I am excited to talk about the latest versions of IBM ZD&T, IBM ZVDT and IBM Wazi Sandbox.
You may have been following the announcements that happened in the last couple of weeks, but before I talk about the highlights of those versions, let's recap and describe each above offering in our DevOps portfolio, plus one more sibling called Wazi as a Service.
- IBM Z Development and Test Environment (ZD&T), it's the oldest of the family and it's in a nutshell the most flexible offering. With ZD&T, one can have x86-based emulated z/OS environments running on bare metal servers, virtual machines, or containers either on-premises or any cloud infrastructure. It offers the ability to create and orchestrate z/OS images based on extracted volumes or datasets from your development LPAR or a unique preconfigured z/OS distribution (ADCD).
- IBM Virtual Dev and Test for z/OS (ZVDT) provides about the same ZD&T capabilities but running on Linux on Z. It provides an unmatched performance running as virtualized z/OS environments on IFLs or LinuxONE servers. It also offers the ability to create and orchestrate z/OS images based on extracted volumes or datasets from your development LPAR or a unique preconfigured z/OS distribution (ADCD).
- IBM Wazi Sandbox is now offered as part of IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack. It's a unique take on x86-based emulated z/OS environments running as certified containers on Red Hat OpenShift. Like its other siblings, it also offers the ability to create and orchestrate z/OS images based on extracted volumes or datasets from your development LPAR or a unique preconfigured z/OS distribution (ADCD).
- IBM Wazi as a Service (WaaS) is the youngest offering of the family. It enables you to have self-serve access to virtualized z/OS systems running on IBM Cloud. One can spin up built-for-a-purpose z/OS development and test virtual servers based on either a pre-installed stock images or extracted data from on-premises systems and deployed as custom images.
Now that we introduced you to the z/OS Development and Test family, let's briefly talk about what's new.
The most exciting news for this release (14.0) wave is the support for IBM z16 architecture and our custom ADCD z/OS V2R5 May Edition of 2022. We are also offering, across all offerings, a new unified and consistent API experience with improved performance when handling large amounts of components and images.
Additional information about what's new and how to update to latest version, please check IBM Documentation website.
Lastly, if you want to learn more about IBM Wazi as a Service just use this link, and don't forget to read Peter's blog about WaaS.