Summary of announcements April 28, 2009

I'm off to the System z Technical Conference in Brussels next week, but I still want to give you an update on the announcements that were made last Tuesday. Most of them are related to the new announcement on Dynamic Infrastructure. You can still find the replay over here. But back to the announcements. Here are the ones that caught my eye for now :

IBM z/VSE Version 4 Release 2 - Additional enhancements available (ZP09-0104)
There are some additional enhancements to z/VSE 4.2 that was announced in August last year (ZP08-350). z/VSE now offers "Encryption Facility for z/VSE V1.2 as an optional, priced feature of VSE Central Functions V8" and some new optional products like IBM Rational COBOL Runtime for z/VSE V7.5 and IBM WebSphere MQ for z/VSE V3.0.

Getting Started Sub-capacity Pricing enhanced for select IBM WebSphere z/OS IPLA programs, making it easier than ever to start new projects on z/OS (ZP09-0193)
This is an improvement to the pricing mechanism that was already announced last year although I had not seen much of it since. Where you only had some profit when you did not pass the 10% utilization of the LPARs MSUs, this is raised to 50%. I'll come back later with more details for this one.

Tivoli Storage Productivity Center V4.1 comes with two announcements. As you can see TPC (Totalstorage Productivity Center) is succeeded by TSPC (Tivoli Storage Productivity Center). The first one is for TSPC (ZP09-0077) itself and the other is for TSPC for Replication (ZP09-0079) which is now again incorporated in the TSPC suite.

CICS Transaction Server for z/OS 4.1 (ZP09-0161) is now officially announced. The Beta Program is still open and it can be used until CICS TS comes available on June 26, 2009.

Last but not least, there are some enhancements on the z10 EC and the z10 BC : 'IBM System z enhancements, continuing to manage risk (ZG09-0244)'. In a nutshell :

• CBU enhancements : CBU tests can now be ordered in single quantities on the z10 instead of in sets of five
• You can now have up to 248GB of memory on the z10 BC instead of 128GB
• STP : there are "improvements by saving STP configurations across Power On Resets (PORs) and power outages".
• "System z now supports InfiniBand coupling link attachment between System z10 and System z9 general purpose servers".
• "Preplanning for your Storage Area Network (SAN): A new worldwide port name (WWPN) tool provides advance SAN preplanning so you are ready before your new IBM System z10 server arrives".

Here the Statements of Direction are interesting as well. I'll quote two of them :

• "ESCON channels will be phased out. It is IBM's intent for ESCON channels to be phased out. System z10 EC and System z10 BC will be the last servers to support greater than 240 ESCON channels.
• IBM intends to support optional water cooling on future high-end System z servers. This cooling technology will tap into building chilled water that typically exists within the data center for computer room air conditioning systems. External chillers or special water conditioning will typically not be required. Water cooling technology for high-end System z servers will be designed to deliver improved energy efficiency."

Well, that's it for now. I'm not sure you'll hear much of me next week. But, as I have been watching the Sarah Connor Chronicles this week, I can only say : "I'll be back !"