Administrator > IMS

Giving You a Reason

Compelling Reasons to Upgrade to IMS 10 or 11

IMS 10: Robust, Scalable, Available and Easily Manageable

IMS 10 can help you enrich your database and transaction-management system with support for the challenges of high-volume, web-based, on-demand processing. IMS 10 leverages open standards and industry-leading application development and connectivity capabilities to integrate across and beyond your enterprise. IMS 10 can increase your flexibility and optimize performance, capacity, availability and recovery.

IMS 10 Database Manager (IMS DB) and Transaction Manager (IMS TM) users are provided with new autonomic-computing system services that simplify dynamic resource definition, ease operations, systems management and serviceability, and ensure security. Agile installation options and facilities help you easily administer, deploy and manage operations from a single point of control to improve visibility, reduce costs and help keep your critical applications up and running with minimal intervention on your part. And Fast Path and utilities enhancements help improve scalability.

IMS 10 TM users are also provided with Callout, Web services, and other connectivity enhancements to ease integration and open up access. New user-friendly interfaces help speed application development and increase programmer productivity. IMS 10 systems coupling bandwidth enhancements provide improved scalability.

IMS 10 DB users are also provided XQuery and broadened Java and XML tooling to ease development, integration and open access. This can open up IMS to the emerging market of off-the-self, third-party tools—using a standard shareable integration point between IMS and other industry databases. IMS 10 parallel database recovery control also provides improved scalability.

With IMS 10, IBM provides architected access to simplify vendor tooling and customer programming efforts. IMS 10 also offers enhancements to both IMS DB and IMS TM users to help ensure they have the growth, availability and systems management that newer environments and cost measures require. IMS 10 can help you maintain high responsiveness to constantly changing environments and reach new levels of availability.

IMS 11: Easier Than Ever

IMS 11 continues to build on a solid foundation of information technology to help you save money and reduce business risk. IMS 11 provides an easier-than-ever roadmap to support your business growth for years to come.

IMS 11 Open Database support provides direct distributed access to IMS data, providing a scalable distributed data-access solution using IMS Connect as the gateway to IMS DB. Universal drivers provide standard access from distributed environments. This support for easier integration and open access can also help with industry regulations compliance and internal controls, and can enable more rapid development and deployment of new applications and services—taking advantage of the larger programmer talent pool.

Additional IMS 11 DB enhancements provide availability, scalability and manageability with:

• An easy way through an enhanced command to quiesce an IMS database across all sharing systems without taking the database offline
• The capability to enable loading the Application Control Block (ACB) members into 64-bit storage to relieve capacity constraints and use dynamic allocation for their ACBLIB data sets
• Improved abend information, thus reducing the time needed to resolve problems
• High-availability large database online reorganization, reduced CPU and elapsed time enhancements—which include a reduction in the time locks are held and a reduction in log volume
• Extended Common Storage Area (ECSA) relief by moving Fast Path Data Entry Database (DEDB) data buffers into 64-bit storage and providing a new buffer manager that allows buffer pools of varying sizes for more efficient use of storage.
• Fast Path performance and serviceability enhancements
• Data Base Recovery Control (DBRC) option of online DBRC regions to run on a Base Primitive Environment base, providing refreshable user exits, multiple exits of the same user exit type and external tracing
• DBRC Migration/Coexistence support is provided to ease migration from IMS v9 and v10 to v11

For IMS DB and IMS TM users, IMS 11 Connect is enhanced to provide simplified TCP/IP access to IMS data as well as IMS transactions, and improves flexibility, availability, resilience and security—addressing numerous user-requested requirements.

Additional IMS 11 systems enhancements provide availability, scalability and manageability with:

• Local System Queue Area Storage Reduction, using 64-bit private for tracking certain types of storage from the IMS Control and DL/I regions
• User Exit enhancements, which include new exit points for calling multiple exit routines from a single exit point and allow selected IMS Control Region user exits to be refreshed
• Installation Verification Program (IVP) Variable Export utility makes it easier to import the IVP variables from a prior release of IMS
• Serviceability is eased by allowing Dump Formatter log records (not physically written to the log data set) to be extracted from buffers in the dump and added to the log, Knowledge-Based Log Analysis data entry panel scrolling and multivolume output dataset allocation, and /DIAGNOSE Command additional control block types and display of module entry point and prolog information

IMS 11 Open TM Access (OTMA) is enhanced to provide an interface to allow OTMA to detect the sick-but-not-dead situations, identify the resources involved and notify IMS Connect so subsequent messages can be routed to a healthy IMS. The OTMA timeout function is extended to cover additional output messages so as not to be left in a hang condition. New commands allow you to monitor an OTMA transaction instance and provide the capability to dynamically change the destination of output messages.

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