It has been almost 10 months since z/OS version 2 release 4 was made generally available to the market. In addition to delivering on modernizing the user experience and enabling hybrid cloud innovations, it continues to position itself as a trusted infrastructure that is flexible, scalable, secure, and resilient.
As always, through the z/OS continuous delivery model, new enhancements and capabilities are available quarterly without requiring the effort of a full release upgrade and no impact to stability, complexity or costs. We continue to follow our continuous delivery cadence with the availability of 2Q 2020 z/OS V2.4 enhancements. Each delivery consists of functional enhancements that clients are entitled to and can enabled with the corresponding APAR. New function APARs are collected here in a convenient reference format.
---------- What's New ----------
z/OS Management Facilities Ansible Collection
The Ansible z/OSMF collection is now available in Ansible Galaxy. Clients now have the ability to leverage existing z/OSMF capabilities to integrate Ansible and z/OS. Industry standard z/OSMF REST web services make it easy to integrate z/OS with other platforms for flexible consumption of z/OS resources. Ansible is an IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, application deployment, and many other IT needs. By driving z/OSMF REST services, the z/OSMF Ansible collection allows users to drive z/OS automation from Ansible Playbooks running in distributed platforms for hybrid cloud orchestration. Learn more here.
Other new z/OSMF enhancements are included while continuing our commitment to a simplified and modernized management facility that enables systems management agility and accessibility for z/OS.
Web Enablement Toolkit
The HTTP/HTTPS protocol enabler portion of the z/OS client web enablement toolkit allows z/OS applications, running in traditional environments, to more easily participate as a web services client application. New enhancements to the HTTP/HTTPS enabler portion of the z/ OS client Web Enablement Toolkit further improve developer productivity with supports that includes a new patch method and new option method, inclusion of Server Name Indication (SNI) when System SSL usage is specified, and enhanced tracing to help with debugging of complex situations with the ability to turn on verbose debug information using environment variables.
IBM z/OS Authorized Code Scanner
A new, optional priced feature to z/OS V2.4 that dynamically scans the Supervisor Calls (SVCs) and Program Calls (PCs) of authorized code running at a high level of privilege for potential vulnerabilities. Automated systems integrity testing helps to further strengthen the foundation of dev/test pipeline, which helps to avoid potential compromise to the system integrity & security of the z/OS platform. See Software Solution Brief.
Many more new enhancements are included in this second quarter delivery. See the announcement for more detail.
---------- Hear What z/OS Clients are Saying ----------
“ z/OS V2.4 brought us many benefits improved system management, improved availability and security through a set of new functions, to our mission critical environments. The ease of installation and migration helped us to run smoothly the new z/OS release and deliver the service our users depend on.”
– Marc Theis, Head of Mainframe and Production,Centre des Technologies de l’Information de l’Etat (CTIE)
Additional Resources