J.O.Skip Robinson wrote: >It's easy to diss a solution as 'budget' when it saves >someone *else* money.
I quite agree. As it happens, I'm quite fond of the single machine z/OS Parallel Sysplex configuration that David also describes. I wish more installations without Parallel Sysplex would adopt it in order to reduce or eliminate most planned and unplanned outages (for the part of their business services relying on IBM Z resources). The single machine z/OS Parallel Sysplex is a terrific value and quite easy to implement. For some odd reason there's a misconception that if you want to upgrade from PLEXCFG=XCFLOCAL or PLEXCFG=MONOPLEX that you must add another machine. No, that's not correct. Moreover, you can run terrifically useful z/OS features such as VSAM RLS and Transactional VSAM even in a PLEXCFG=MONOPLEX mode with one z/OS LPAR (or one z/OS guest in z/VM). That's another popular misconception. Within z/OS Parallel Sysplex configurations you get to decide which subsystems and applications to protect, and how. As one example, you might decide to implement MQ shared queues but otherwise not do much else. Messages can then still be received and queued for processing, even when the only instance of a particular application (or whole LPAR) is offline for maintenance or some other purpose. If "Yes, I've got your message, and I'll get to it soon" is good enough to meet the business requirements between 3:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. every third Sunday of the month, or whatever, FINE! There are all kinds of really interesting configuration choices available to cater to particular business service objectives, and it's wonderful to have the flexibility. It's important to have some basic familiarity with these various options if you have a role in advising on configurations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM Z & LinuxONE, Multi-Geography E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
