GDPS

What is GDPS Performance and Parallelism?

GDPS Performance and Parallelism, increases the speed with which GDPS drives hardware actions, along with enhancing the speed of the underlying hardware services.

The GDPS Enhancements are a combination of changes to GDPS processing/scripting itself, and GDPS taking advantage of new functionality being offered by the z15 Support Element. Various APIs used by GDPS on the SE are being streamlined and improved, while GDPS itself will be doing more in parallel when possible. In addition, GDPS will be enhancing its scripting language to allow multiple systems to be addressed in parallel by some commands, as opposed to sequentially as before, and making changes to some control flows to improve efficiency.

How do the GDPS enhancements work?

The GDPS enhancements are available in GDPS 4.2 and above, once running on a z15 CPC.

As part of GDPS 4.2 the system infrastructure management has been improved, allowing a reduction in the observed RTO when there is a need for the IT infrastructure to be reconfigured. This is the case in scenarios such as on-site system restart, planned site or region switch, or in case of a disaster recovery process. This has been achieved by optimizing GDPS & CPC interactions and by providing the possibility for customers to perform actions against a group of System/LPARs rather than against each one individually.

Before this change, all actions were done sequentially, repeating in each step the required handshaking between GDPS and the CPCs hosting the systems. Grouping the actions eliminates the duplicate handshaking processes and reduces substantially the overall time needed to manage multiple systems. Early testing of these changes has demonstrated an improvement of between 30% and 60%, depending on the numbers of CPCs, number of system/LPARs managed, and CPC models.