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Driving a car in stop-and-go traffic requires the ability to recover from a standstill by quickly regaining speed to stay with the flow. Similarly, in IT, the ability to pivot resources and workloads to meet business objectives and fluctuating demand is critical. With a continually increasing focus on services as a differentiator and changing regulations requiring companies to prove they can recover swiftly in the event of an outage availability cannot take a back seat. Even planned maintenance can mean service-level disruption, which can have an impact on customer experience. Simply put, your systems cannot afford to be down at all.

The latest enhancements introduced with the new IBM z15 follow on IBM’s longstanding commitment to high availability and are designed to help organizations strengthen their resiliency. System Recovery Boost is one of these enhancements– and it’s a key capability for those customers who cannot afford to miss service levels, especially in an increasingly competitive market. Let’s take a closer look at the possibilities it brings to your business.

Speed your processing  

Customers aiming to deliver exceptional response times often worry about outages impacting online service delivery. IBM System Recovery Boost is designed to provide temporary processing capacity boosts in z/OS partitions after an episode of downtime for the purpose of speeding up shutdown and starting up processing. For a fixed time period, it also delivers additional capacity to process the workload backlog that can typically build up during recovery processing. With System Recovery Boost, customers can apply capacity to process workloads to help achieve their pre-outage service levels twice as fast as what would have been the case without System Recovery Boost. After the boost period ends, the z15 image reverts to its normal capacity.

System Recovery Boost uses the computing power of general purpose and zIIP processors to deliver additional capacity, pooling these resources to drive the additional capacity to help you recover your pre-shutdown, steady state processing. It also helps GDPS enable more efficient automation to reconfigure and recover your environment quickly, which can help clients when they are especially vulnerable to downtime.

For z15 T02 customers who often use sub-capacity IBM Z machines, System Recovery Boost can be particularly beneficial, as these processors will then run at full capacity speeds during the boost period–without requiring manual intervention.

Speed Sysplex Recovery

When an entire sysplex is recovering from disruption, there can be a short-term impact to service levels as the sysplex system as a whole tries to achieve steady state. System Recovery Boost has recently been enhanced to deliver short-term “recovery process boost” acceleration during  sysplex recovery events. This boosted processor capacity can help restore normal sysplex operations as quickly as possible and can also  help provide capacity for workload “catch-up” from the recovery event. So, if a DB2 instance were to fail, for example, the surviving members of the sysplex would have to “pitch in” to perform recovery processing which could impact the service delivery of the entire sysplex.

This is where System Recovery Boost steps in to add capacity to sysplex rebuilds, including sysplex partitioning, coupling facility structure recovery or data sharing member recovery, and HyperSwap recovery to help automate the restoration of the sysplex.

Try it out

Flexible consumption models and financing are key to maintaining business continuity. With z15, IBM introduced System Recovery Boost Upgrade, an optional subscription feature that provides z15 T01 clients the option of turning on additional zIIP engines for boost purposes¹.  Most recently, IBM is offering System Recovery Boost Upgrade for a no-charge 90-day trial for new or existing z15 T01 customers who have not purchased System Recovery Boost Upgrade. The trial is available as a self-service download through Resource Link (feature codes and completed paperwork are required)².System Recovery Boost can help reduce the impact of downtime as experienced by your internal and external customers. And in today’s 24/7 environment, there is just no time for IBM Z to take a rest.

Learn more about System Recovery Boost, read the Redpaper for more information, and begin your free trial today.

At least one zIIP entitlement must be available.

Disclaimer: z15 z/OS partitions benefit from IBM System Recovery Boost for one boost period of 30 minutes during shutdown and 60 minutes after activation. Measurements were collected in a controlled environment running an IBM developed workload under z/OS 2.4 comprised of COBOL Batch jobs. Comparisons were made between z15 with IBM System Recovery Boost and z14, with substantially comparable configurations. Individual client results may vary

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