Business Continuity announcements from February 26, 2008

On the same day that IBM announced the new z10 processor, there were a couple of other product announcements of interest to the Business Continuity practitioner: GDPS v3.5 was announced along with enhancements to the DS8000. These announcements may have been overlooked by some because of the excitement generated by the processor announcement.

GDPS V3.5

GDPS V3.5 is planned for general availability on March 31, 2008. New functions include:

• Distributed Cluster Management (DCM) - Designed to provide coordinated disaster recovery across System z™ and non-System z servers by integrating with distributed cluster managers. Added integration with Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) via GDPS/PPRC and GDPS/XRC.
• GDPS/PPRC Multiplatform Resiliency for System z expanded to include Red Hat Enterprise Linux™ 4.
• Enhancements to the GDPS GUI.
• Added support for FlashCopy® Space Efficient.
• Improved performance and system management with support for z/OS® Global Mirror Multi-Reader.
• Increased availability with GDPS/MzGM support for z/OS Metro/Global Mirror Incremental Resync

DS8000 (2107)

The new DS8000 functions are currently available. They are delivered via Licensed Machine Code (LMC) update.

• Extended Distance FICON for System z environments - help avoid performance degradation at extended distances and reduce the need for channel extenders in DS8000 z/OS Global Mirror configurations.
• Support for Extended Address Volume (EAV) – Increases the maximum number of cylinders per volume from 65,520 to 262,668 (223 GB of addressable storage).
• Support z/OS Metro/Global Mirror Incremental Resync.

Trademark Legal Info

GDPS, System z, HyperSwap, Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex, DS8000, System Storage, FICON, System z9, HACMP and Tivoli Enterprise are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both.

FlashCopy, z/OS, Tivoli, AIX, NetView, Parallel Sysplex, and zSeries are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both.

Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries or both.

Other company, product, and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.