Earlier this week the z15 announced.  This is the latest z processor and is some 14% faster than the prior machine.  It also has a new compression engine built right into the chip, so you no longer need PCI compression cards.  The new compression engine is even faster with improved bandwidth, reduced latency and improved compression algorithms.  z/OS 2.4 of course supports the z15.

Another key item in z/OS 2.4 which I worked on was the System Recovery Boost capability.  What is key here is that when you roll-in a z15 you will get this new capability by default.  There are controls to disable it should you choose to… but the base feature is enabled by default.  What it does it applies a healthy amount of CPU boost for both shutdown and startup of z/OS.

Lets imagine a scenario where you have a planned maintenance window.  You go through your normal shutdown procedure, to indicate that you are shutting down we have a new PROC which you invoke, that turns on the boost.  The LPAR shuts down and then you IPL and during early IPL we apply the boost.  The shutdown boost is 30 minutes and the IPL boost is an hour.  This should give you plenty of time to shutdown and re-ipl.  The expectation is that any part of IPL or shutdown that is CPU limited would find more CPU available and be accelerated.

What are we really doing… 1) we give your cpu’s full capacity during the boost even if you only have a sub-capacity machine,  2) we will allow non-zIIP work to run on ziip’s during the boost, and 3) we improved the commands and sequences for GDPS LPAR during the shutdown and startup.  In the lab environment we saw 2.5x improvement in elapsed time for this processing.  In some cases it can be much more.

This is an industry exclusive and I am proud to have been a contributor to this effort.  If you get a chance to use a z15 I would be interested in your experiences, post them here.