IBM's New z/OS Version 2 Announcement

Is Your Organization Preparing for IBM z/OS Version 2 Training?

IBM has released more information regarding the next release of its z/OS. z/OS Version 2 Release 1 will be a completely new operating system for mainframe computing. Interskill Learning is staying current with IBM and will be prepared to offer z/OS Version 2 training soon after the release is final.

Contact Interskill Learning for more information about mainframe training and z/OS Version 2 training.Read below for the latest news from IBM regarding the z/OS Version 2 Release.

z/OS® V2.1. Get ready to innovate with Smarter Computing. Get ready to innovate with z/OS V2.1.

The new version of z/OS , z/OS Version 2 Release 1, marks a new era of z/OS . Version 2 sets the groundwork for the next tier of mainframe computing, allowing you to pursue the innovation to drive highly scalable workloads -- including private clouds. Its unrivaled security infrastructure is designed to help secure your data; its highly optimized availability can help you deliver new data analytics solutions, and its continued improvements in management are targeted to help automate the operations of IBM® zEnterprise® systems. With support for and exploitation of the new IBM zEC12 server, z/OS V2.1 is designed to offer unmatched availability, scalability, and security to meet the emerging business challenges of cloud, data analytics, and the security demands of mobile and social applications. Through its unique design and qualities of service, z/OS delivers the foundation you need to support demanding workloads such as operational analytics and clouds alongside your traditional mission-critical applications.
With enhancements to management and operations, z/OS V2.1 and z/OS Management Facility V2.1 (z/OSMF V2.1) are planned to improve ease of configuration and software service level management to help reduce the cost and improve the quality of your configuration and management processes. z/OS and z/OSMF together can help systems administrators and other personnel handle configuration tasks with ease.
Planned enhancements for z/OS V2.1 are designed to help you achieve the scale and availability needed for cloud, deliver a superior data serving environment, and secure your mission-critical assets. For instance, z/OS V2.1 is designed to help you:

• Further optimize data placement with significant enhancements to policy-based storage tiering.
• Provide a top-down perspective on performance and capacity planning efforts across zEnterprise ensembles with RMF™ support for new SMF records for the Linux™ on System z® , and for the Linux on System x® and AIX® operating systems running on zBX blades. RMF V2.1 also adds support for Windows™ Server running on zBX blades.
• Extend existing batch runtime environment support for COBOL-based applications to interoperate with PL/I programs in addition to Java™ programs, all with shared DB2® with transactional integrity, and extended support to encompass DFSMStvs processing for VSAM record-level sharing data sets. These enhancements are intended to provide flexibility in application development and provide modern programming models to help you extend business applications.
• Reduce batch run times by having DFSMShsm-migrated data sets allocated by batch jobs recalled in parallel, in order to reduce overall elapsed recall times.
• Simplify I/O configuration tasks with improvements for z/OS FICON® Discovery and Auto Configuration (zDAC), which provides improved support for installations with less-complex I/O configurations.
• Improve auditing granularity for digital certificates stored in RACF® , helping you meet compliance requirements.
• Enable the use of additional standards, with support for Japanese Industrial Standards for Extended UNIX™ Code and the Unicode 6.0 standard, amongst others, to allow you to better serve new customers.
• Exploit available fonts, with fonts included as a new base element of z/OS to give you capabilities you need for print in a global marketplace.

z/OSMF V2.1 is planned to introduce capabilities designed to help you to:

• Manage your software service levels with new reporting and display capabilities, to help you determine at a glance the currency of your installed system software portfolio
• Use a new workflow application intended to help with simplification of configuration tasks
• Manage On/Off Capacity on Demand in an intuitive way

These select highlights of z/OS V2.1 contribute to the foundation of a highly secure, available, and scalable enterprise infrastructure for efficiently running business-critical applications. Some new IBM solutions well suited for this environment include:

• IBM Smarter Analytics Anti-Fraud Infrastructure to help banking, insurance, healthcare, and other customers deploy real-time, prepayment fraud-detection capabilities solutions and integrate these functions into operational systems
• IBM Smarter Infrastructure for Social Services to provide a leading and highly flexible solution for end-to-end social program service delivery, ensuring privacy with a single source of secure data
• IBM Enterprise Key Management Foundation, a comprehensive highly secure key management system, which is ideal for banks and payment card processors that must comply with industry standards and manage keys and certificates

Overview

To compete in today's globally connected markets, organizations need an infrastructure capable of delivering extraordinary service levels. Such an infrastructure must be able to react swiftly to dynamic changes in workloads, deliver extreme scale to support workload shifts, and offer unrivaled availability by reducing opportunities for downtime. Given new increasingly creative security threats, this infrastructure must be "security-ready" by design, and be able to process workloads and data with reduced risk. And it must be able to support solutions using new service delivery models, such as cloud, that depend heavily on the integrity of data and applications.

