IBM Z Client Innovation & Strategy - Group home

It’s an appropriate time of year to take a moment to express our gratitude for the meaningful connections we have, the opportunities life brings, and especially for you, our valued partners and clients.

This year has been about creating lasting value for our partners and clients while addressing crucial business challenges together. We are thankful for the trust you’ve placed in us. Our focus on modernizing legacy applications in the hybrid cloud, integrating AI to meet regulatory needs, and enhancing cyber resiliency underscores our commitment to your success.
 

Wishing you a warm and joyous Holiday Season filled with gratitude and happiness!

Announcements

IBM Z Tech Bytes 2023

Tuesdays and Thursdays from November 7th to December 14th at 11am, 2pm, and 3pm ET 

The IBM Washington Systems Center will host an in-depth technical series for mainframe professionals centered around IBM Z Hardware, z/OS, Red Hat OpenShift, and AI on the IBM Z platforms to help IT Professional implement the newest technology. Register now: https://ibm.biz/ztechbytes2023

IBM Z Day Replays

Hear the latest about IBM Z, LinuxONE, industry trends and innovation spanning Hybrid Cloud, AI, Quantum-Safe Security, and more! Watch the replays here

Upcoming Events

• November 14-15 | IMS Database Workshop - Moving Forward with the IMS Catalog, IMS Managed ACBs, and Database Recovery | Coppell, TX | LINK
• November 15 | DevOps on IBM Z Hands-On Workshop | Chicago, IL | LINK
• November 15 | IBM CICS Insight Series - CICS TS Debugging Essentials | Virtual | LINK
• November 15 | Apache Kafka on IBM Z - Performance Experiences, Hints and Tips | Virtual | LINK
• November 16 | Accelerate Digital Transformation with MongoDB and IBM LinuxONE | Virtual | LINK
• November 22 | Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and ODF on IBM Z & LinuxONE: Sizing & Performance | Virtual | LINK
• November 29 | Db2 for z/OS Utilities Technical Summit - Revolutionize the Management of Db2 Systems | Virtual | LINK
• December 5-6 | Db2 for z/OS: REST and Hybrid Cloud Virtual Workshop | Virtual | LINK
• December 6 | IBM Dynamic Partition Manager (DPM) Update and News | Virtual | LINK
• December 7 | IBM Z Customer Council | Charlotte, NC | LINK
• December 12 | IBM Z Customer Council | Phoenix, AZ | LINK
• December 12 | Modernizing Your IT Infrastructure with Red Hat & IBM LinuxONE/Linux on Z | Coppell, TX | LINK
• December 12-13 | Confidential Computing on IBM Z and LinuxONE with Hyper Protect Virtual Servers 2.1 | Virtual | LINK

Tech Corner

Written by Pedro Y. Acosta

Safeguard Your Business with IBM Z Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency

In today’s increasingly digital-driven world, IT plays a critical role in every aspect of business. The infrastructure is the foundation of the IT operations, it drives productivity, customer experience, and even brand reputation. As a result, every business needs to be able to recover quickly from any event that disrupts IT operations in a proven way and be viable for extended periods.

Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency is a new IBM solution that improves the resiliency of the IT infrastructure built with the new IBM Z servers. This is a Capacity on Demand (CoD) offering for IBM z16 and IBM LinuxONE 4 family of servers. It enables you to shift capacity between participating machines at different sites and stay at the target site for up to one year with greater flexibility and control. This helps you:

• Proactively avoid outages by shifting workloads to another site before a problem occurs.
• Test disaster recovery plans and ensure that business-critical workloads can be shifted and run at full capacity at an alternative site.
• Improve business continuity by ensuring you can run production workloads from your alternative site while maintaining adequate capacity at the primary site.
• Meet compliance requirements that require comprehensive and extended testing periods.

Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency provides up to twelve activations, with a duration of up to one year, and up to 24 hours to transfer workloads.  This allows for greater flexibility over offerings such as capacity back-up (CBU), which limits real activations to up to 90 days and tests to 10 days. The 24-hour window to transfer workloads means that you can transfer workloads in the least disruptive way possible.

Additionally, you can fully automate the process of shifting capacity between sites using IBM GDPS.

Flexible Capacity can work in conjunction with other temporary records such as CoD, System Recovery Boost (SRB), and TFP for IBM Z hardware.

The following diagram depicts the implementation of Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency in a two-site configuration:

Requirements:

• IBM z16 or IBM LinuxONE 4 family of servers
• Servers in at least two separate sites
• Tailored-Fit Pricing for IBM Z software 

Why would you care?

Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency gives you complete control over the shift of capacity between sites. This process can be automated using solutions such as GDPS and requires no on-site personnel after initial setup.

This gives you the flexibility you need to proactively avoid outages, improve disaster recovery (DR) procedures, and perform DR testing. By allowing activations for up to 12 months, Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency will help you meet strict regulatory requirements for business-critical applications while minimizing the impact of outages and other disruptions. The allowance of 12 activations per year enables you to test your DR plan often to ensure that it can be relied upon at the time of need. 

You can learn more about Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency and how to implement it here and schedule a call with your IBM Representative.