IBM z/OS 3.1 was announced on August 8th, 2023 and made generally available September 29th, 2023. z/OS 3.1 intends to follow the traditional z/OS continuous delivery (CD) model by delivering new features and enhanced capabilities quarterly, which is intended to avoid the effort of a full release upgrade with no impact to stability, complexity or costs. The following enhancements have been delivered for z/OS 3.1 in 3Q 2024.
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Overview:
z/OS infrastructure architects and storage administrators can utilize the following enhancements, designed to better manage the growth of data and eliminate impactful data constraints and complexities:
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z/OS DFSMS enhancements. Users can now request that the system convert a newly allocated encrypted data set to non-encryption during the first open.
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Cloud Data Access (CDA) enhancements. Uploads of data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud providers can have the data protected by signing the payload.
Infrastructure architects and system programmers are better equipped with detection, reaction, and alerting updates that enable more resilient applications for business continuity:
In addition, z/OS system programmers can take advantage of updated support levels of the IBM Customized Offerings Driver for their installations:
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Description:
z/OS DFSMS enhancements
z/OS data set encryption delivers a usability enhancement to allow users to request that the system convert a newly allocated encrypted data set to non-encryption during the first open of an encrypted extended format, basic format, or large format data set when an encryption restriction is detected and instead convert the data set to be a non-encrypted data set in order to avoid any application outage due to an open abend based on the restriction. With the PTFs for APARs OA66123, OA66122, and OA66336, this support is available on z/OS V2.5 or later.
Cloud Data Access (CDA) enhancements
CDA is enhanced to ensure the validity of the data being sent to an S3 Cloud provider. This enhancement will add a new key:value pair to the operation in a provider file of "signedPayload": "true" to indicate that that operation should use the signed payload support on the request. With the PTF for APAR OA65989, this support is available on z/OS V2.5 or later.
z/OS BCPii enhancement
z/OS BCPii delivers an enhancement to its behavior that allows it to be more pro-active in reestablishing lost communication with a monitored CPC. In addition, BCPii will issue console messages when it loses communication with a CPC, re-establishes communication with a CPC, or has stopped attempting to regain communication with a CPC. This enhancement also delivers support for a DISPLAY BCPII system command that can be used to obtain the current communication status between BCPii and available CPCs. With the PTF for APAR OA62934, this support is available on z/OS 2.5 or later.
IBM Customized Offerings Driver
The IBM Customized Offerings Driver (5751-COD) is a prebuilt, stand-alone driving system that can be used to install a z/OSMF Portable Software Instance (ServerPac) or a z/OS Custom-Built Product Delivery Offering (CBPDO) package when clients do not have a driving system or one that does not meet the minimum requirements for z/OS installation.
The Customized Offerings Driver has been updated to include a subset of a z/OS V2.5 operating system, including selected functions in z/OSMF and IBM 64-bit SDK for z/OS, Java™ Technology Edition, 8.0 that can run on any IBM Z processor that is supported by z/OS V2.5 or later.
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