Dale F. Riedy

Integrated high-performance data compression in the IBM z13

The IBM zEnterprise® Data Compression (zEDC) feature provides integrated high-performance data compression to the IBM z13™ and zEnterprise EC12 and BC12 processors. zEDC is a combined hardware feature (zEDC Express) and z/OS® software solution that provides high-performance, industry-standard-compliant compression and decompression. The zEDC Express device and the z/OS device support have been designed to provide compatibility with the zlib open source library for both compression and decompression. The base z/OS operating system and z/OS middleware significantly exploit the zEDC technology to provide access to this compression technology across a wide range of applications. This paper provides an overview of the zEDC Express hardware feature, the different z/OS device driver interfaces for using zEDC, including zlib, and discusses how this support was integrated into different aspects of the z/OS software stack.

IBM System z I/O discovery and autoconfiguration

IBM zEnterprise®, the latest family of IBM mainframe servers, introduces the System z® input/output (I/O) discovery and autoconfiguration (zDAC) feature. The zDAC feature is the latest step of many I/O-related technologies that simplify the definition and management of I/O configurations for mainframe clients. These I/O technologies provide the autonomic management of I/O requests to meet the workload goals specified by the client policy, dynamically altering the logical I/O configuration to adjust bandwidth capacity required, automatically reacting to hardware and firmware failures to adjust the configuration to maintain optimal availability characteristics, and automatically identifying single points of failure from the host through the I/O fabric to the storage subsystems. This paper describes the zDAC capability and how it complements the autonomic I/O capabilities provided by the IBM z/OS® operating system and IBM mainframes.