Planning for migrating CICS to a Parallel Sysplex

You might need to change the way you run your CICS® applications to fully achieve the benefits from a Parallel Sysplex® environment.

There are two major areas to focus on if you want to achieve the maximum benefit from a Parallel Sysplex:
  • Affinities

    CICS transactions use many techniques to pass data from one to another. Certain techniques require that the transactions that are exchanging data execute in the same CICS region and therefore impose restrictions on the dynamic routing of transactions. If transactions exchange data in ways that impose such restrictions, there is said to be an affinity between them. Any affinity imposes restrictions on the dynamic routing of transactions and on workload balancing, and can have a negative impact on application availability. Where possible affinities should be avoided.

  • Workload routing and management

    The aims of workload routing and management in a Parallel Sysplex are to optimize processor capacity, while meeting application response time and availability goals. To achieve this, the workload must be dynamically routed to where it is most appropriate, based on the most up-to-date information about system and subsystem availability and load.