You may have several triggers to investigate the feasibility of moving a workload or set of workloads to the IBM® System z® platform. These triggers could be concerns about operational cost, manageability, or delivering the agreed service levels, among others. Investigating the feasibility of a possible migration or transition to any other platform, including System z, requires a number of basic steps. These steps usually start with an understanding of the current workload and its pain points, and end with a business case to move the workload. It is important to find out how easy a migration is going to be and how much risk will be involved. In this IBM Redbooks® publication we offer thoughts on how to move through these steps. We also include a chapter with a System z technology summary to help you understand how a migrated workload may fit on the platform. Our focus in this book is on workloads that are mission-critical and require a high level of availability, including disaster recovery.
This IBM Redbooks publication addresses the challenges posed by monitoring high availability, scalability, and performance in an SAP sysplex data sharing environment. It introduces the motivations for utilizing a design based on DB2 data sharing. It includes the principal SAP-DB2 data sharing architecture options and trade-offs used in the industry today and issues that play a role in both high availability and scalability, such as failover design, database connectivity design, workload splitting and load balancing, MCOD, and coupling facility design. The book discusses single point of failure, important failover scenarios and outage avoidance, automation of high availability constructs, and backup and recovery considerations in data sharing environments. Performance issues are detailed in the order you would approach them at planning and implementation time. First, it discusses tuning the sysplex, which is the base for a well-performing DB2 data sharing system, then tuning the DB2 data sharing system, which is the base for a well-performing SAP system, and finally, tuning the SAP system. The book focuses on initial planning for performance and monitoring it afterward, and explains the key points to look for to health-check your system and maintain high performance.
As business cycles speed up, many customers gain significant competitive advantage from quicker and more accurate business decision-making by using real data. For many customers, choosing the path to co-locate their transactional and analytical workloads on System z® better leverages their existing investment in hardware, software, and skills. We created a project to address a number of best practice questions on how to manage these newer, analytical type workloads, especially when co-located with traditional transactional workloads. The goal of this IBM® Redbooks® publication is to provide technical guidance and performance trade-offs associated with resource management and potentially DB2® data-sharing in a variety of mixed transactional / data warehouse System z topologies. The term co-location used here and in the rest of the book is specifically defined as the practice of housing both transactional (OLTP) and data warehouse (analytical) workloads within the same System z configuration. We also assumed that key portions of the transactional and data warehouse databases would reside on DB2 for z/OS®. The databases may or may not reside in a DB2 data-sharing environment; we discuss those pros and cons in this book. The intended audience includes DB2 data warehouse architects and practitioners who are facing choices in resource management and system topologies in the data warehouse arena. This specifically includes Business Intelligence (BI) administrators, DB2 database administrators (DBAs) and z/OS performance administrators / systems programmers. In addition, decision makers and architects can utilize this book to assist in making platform and database topology decisions. The book is divided into four parts. Part I, "Introducing the co-location project" covers the System z value proposition and why one should consider System z as the central platform for their data warehousing / business analytics needs. Some topics are risk avoidance via data consolidation, continuous availability, simplified disaster recovery, IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer, reduced network bandwidth requirements, and the unique virtualization and resource management capabilities of System z LPAR, z/VM® and WLM. Part I also provides some of the common System z co-location topologies along with an explanation of the general pros and cons of each. This would be useful input for an architect to understand where a customer is today and where they might consider moving to. Part II, "Project environment" covers the environment, products, workloads, workload drivers, and data models implemented for this study. The environment consisted of a logically partitioned z10TM 32way, running z/VM, Linux®, and z/OS operating system instances. On those instances we ran products such as z/OS DB2 V9, IBM Cognos® Business Intelligence Version 8.4 for Linux on System z, InfoSphereTM Warehouse for System z, InfoSphere Change Data Capture, z/OS WebSphere® V7, Tivoli® Omegamon for DB2 Performance expert. Utilizing these products we created transactional (OLTP), data warehouse query, and data warehouse refresh workloads. All the workloads were based on an existing web-based transactional Bookstore workload, that's currently utilized for internal testing within the System p® and z labs. While some IBM Cognos BI and ISWz product usage and experiences information is covered in this book, we do not go into the depth typically found in IBM Redbooks publications, since there's another book focused specifically on that
You may have several triggers to investigate the feasibility of moving a workload or set of workloads to the IBM® System z® platform. These triggers could be concerns about operational cost, manageability, or delivering the agreed service levels, among others. Investigating the feasibility of a possible migration or transition to any other platform, including System z, requires a number of basic steps. These steps usually start with an understanding of the current workload and its pain points, and end with a business case to move the workload. It is important to find out how easy a migration is going to be and how much risk will be involved. In this IBM Redbooks® publication we offer thoughts on how to move through these steps. We also include a chapter with a System z technology summary to help you understand how a migrated workload may fit on the platform. Our focus in this book is on workloads that are mission-critical and require a high level of availability, including disaster recovery.
