Parallel Sysplex, CICS/VSAM enabled for 24x7 availability

z/OS 1.5 can help signiﬁ cantly enhance application backup with enhancements to DFSMShsm to utilize volume level fast replication. The fast backup is designed to exploit FlashCopy and the virtual concurrent copy capa- bility of IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server and IBM RAMAC Virtual Array (RVA) respectively. DFSMShsm Fast Replication in z/OS 1.5 is also intended to provide a fast, easy to use point-in-time backup and recovery solu- tion speciﬁ cally designed for DB2 Universal Database (UDB) for z/OS V8. It is designed to allow fast, nondisrup- tive backups to be taken at appropriate events when there is minimum activity at the application level or when a fast point-in-time backup is desired.

Parallel Sysplex

zSeries Parallel Sysplex technology provides world-class availability by allowing z/OS workloads to be balanced across multiple servers to provide near continuous avail- ability. This form of clustering, known as single system image, also provides tremendous scale. Up to 32 zSeries servers with z/OS can appear as a single image for data sharing applications (see previous section, Parallel Sysplex Clustering Technology).

CICS/VSAM enabled for 24x7 availability

DFSMS Transactional VSAM Services (DFSMStvs) allows you to share VSAM data sets across CICS, batch, and object-oriented applications on z/OS or distributed sys- tems. DFSMStvs can enable concurrent shared updates of recoverable VSAM data sets by CICS transactions and multiple batch applications and 24-hour availability of CICS and batch applications. DFSMStvs is built on top of VSAM record-level sharing (RLS), which permits sharing of recoverable VSAM data sets at the record level.

System-Managed CF Structure Duplexing

System-Managed Coupling Facility (CF) Structure Duplex- ing is designed to signiﬁ cantly enhance Parallel Sysplex availability. It can provide a robust failure recovery capa- bility via CF structure redundancy, and it can enhance Parallel Sysplex ease of use by helping to reduce the complexity of CF structure recovery. These beneﬁ ts can be achieved by creating a duplicate (or duplexed) copy of a CF structure and then maintaining the two struc- ture instances in a synchronized state during normal CF operation. In the event of a CF related failure (or even a planned outage of a CF), failover to the remaining copy of the duplexed structures can be initiated and quickly com- pleted transparent to the CF structure user and without manual intervention.

JES2 and JES3

JES2 and JES3 handle the submission of work and the distribution of output for the Base Control Program. JES2 exercises independent control over its job processing functions, whereas JES3 exercises centralized control.

•In z/OS 1.2, JES2 and JES3 allow an installation to have up to 999,999 jobs managed at any single point in time. In addition, both provide the installation the ability to obtain (spinoff) their JESlog data sets prior to job com- pletion.

•The JES2 Health monitor, in z/OS 1.4, provides improved diagnostics. Even when JES2 is not responding to com- mands, the JES2 monitor, running in a separate address space, will be able to provide information about JES2’s status. JES2 also provides enhanced recovery from cor- rupted checkpoint data to prevent multisystem outages

•In z/OS 1.4, JES3 provides additional tolerance for ini- tialization errors and the MAINPROC refresh function which enables the dynamic addition of systems to the sysplex