34 Introduction to the New Mainframe: Large-Scale Commercial Computing
2.10 Parallel Sysplex
While the combination of IBM System z hardware and software provides
excellent availability and reliability characteristics, both planned and unplanned
outages can occur. If 24x7 availability is required, then more than one LPAR must
be configured to share the critical workload; this is known as a Parallel Sysplex,
Parallel Sysplex has aspects that relate to capacity, availability, and scalability,
and it is described in more detail under those topics. Briefly, it is a form of
clustering that allows up to 32 systems to be linked together and share data. The
components required to do this, in addition to the servers and I/O devices, are a
time source ...