IBM has announced the latest release of its Z/OS mainframe
operating system, featuring enhancements to its resource-sharing
and security capabilities.
The company also announced that it has boosted its Z/900 mainframe
hardware with a new PCI-accelerator card that it claimed would
result in significantly better system-level performance compared
with existing models.
The Z/OS is IBM's new name for its OS/390 mainframe operating
system. It was first announced, along with IBM's 64-bit Z/900
mainframes, in October 2000.
With this new release, which IBM first unveiled in September, the
company is building on several key features supported by Z/OS, said
Peter McCaffrey, IBM's enterprise platform director.
The new Z/OS V1R2.0, for example, extends the capabilities of the
Intelligence Resource Director (IRD) to customers running Linux and
Z/VM applications on the Z/900, McCaffrey said.
IRD is designed to dynamically and intelligently re-allocate system
resources, such as memory and processor capacity, to applications
that need them most. So, for example, an e-commerce application
running on one mainframe partition would be able to use resources
from another lower-priority partition if the need arose.
With this release, IBM has extended those capabilities to Linux and
Z/VM applications on the Z/900, McCaffrey said.
Also introduced is a new server-to-server networking technology
called Hipersockets, which speeds up communications between server
partitions. This "network-in-the-box" capability cuts costs and
complexity because it eliminates the external networks that were
previously needed.
Z/OS's security capabilities have also been enhanced. IBM said it
is making available new intrusion-detection technology that scans
incoming data for threats. It is also extending its cryptographic
co-processor support to Linux applications.
The Z/OS represents IBM's efforts to attract new applications to
the mainframe, said David Floyer, an analyst at IT Centrix. The
operating system's support for Linux and its enhanced
resource-sharing capabilities are examples of how IBM is making it
easier to run multiple workloads on the mainframe, Floyer added.