system I/O configuration

system I/O configuration

IBM’s z15 is the latest offering infrastructure and operations for leaders in need of the management, protection, and upgrading mission-essential mainframe workloads. The design considerations for the z15 relates to the efficient delivery of new services with speed and at a scale that is useful to any business. The need to manage changes along with potential disruptions to the IT infrastructure, and at the same time, maintaining service availability is core to any organization. Similarly, ensuring the protection and privacy of data to lessen impacts associated with security breaches remains the overriding expectation of businesses from its IT infrastructure. Likewise, the z15 is essential for complementing and augmenting cloud solutions as well as offering resiliency, compliance, and performance by full protection of data and delivering the strongest workload isolation.

System Input/ Output (I/O)

The system I/O configuration analyzes task and supports the system function. The information required to manage a system’s I/O configuration must be derived from different sources. The system has an I/O Configuration Analyzer task that allows the hardware of the system to the administrator to access, from a single location, the data from particular sources. The management of the I/O configurations, hence becomes easier, most so across multiple systems. The system I/O Configuration Analyzer assesses the current active IOCDS on the SE and extracts information relating to a defined channel, link addresses, partitions, and control units XXX. The analyzer also requests the node ID information of the channel. The presence of the Fibre Channel connection (FICON) channels supports remote note ID information that is equally collected.

Additionally, the System I/O Configuration Analyzer is a view-only tool and does not provide other options. The application of the instrument means that it formats and display data in five discrete views. Thus, the server offers multiple sort options, which makes exporting of data to a UFD for later viewing effectively. It provides the following aspects:

PCHID Control Unit View shows channel subsystems, PCHIDs, and their unit controls

Control Unit View displaying the control units, their link addresses, and PCHIDs

PCHID Partition View with CSS, PCHIDs, and partitions

Link Load view that depicts the link address and the PCHIDs applied

Node ID View showing the node ID data in the PCHIDs

Fast and Protected Access to Data (Network and I/O)

The z15 mainframe can protect, manage, and optimize data, which speeds organization and make it easy to maximize the power of the data. IBM z15 offers high connectivity to data critical for attaining exceptional transaction throughput. In particular, the IBM z15 provides a new 2-port FICON Express 16SA adapter that connects the switches, storage devices, and directors at up to 16 Gbps. The support for the native FICON means that High-Performance FICON for IBM Z and Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), the adaptor is essential in ensuring the increased bandwidths and low latency demands of applications. It has a new set of OSA-Express 7S adaptors that meet the augmented networking bandwidth requirements driven by high-speed processors as well as faster network-linked storage devices. IBM z15 supports the IBM zHyperLink, a short distance, direct connect, IBM Z I/O adapter providing low latency connectivity to FICON storage systems. The presence of shared memory communications used for either direct memory placement of data within the z15 or us host-to-host memory communications, based on Remote Direct Memory Access over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) Express adapters, devoid of high TCP/IP costs of processing. Finally, it supports IBM Internal Coupling Adapter Short Reach (ICA SR) 1.1 in addition to Coupling Express LR that interconnects with vital changes to the coupling limits with an increase for ICA SR physical coupling links. The presence of internal configuration variations implemented for the 19″ the level of I/O that can be linked depends on the selected type of power. There are a maximum of 12 PCIe+ I/O drawers at a time when iPDU power is used or a maximum of 11 PCIe+ I/O drawers when BPA is used.

Speed Boost

The server only applies to sub-capacity Servers, such as 5xx and 6xx models. The System Recovery boost has a capacity increase. During the boost period, sub-capacity engines are activated to full potential (CP engines). Also, the zIIP capacity Boost occurs when all activity zIIPs are assigned to an LPAR applied in extending the CP capacity. On the sub-capacity machine models, the server provides a boost in processor capacity by running the CPs at a complete-capacity speed for the boosting images in the boost time, which is dependent on the operating system. When configured as a sub-capacity model, LPARs that run in a boost period potentially access the speed boost. The feature requires that the OS opt-in and support.

Performance Advantage

IBM’s LSPR approach is designed to offer a comprehensive z/Architecture® processor capacity ratios for various configurations of CPs across a variety of system control programs as well as workload settings. The IBM z15 has a capacity indicator of the z/Architecture processor defined with 4XX, 5XX, or 6XX notation, where XX represents the number of CPs installed. Additionally, the LSPR also consists of performance relationships for Linux and z/VM operating settings. The capacity per processors engine of the server processor provides an increase of 14%, with some variation, dependent on configuration and workload. The largest server of IBM z15 delivers up to 25% more capacity compared with the largest z14.

Conclusion

The IBM z15 is a useful server to explore the core systems, I/O features, and networking capabilities. Background research on the z15 suggests that it has a long developing history. The IBM z15 has provided service excellence through uptime SLA and regulatory compliance, data protection, and privacy, and mission-critical cloud.