The Business Value of DB2 UDB for z/OS

42 The Business Value of DB2 UDB for z/OS

3.1.2 zSeries architecture highlights

IBM provides world-class zSeries server technology to help today’s enterprises

respond to business conditions quickly and with flexibility. From automation to

advanced virtualization technologies and open industry standards, zSeries

servers help deliver competitive advantages for the On Demand Business.

The zSeries architecture provides innovative self healing features built into every

zSeries server. The features are designed to manage and heal themselves and

dynamically adapt to change. They help you to keep your system running at peak

performance, reducing administration costs and letting you focus on running your

business rather than managing your IT infrastructure.

The concept of servers that take care of themselves is modeled after the

autonomic function of the human nervous system. Just as the human body

automatically breathes, digests, and fends off viruses, a zSeries server is

designed to manage, repair, and protect itself. Because the zSeries servers

incorporate technologies that have been developed over decades of research

and fine-tuning, they are leaders in autonomic computing abilities.

On/Off Capacity on Demand is designed to provide greater flexibility in managing

the constantly changing workload demands of today’s environment.

zSeries servers are among the most secure servers on the market, with mean

time between failures (MTBF) measured in decades. In fact, the zSeries is

designed for up to 99.999% availability with Parallel Sysplex clustering. The

zSeries is designed to provide superior qualities of service to help support high

volume, transaction-driven applications, and other critical processes. It supplies

tremendous power and throughput for information-intensive computing

requirements.

z/OS architecture is designed to support a failure in some of its components

without affecting the others. This means that a zSeries server can survive a

central processor (CP) failure without loss of availability of the system. Also a

middleware software subsystem outage can be survived without loss of

availability of the system.

3.1.3 DB2 UDB for z/OS

DB2 takes advantage of joint development and possible synergy of zSeries,

z/OS, and DB2. DB2 is engineered from the ground up to use many features for

high availability and continuous operations that are provided by z/OS and zSeries

hardware.

How does DB2 take advantage of zSeries hardware and software? This is

explained in the following sections. These sections review how DB2 for z/OS