The importance of systems management for a Parallel Sysplex

IBM S/390® Parallel Sysplex™, a multisystem parallel processing environment, provides benefits in terms of reliability, availability, and the total cost of computing. These benefits, however, bring about a systems management challenge because of the increased number of address spaces that need to be managed. This paper describes how CICSPlex® System Manager (SM) for MVS/ESA™ provides simplified systems management of multiple CICS® regions within a sysplex environment. CICSPlex SM provides workload-sensitive balancing of CICS transactions, a single-system image for CICS operations and monitoring, and general-purpose thresholds for resource conditions within CICS. It also describes how CICSPlex SM is integrated with the MVS workload manager, the MVS automatic restart manager, and automation products such as NetView® and the NetView resource object data model (RODM).