PSP information

z/OS® and most products that run on it provide files that contain information that becomes available after the product information is published. Kept on the IBM® RETAIN system and also available using IBMLink, these files are called preventive service planning (PSP) buckets, or just PSPs. These terms were chosen when PSP buckets contained only APAR- and PTF-related information, but over time customers requested a more general repository of important installation-related information, and the role of the PSP bucket has grown.

PSP buckets are kept on the IBM RETAIN system and are available to customers at Preventive Service Planning buckets.

PSP buckets are identified by an upgrade identifier, and specific parts of them are called subsets. Each upgrade contains information about a product. Subsets contain information about specific parts of a product. For example, the z/OS PSP bucket has subsets for the BCP, JES2, ServerPac, and others.

For software upgrades for ServerPac and CBPDO installations, see z/OS Program Directory in the z/OS Internet library. For ServerPac, the upgrade is ZOSV2R4 and the subset is SERVERPAC. For software upgrades for SystemPac installations, the upgrade is CUSTOMPAC and the subsets are SYSPAC/FVD (for full volume dump format) and SYSPAC/DBD (for dump-by-data-set format). For hardware upgrades, see PSP hardware upgrade identifiers.

At the beginning of each PSP bucket is a change index. For each subset, the change index identifies the date of the latest entries in each section. You can quickly determine whether there are new entries you need to read by checking the change index.