Operations goals

MVS™ operations planning involves issues like workload management, system performance, I/O device management, console security, and console operations, to name a few. But it also involves the business goals and policies established by the installation to allow the installation to grow and handle work efficiently. These needs, of course, vary from installation to installation, but they are important when you plan your MVS operations.

Managing the complexity of MVS requires you to think about the particular needs of the installation. However, any installation might consider the following goals when planning its MVS operations:

Increasing system availability. Many installations need to ensure that their system and its services are available and operating to meet service level agreements. Installations with 24-hour, 7-day operations need to plan for minimal disruption of their operation activities. In terms of MVS operations, how the installation establishes console recovery or whether an operator must re-IPL a system to change processing options are important planning considerations.
Controlling operating activities and functions. As more installations make use of multisystem environments, the need to coordinate the operating activities of those systems becomes crucial. Even for single MVS systems, an installation needs to think about controlling communication between functional areas (like a tape-pool library and the printer pool for example). In both single and multisystem environments, the commands operators can issue from consoles can be a security concern that requires careful coordination. As planner, you want to make sure that the right people are doing the right tasks when they interact with MVS. If your installation uses remote operations to control target systems, you also need to decide about controlling those activities from the host system.
Simplifying operator tasks. Because the complexity of operating MVS has increased, an installation needs to think about the tasks and skills of its operators. How operators respond to messages at their consoles and how you can reduce or simplify their actions are important to operations planning. Also, your installation needs to plan MVS operator tasks in relation to any automated operations that help simplify those tasks.
Streamlining message flow and command processing. In thinking about operator tasks, an installation needs to consider how to manage messages and commands. Operators need to respond to messages. Routing messages to operator consoles, suppressing messages to help your operators manage increased message traffic, or selecting messages for automated operations can all help you manage system activity efficiently.
Single system image. Single system image allows the operator, for certain tasks, to interact with several images of a product as though they were one image. For example, the operator can issue a single command to all MVS systems in the sysplex instead of repeating the command for each system.
Single point of control. Single point of control allows the operator to interact with a suite of products from a single workstation. An operator can accomplish a set of tasks from a single workstation, thereby reducing the number of consoles the operator has to manage.