As Linux on System z becomes more prevalent and mainstream in the industry, the need for it to deliver higher levels of availability is increasing. This IBM Redbooks publication starts with an explanation of high availability (HA) fundamentals such as HA concepts and terminology. It continues with a discussion of why a business needs to consider an HA solution and then explains how to determine your business single points of failure. We outline the components of a high availability solution and describe these components. Then we provide some architectural scenarios and demonstrate how to plan and decide an implementation of an end-to-end HA solution, from Linux on System z database scenarios to z/OS, and include storage, network, z/VM, Linux, and middleware. This implementation includes the IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms (TSA MP), which monitors and automates applications distributed across Linux, AIX®, and z/OS® operating systems, as well as a GDPS based solution. It includes the planning for an end-to-end scenario, considering Linux on System z, z/VM, and z/OS operating environments, and the middleware used. The TSA MP implements HA for infrastructure, network, operating systems, and applications across multiple platforms and is compared to a Linux HA implementation based on open source Linux-HA, which is Linux only.
Modernization of enterprise IT applications and infrastructure is key to the survival of organizations. It is no longer a matter of choice. The cost of missing out on business opportunities in an intensely competitive market can be enormous. To aid in their success, organizations are facing increased encouragement to embrace change. They are pushed to think of new and innovative ways to counter, or offer, a response to threats that are posed by competitors who are equally as aggressive in adopting newer methods and technologies. The term modernization often varies in meaning based on perspective. This IBM® Redbooks® publication focuses on the technological advancements that unlock computing environments that are hosted on IBM Z® to enable secure processing at the core of hybrid. This publication is intended for IT executives, IT managers, IT architects, System Programmers, and Application Developer professionals.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication pulls together diverse information regarding the best way to design, implement, and manage a Parallel Sysplex® to deliver the levels of performance and availability required by your organization. This book should be of interest to system programmers, availability managers, and database administrators who are interested in verifying that your systems conform to IBM best practices for a Parallel Sysplex environment. In addition to z/OS® and the sysplex hardware configuration, this book also covers the major IBM subsystems: CICS® DB2® IMSTM MQ WebSphere® Application Server To get the best value from this book, readers should have hands-on experience with Parallel Sysplex and have working knowledge of how your systems are set up and why they were set up in that manner.
The popularity of the Internet and the affordability of IT hardware and software have resulted in an explosion of applications, architectures, and platforms. Workloads have changed. Many applications, including mission-critical ones, are deployed on a variety of platforms, and the System z® design has adapted to this change. It takes into account a wide range of factors, including compatibility and investment protection, to match the IT requirements of an enterprise. This IBM® Redbooks® publication discusses the IBM zEnterprise System, an IBM scalable mainframe server. IBM is taking a revolutionary approach by integrating separate platforms under the well-proven System z hardware management capabilities, while extending System z qualities of service to those platforms. The zEnterprise System consists of the IBM zEnterprise 114 central processor complex, the IBM zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, and the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter® Extension. The z114 is designed with improved scalability, performance, security, resiliency, availability, and virtualization. The z114 provides up to 18% improvement in uniprocessor speed and up to a 12% increase in total system capacity for z/OS®, z/VM®, and Linux on System z over the z10TM Business Class (BC). The zBX infrastructure works with the z114 to enhance System z virtualization and management through an integrated hardware platform that spans mainframe, POWER7TM, and System x technologies. The federated capacity from multiple architectures of the zEnterprise System is managed as a single pool of resources, integrating system and workload management across the environment through the Unified Resource Manager. This book provides an overview of the zEnterprise System and its functions, features, and associated software support. Greater detail is offered in areas relevant to technical planning. This book is intended for systems engineers, consultants, planners, and anyone wanting to understand the zEnterprise System functions and plan for their usage. It is not intended as an introduction to mainframes. Readers are expected to be generally familiar with existing IBM System z technology and terminology.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides system administrators and developers with the knowledge to configure an IBM WebSphere® Application Server Version 8 runtime environment, to package and deploy applications, and to perform ongoing management of the WebSphere environment. As one in a series of IBM Redbooks publications and IBM Redpapers publications for V8, the entire series is designed to give you in-depth information about key WebSphere Application Server features. In this book, we provide a detailed exploration of the WebSphere Application Server V8 runtime administration process. This book includes configuration and administration information for WebSphere Application Server V8 and WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V8 on distributed platforms and WebSphere Application Server for z/OS® V8. The following publications are prerequisites for this book: WebSphere Application Server V8.0 Technical Overview, REDP-4756 IBM WebSphere Application Server V8 Concepts, Planning, and Design Guide, SG24-7957
This IBM® Redbooks® publication is intended to make System Programmers, Operators, and Availability Managers aware of the enhancements to recent releases of IBM z/OS® and its major subsystems in the area of planned outage avoidance. It is a follow-on to, rather than a replacement for, z/OS Planned Outage Avoidance Checklist, SG24-7328. Its primary objective is to bring together in one place information that is already available, but widely dispersed. It also presents a different perspective on planned outage avoidance. Most businesses care about application availability rather than the availability of a specific system. Also, a planned outage is not necessarily a bad thing, if it does not affect application availability. In fact, running for too long without an IPL or subsystem restart might have a negative impact on application availability because it impacts your ability to apply preventive service. Therefore, this book places more focus on decoupling the ability to make changes and updates to your system from IPLing or restarting your systems.
