At the IBM z13 event this past winter, IBM and customers alike spoke about the oncoming wave of mobile transactions and the transformational impact on virtually all industries. It is expected that over one trillion devices will be connected within the next year. Imagine the impact on the mainframe given that 80% of business transactions touch z Systems at some point. z/OS can support the SLAs our largest customers have come to expect for new mobile and analytics applications, as well support the growth in traditional workloads. Customers continue to access information at the point of need, drawing upon huge volumes of data typically stored on their mainframe, their system of record. The capabilities of z/OS V2.2 along with the scalability and memory of the z13 are designed to support new compute and memory intensive analytics workloads.
z/OS v2.2 with the z13 introduce agility and automation, enabling the processing of high volumes of mobile transactions at speed. z/OSV2.2 on z13 offers extreme scale, with up to 85 partitions, 40% more than on the zEC12 and double the on-chip CPACF crypto speed. It can help you better manage service priorities from the server to the fabric, proactively manage disk space, keep more active data available for analysis, and run up to 1 million active jobs concurrently. With SMT support, unprecedented throughput is now possible for Java and other applications that use zIIP engines. For analytics applications, z/OS now offers SIMD and vector processing support to help you gain insight quickly and efficiently. There is an improved, batch capability to support your dynamic processing requirements and enabling you to process data on-demand. Who said batch had to run only at night?
z/OS V2.2 is also smarter with the ability to anticipate operational and space requirements, the ability to route work to only well behaving servers in a sysplex, and to proactively anticipate problem conditions, such as virtual storage shortages. There are many examples of autonomics and built in intelligence throughout the z/OS architecture. For instance, workload management, a leading capability of z/OS to help customers meet service levels, is now extended further into the I/O fabric to provide a comprehensive and automated workload management capability.
z/OS is more integrated into the web development environment. For developers, z/OS uses current programming models like RESTful services to simplify access to z/OS applications and files providing a new way to interact with z Systems' assets. The new Web Enablement Toolkit allows z/OS to serve not only as a server but as a client to Internet-based applications enabling new application possibilities like tapping into Internet based data.
Many clients want to automate operations and want to extend the reach of technical skills. To address this, z/OSMF management with its workflows, automation and intuitive user interface is now entitled in the base z/OS product. Enabling improved choreography of workflow, z/OSMF allows the design and orchestration of scripts performing many tasks in a component based approach. Over the past few releases, z/OSMF has been continually enhanced to provide a faster startup time and smaller resource footprint to make it a more seamless management environment.
Security leadership on z/OS continues the platform's industry leadership. New in z/OS V 2.2, audit records can now be digitally signed to help you detect tampering. Passwords are further hardened with stronger encryption to help you reduce risk. IT managers can more easily meet compliance challenges with z/OS support for EMVCo and other protocols and standards.
Automation is woven throughout the fabric of z/OS. Even new users will find it easier to expedite the migration to the latest release. For instance, network configuration is dramatically improved with a guided install process in the Configuration Assistant of z/OSMF; in once case, this reduced network profile configuration time from two days to 20 minutes. Log files are pre-allocated in advance to minimize the possibility of disruption, and initialization routines are checked in advance to proactively catch human error. Over time, with each release, less programming effort is required to run your z/OS environment.
The autonomics and smarter decision making built into z/OS represent the edge you need to help with mobile, analytics and platform as a service deployments. By taking the strength of z/OS and fortifying it with a consumable and intuitive interface IBM offers an environment capable of handling both extreme processing of core workloads as well as the flexibility and support for your next gen applications.
Read here about z/OS V2.2 targeted for general availability September 30th, 2015.