IBM's z/OS V2.1 operating system in conjunction with zEnterprise and its remarkable hybrid design is such a platform: one that can free you to deliver new solutions to support both your core business-critical applications as well as your next-generation business applications. z/OS V2.1 qualities of service are enhanced through smarter computing to help you reduce opportunities for downtime and achieve superior performance and availability with efficient operations. Smarter computing is built into the core fabric of z/OS V2.1: workload management, I/O, systems configuration, security, operations, and other functions allow you to invest more time on your business.

Planned enhancements are designed to help keep your applications that require near total up time available to support the demands of your business. Several examples include further exploitation of Flash technology, Transactional Execution support for improved throughput, large pages for superb performance availability, and a new smarter task structure to help improve logging performance.

To further strengthen its quality of service, z/OS V2.1 is enhanced to deliver new platform performance capabilities and enhancements in support of data serving and analytics. For instance, in a Parallel Sysplex® environment, z/OS V2.1 is planned to extend support for the VSAM record-level sharing (RLS) environment to catalogs in order to allow you to improve both single-system and shared catalog performance. Other enhancements support data tiering, for intelligent policy-based movement of data, to help you better meet availability, utilization, and performance goals automatically.

With its highly acclaimed security capabilities, z/OS V2.1 can help you deploy the mainframe as your secured enterprise service delivery hub. The z/OS platform is capable of serving the most highly secured and regulated industries. The security fabric of z/OS helps you deliver innovative solutions, including the ability to deploy enterprise-wide Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) services, secure data for use by both business partners and customers, and host solutions that support new cryptographic standards and industry needs. By making cryptography-as-a-service available to Linux clients, including those not running on the zEC12, z/OS extends the strength of centralized and secured key management to more enterprise applications.

Customers recognize that z/OS applications do not run in isolation; new enhancements planned for z/OS Language Environment® can help overcome potential inhibitors to effective application integration, and new RESTful interfaces planned for z/OSMF, such as the Jobs REST API, are intended to help bridge batch-based and web-based applications.
z/OS V2.1 and z/OSMF V2.1 offer enhancements to simplify the user experience and reduce error-prone aspects of systems administration. New z/OSMF enhancements are designed to help you achieve more standardized management processes, automate repeatable tasks, and improve process quality. A new software management application is planned to provide reporting and display capabilities to show end of service dates for software inventory and fix status for SMP/E-installed products. Also, a new workflow application is planned to provide the infrastructure needed to further automate the flow of management tasks to people in the appropriate roles, improving the quality and efficiency of management.

Successful organizations are those best able to gain rapid insight into their businesses to quickly transform data into insightful knowledge for improved decision making. They want to optimize the scale and availability of System z to support private clouds. They want to protect and defend their critical data as new mobile and social applications take root in a global market. These capabilities will become more critical with next-generation workloads. New enhancements to z/OS can help you achieve these processing goals, drive processing of data to new limits, simplify operations, and deliver the superb qualities of service you need to create innovation for your customers.
Get the freedom to innovate with z/OS V2.1.

Key prerequisites

z/OS V2.1 is planned to run on these IBM System z servers:

• IBM zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12)
• IBM zEnterprise 196 (z196)
• IBM zEnterprise 114 (z114)
• IBM System z10® ( z10™ EC, z10 BC)1
• IBM System z9® ( z9® BC, z9 EC)1

1 - These products are withdrawn from marketing.

In addition, beginning with z/OS V2.1, IBM plans to support these and later IBM storage control units:

• 3990 Model 3 and 3990 Model 6
• 9393
• 2105
• 2107
• 2421, 2422, 2423, and 2424

For a complete description of z/OS V2.1 software prerequisites, refer to z/OS V2R1 Planning for Installation (GA22-7504), when available.

Planned availability date

September 2013
Previews provide insight into IBM plans and direction. Availability, prices, ordering information, and terms and conditions are provided upon product announcement.

Read more new about IBM's z/OS Version 2 Release at http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS213-013

Contact Interskill Learning for more information about mainframe training and z/OS Version 2 training.