Scott B. Compton

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.