DB2 11 for z/OS Early Support Program

IBM recently announced the DB2 11 for z/OS Early Support Program (ESP). Selected ESP participants are able to utilize the next version of DB2 prior to its general availability. Contact your IBM representative for details.

The DB2 11 ESP begins on March 8, 2013. For more, read the announcement letter. This is from the overview:

"DB2 10 delivered strong CPU savings that drove great value for IBM clients. DB2 11 follows up with even more CPU savings and improved performance. Compared to DB2 10, DB2 11 clients may achieve up to 5 percent out-of-the-box CPU savings for various traditional online transaction processing (OLTP), heavy INSERT, and SAP workloads. Select query workloads may see even more benefits, with up to 20 to 30 percent CPU savings. Read intensive OLTP workloads may see up to 10 percent CPU savings with DB2 11. Decompressing data is much faster using DB2 11, with significant performance improvements, delivering up to 15 percent CPU savings when running the queries against compressed tables. Deep integration between DB2 and System z continues to bring value.

"Additional RUNSTATS and LOAD workloads can now take advantage of zIIP engines, driving faster LOAD processing, improved performance, and CPU savings. With IBM zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12) and DB2 11, you can achieve additional CPU reductions through the use of pageable large (1 MB) pages and Flash Express, as well as the support of 2 GB pages."

zEC12 and zIIP Processors

Following up on last week's post about the zEnterprise EC12, IBM has just come out with a new Redbook, the "IBM zEnterprise EC12 Technical Guide."

As the title suggests, this publication is technical. However, even if you're not a hardware or OS guru, I think you'll get something out of it, if only for the pictures. No, that's not a putdown of you less technical folk; the illustrations and images that explain the zEC12 technology are really quite interesting. They allow you to see -- as I did -- just what an amazing machine the zEC12 is.

The zEC12 is designed to run z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, z/TPF, Linux on System z (SUSE Linux and RedHat). On the zBX blades you can run POWER7 hardware with AIX, PowerVM, Linux on System x (SUSE SLES and Red Hat), Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 (Datacenter Edition) 64-bit.

Since I work with z/OS and DB2, I’m very interested in specialty processors such as zAAP, zIIP and IFL. The zAAP processor is designed to offload Java workload, zIIP for DB2 workloads (such as DRDA access over TCP/IP, JDBC, ODBC, parallel queries, XML parsing and some DB2 utilities) and IFL for Linux workloads. 

I recently learned that zAAP workloads can run on a zIIP specialty engine if you don't have a zAAP processor. I wasn't sure this has been supported on z/OS, but I searched around and found this great cheat sheet about zAAP and zIIP parameters. Looking at this document I see that z/OS 1.11 provides this support using the parameter, ZAAPZIP=YES. By applying APAR OA27495, you can use parameter zz=YES on 1.9 and 1.10.

All this made me wonder why a customer would buy a zAAP specialty engine when both Java and DB2 workloads can now run on a zIIP. The answer comes in this IBM statement of direction:

"IBM zEnterprise EC12 is planned to be the last high-end System z server to offer support for zAAP specialty engine processors. IBM intends to continue support for running zAAP workloads on zIIP processors (zAAP on zIIP). This is intended to help simplify capacity planning and performance management, while still supporting all the currently eligible workloads. In addition, IBM plans to provide a PTF for APAR OA38829 on z/OS V1.12 and V1.13 in September 2012 to remove the restriction that prevents zAAP-eligible workloads from running on zIIP processors when a zAAP is installed on the server. This is intended only to help facilitate migration and testing of zAAP workloads on zIIP processors."

I’m sure this will greatly help customers plan their hardware upgrades, because it removes the need to guess how much new workload will be Java or how much will be DB2 for z/OS work. Instead of having to purchase another zAAP engine or a zIIP engine, now customers can just buy zIIP engines and know they'll handle both Java and DB2 workloads.

zEC12: What’s in it for DB2 pros?

IBM recently announced the zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12), an enterprise system that provides cloud computing capabilities. Here's a nice overview, and here's Willie Favero dissecting the name.

The day of the zEC12 announcement, the IBM Redbook team released a draft titled, “IBM zEnterprise EC12 Technical Introduction."

I mention this publication because it cites three new features that I believe will improve DB2 processing. 

The first is the introduction of 2 GB page frames. This support means that the page size limit of 1 MB that's available in DB2 10 has grown by 2,048 times. IBM has this statement of direction:

• IBM plans for future maintenance roll-ups of 31- and 64-bit IBM SDK7 for z/OS Java to provide exploitation of new IBM zEnterprise EC12 features, including: Flash Express and pageable large pages, Transactional Execution Facility, Miscellaneous-Instruction-Extension Facility, and 2 GB pages.
• Beyond the existing DB2 support for zEC12, DB2 plans further enhancements designed to improve performance in two ways: 1) using pageable large (1 MB) pages and Flash Express and 2) enabling support of 2 GB pages

The second new feature is improved DB2 I/O response time based on changes to MIDAW and FICON channels. For more, see IBM Redpaper, “How does the MIDAW Facility Improve the Performance of FICON Channels Using DB2 and other workloads?”

The final new feature involves improvements in Java execution on z/OS. Java is planned to exploit a significant set of the new instructions available in zEC12. Here's IBM statement of direction on this:

"IBM SDK7 for z/OS Java is available for use by IBM middleware products running Java, such as IBM IMS 12, IBM DB2 10 for z/OS, and the Liberty profile of IBM WebSphere Application Server for z/OS v8.5 and is planned for use by a future release of CICS Transaction Server for z/OS."

IBM's intent to provide future maintance roll-ups of 31- and 64-bit SDK7 for z/OS Java (detailed above) also applies here.

I look forward to learning more about Flash Express, pageable large pages and the other new capabilities to come.

So is your company moving to zEC12? What's driving the decision for your upgrade?