The integration of the hardware, operating system, relational database and middleware components has provided an extremely reliable, dependable and scaleable platform for its customers. This allows customers to tap into exploding e-business opportunities and expand their marketplace. IBM has integrated into this release a number of other significant capabilities. This was accomplished by adding database parallelism, as well as the new 8 and 12-way processors support. The ability to build a parallel index across multiple processors allows for significant performance gains in application areas such as data warehousing.
Customers continually request improvements in overall systems availability and recoverability.
In addition, customers will see a reduction in IPL times of up to 500ver current V3R7. L. L. Bean saw IPL time drop from 25 minutes to 7 minutes, while in another situation a 43 minute IPL was reduced to a 13 minute IPL with this release. Also improving overall system availability, PTF installation times have been reduced by up to one third. Quality One of IBM.s primary goals in the development of any new operating system version or release is to provide existing customers with a stable release that can be installed with a minimum disruption to existing operations. Quality can be defined to include a number of elements that impact the overall availability and recoverability of the system itself.