Parallel Sysplex® technology is an enabling technology, allowing highly reliable,
redundant, and robust mainframe technologies to achieve near-continuous availability.
A properly configured Parallel Sysplex cluster is designed to
remain available to its users and applications with minimal downtime, for
example:
- Hardware and software components provide for concurrency to facilitate
non-disruptive maintenance, like Capacity Upgrade on Demand, which allows
processing or coupling capacity to be added one engine at a time without disruption
to running workloads.
- DASD subsystems employ disk mirroring or RAID technologies to help protect
against data loss, and exploit technologies to enable point-in-time backup,
without the need to shut down applications.
- Networking technologies deliver functions such as VTAM® Generic Resources, Multi-Node Persistent
Sessions, Virtual IP Addressing, and Sysplex Distributor to provide fault-tolerant
network connections.
- I/O subsystems support multiple I/O paths and dynamic switching to prevent
loss of data access and improved throughput.
- z/OS® software
components allow new software releases to coexist with lower levels of those
software components to facilitate rolling maintenance.
- Business applications are "data sharing-enabled" and cloned across servers
to allow workload balancing to prevent loss of application availability in
the event of an outage.
- Operational and recovery processes are fully automated and transparent
to users, and reduce or eliminate the need for human intervention.