Chapter 5. The on demand environment 113
5.1.1 Revenue protection and growth
This is undoubtedly the top priority for any Chief Executive Officer. With trade
borders and boundaries becoming increasingly virtual, an enterprise must
combat both national and international competition. Companies can turn this
situation to their advantage by exploiting this expanded marketplace, but only if
their business processes and supporting IT systems are up to the job.
In the fight for turf in an on demand world, your competitors range from traditional
established companies to Web-based newcomers to the market. To a customer
who is searching the best deal, it often doesn’t matter. Reliable service at the
right price is the governing factor.
In a marketplace where loyalty can evaporate as a result of a Web search, it is
important to protect your existing revenue base while striving for new business.
With its support for the latest technologies and industry methodologies,
z/Architecture offers a number of benefits that keep you competitive while helping
to satisfy your customers and business users.
Customer experience
Customers and partners will quickly seek alternatives in the event of unreliable or
slow service. Built on proven technology, the zSeries family of servers and
supporting operating environment provide unrivalled reliability and availability
with performance to match.
򐂰 Consistent service
Through the enablement of additional processors or the introduction of
additional hardware to a Parallel Sysplex configuration, your z/Architecture
infrastructure can scale-up or scale-out to meet projected workload demand.
򐂰 Consistent response
With its distinct dynamic workload management capabilities, a zSeries server
can constantly monitor and react to resource utilization. Through the business
language specification of service-level agreements (SLA), the system
balances its resources to ensure important workloads are prioritized
accordingly.
Through constant monitoring, as opposed to periodic snapshots, it is possible to
respond immediately to unpredictable workload peaks. Resources are
automatically diverted to important tasks to maintain system throughput
according to business priorities. Refer to 3.9, “WorkLoad Manager, Intelligent
Resource Director, and VIPA” on page 63, to see the functions capable of
providing the constant management and adjustment required to optimize the
workload throughput.

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