Technical Blog Post
Abstract
Meet the new z14: made for secure cloud
Body
No organization on the planet can escape the effects of today’s digital transformation. Ensuring quality in every interaction and transaction builds trust that is at the core of every relationship with clients and partners.
The IBM z14 (z14) was designed as the infrastructure to trust in the digital economy. It delivers function and capabilities to meet the demands for new services and better customer experiences, while securing the growing amounts of data and complying with increasingly intricate regulations.
Now IBM extends the z14 family with a new single-frame model able to process over 850 million fully encrypted transactions per day in the space of two floor tiles. Now, businesses of all sizes can create a low-cost, secure cloud infrastructure and capitalize on new opportunities through trusted digital experiences.
What is new?
The IBM z14 with GA2 code takes your workloads to a new level by increasing your networking bandwidth to 25 GbE for both OSA and RoCE. The higher bandwidth creates opportunities to move more data with the same number of adapters or exploit fewer adapters by consolidating lower bandwidth adapters.
A summary of the z14 GA2 25 GbE features that are introduced are:
- OSA-Express7S 25 GbE providing OSD CHPID (QDIO mode) support as a single 25 GbE port per feature. With this next generation of OSA-Express and when your z/OS Communications Server interface is configured in QDIO mode, all existing OSA (OSD) features are preserved, but now provided with a much higher bandwidth for your business critical TCP/IP workloads. (OSA-Express7S 25 GbE is planned for availability in April, 2019.)
- 25 GbE RoCE Express2 is provided for increasing the bandwidth of your RoCE-related workloads.
A quick review of the 10 GbE RoCE Express2 feature that can replace the 10 GbE RoCE Express feature shows that the 10 GbE RoCE Express2 continues to enable IBM Z server-to-server Shared Memory Communications (SMC-R). SMC-R is designed to take advantage of high speed protocols and direct memory placement of data for faster communications versus consuming large amounts of TCP/IP resources. The RoCE Express2 feature provides increased virtualization (sharing capability) allowing RoCE to be extended to more workloads by allowing additional virtual functions (VFs) per physical port.
The new 25 GbE RoCE Express2 with z14 GA2 code with the increased bandwidth complements the option for better adapter sharing. This could provide flexibility for clients to consolidate adapters or increase overall speed, while still seeing the high reliability and performance established on prior adapters.
The z14 continues to support Shared Memory Communications - Direct Memory Access (SMC-D) to improve direct memory communications between logical partitions on a single server. SMC-D optimizes z/OS for improved performance in “within-the-box” communications versus standard TCP/IP HiperSockets or Open Systems Adapter. SMC-D is compatible with SMC-R for all RoCE features.
z/OS Communications Server V2R1, V2R2, and V2R3 are enhanced to support IBM OSA-Express7S 25 GbE and 25 GbE RoCE Express2 features. See Communications Server support for 25 GbE RoCE Express2 features for more details. Reference information about OSA-Express7S 25 GbE support will be added upon availability.
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