Evolving Solutions Perspective

IBM Z15 Announcement - System Recovery Boost

For those of you that follow IBM Mainframe Technology, you realize IBM announced a new server on September 12, 2019. The announcement details are found here - https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/news

Speaking as an IBM Premier Business Partner, this latest IBM Announcement will offer our client’s some rather unique features. One such feature is referred to as System Recovery Boost and is of high value for those clients that have yet to fully embrace a Parallel Sysplex model.

What exactly is this new capability?

Consider for a moment the time it takes to initialize one of your logical partitions today either as part of normal operations or in support of a unscheduled system restart.

An event takes place that "triggers" the need to shutdown the Logical Partition (LPAR). Given the available processing capacity available to that LPAR, the system shutdown completes.

A restart is initiated by Operations Staff and the system goes through the three common phases of System Initialization (e.g. IPL, NIP, MSI) followed by core subsystem, ISV and middleware startup; eventually reaching a "known steady state". Batch queues build up, online transactions process and life continues on this platform once steady state is reached. This implies workload catch up takes place using the processing power normally available to that LPAR.

What makes the Z15 so different?

It is not uncommon for manufacturers to package additional cores with their servers. IBM Mainframe technology has done this for decades; they are even capable of activating those cores when server upgrades are purchased avoiding extended upgrade times entirely.  The IBM Z15 System Recovery Boost takes this capability to the next level.

Prior to the IBM Z15 server, there exists a finite number of cores available to that partition to bring it back online and achieve steady-state. With the IBM Z15 server, two boost capabilities exist. One is known as Speed Boost and the second, zIIP Boost. Both allow you to unleash additional processing capacity, at the logical partition level, for a fixed period of time. 

By enabling the general-purpose processors to either run at full speed, and/or by allowing additional general-purpose workloads to run on zIIP processors, the System Recovery Boost will accelerate the entire restart and recovery process for the logical partition(s) that are boosted. With this capability, you can return to pre-shutdown service levels twice as fast, process your transaction backlog twice as fast and even process your batch backlog two and a half times faster!  All without incurring additional Software Costs.

The IBM Z15 System Recovery Boost is just one example of the technical innovations this new server offers to today’s Mainframe-centric client. There are others. 

If you are interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to me via email: [email protected]