built up around two major themes : Performance on the one hand and Simplification and (cost) efficiency on the other hand. I’m going to give a brief description of these new functions.

Performance

• Storage Pool Striping
  It is now possible to stripe a volume’s data across arrays in the storage pool. This should optimize the performance. This is done by choosing the ‘Rotate Extents’ option at volume allocation instead of the current default (Rotate LUNs).
• z/OS Global Mirror Multiple Reader
  This function increases parallellism in processing I/Os and improves throughput for IBM z/OS Global Mirror.

Simplification and efficiency

• IBM FlashCopy SE
  FlashCopy SE stands for Space Efficient FlashCopy and fullfills a statement of direction lots of people have been asking for and that’s been lingering for quite some time now. This should significantly reduce the disk capacity needed for copies and it only uses space to save source data being updated. You no longer need a full match between source and target volumes. Most FlashCopy functions are available with FlashCopy SE. Exceptions for the moment are e.g. Dataset FlashCopy and Full Volume Copy.
  FlashCopy SE is separately licensed next to FlashCopy. Licenses are independent of one another.
• Dynamic Volume Expansion
  You no longer need to delete and re-create a volume to expand it.
• ‘Expansion frame’ warranty intermix
  Expansion frames can from now on have a warranty type (1,2,3 or4 years) independent of the base frame warranty.
• New SSL broadband option for Call Home
  This secure protocol is used for data offload and problem reporting only. It provides quicker debug times than a modem and requires minimal firewall setup at the customer site.
• DS Storage Manager Enhancements
  Based on a large study IBM has improved the functionality and the user interface should be faster and easier to use. This means faster respons time, improved flows, better graphics . . .
  
• Support for System Storage Productivity Center (SSPC)
  I'll come back to this in a follow-up post as there have been some separate announcements regarding Totalstorage Productivity Center and this new SSPC concept.
  

Another functionality people have been asking for is Raid 6. Raid 6 is not in the announcement, but it has been announced for the DS4700, the midrange disk storage solution of IBM. Maybe the DS4700 is the first one, and others will follow ?

Techdocs : Flashcopy & PPRC

It's been a while since I mentioned any interesting reading material from Techdocs. But now there's some nice presentations on Flashcopy and PPRC. The first one is "Flashcopy in a zSeries environment" describing how FlashCopy works, its different functions, and how to invoke those functions using DFSMSdss, TSO, or ICKDSF. Very related to the previous one is "Flashcopy for Open Environments". Another nice presentation is "PPRC Overview" discussing Metro/Mirror, Global Copy, Global Mirror, and Metro/Global Mirror. There's specific attention on how each of these maintains consistency. There's also advice on how to choose the best solution for each specific situation.