Here are some features of DB2 10 for z/OS, straight from the announcement letter:
1. CPU reductions for all workloads.
2. Five to 10 times more concurrent users on a single subsystem by avoiding memory constraints.
3. Greater concurrency for data management, data definition, and data access, including DDL, BIND, REBIND, PREPARE, utilities, and SQL.
4. Additional online changes for data definitions, utilities, and subsystems.
Improved security with improved granularity for administrative privileges, data masking, and audit capabilities.
5. Temporal or versioned data to understand system and business times at the database level.
6. pureXML™ and SQL enhancements to improve portability from other database solutions.
7. Productivity improved for database administrators, application programmers, and systems administrators.
8. Enhancements in QMF™ Classic Edition that allow greater interoperability with other programs as well as features that improve queries, forms, certain commands, diagnostics, performance, and resource control. QMF Enterprise Edition provides even more value, including support for QMF-based dashboards and visually rich page-based reports; enhanced QMF security model for access control and personalization; support for HTML, PDF, or Flash QMF report and dashboard output formats; and a QMF metadata layer simplifies content authoring.
You need at least a z890 or later running z/OS V1.10 or later to take part in the beta program. The announcement letter does not say when DB2 10 for z/OS will be generally available, or how much it will cost, or when DB2 8 will go out of service.
Friday, February 26, 2010
RAID 6: A comparison with RAID 5
RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) has its own place in the storage arena, especially with storage as a concept taking off quite seriously in India. There are half a dozen RAID levels which organizations can choose from; the more persistent one seems to be RAID 5. With criticality and protection of data becoming more vital with each passing day, RAID 6 is slowly making its way into the storage infrastructure of Indian organizations.
The pros and cons
The main question that arises: Why should organizations shift to RAID 6 leaving their comfort zone of a certain RAID level? Also, for which organizations does it make sense? To find the answer, one needs to take a close look at the advantages of RAID 6 as well as its downside.
The biggest advantage is its ability for dual disk parity. Currently, some hard disk drives (HDDs) have a capacity of almost 1 TB, in contrast to HDD capacities just a decade ago which were not over 30 GB. Thus, the amount of time needed to fix the fail drive would be more, and it would be a smarter decision to have dual disk failure protection. RAID 5 seems to work really fine with SMBs, which are cost-conscious and do not have any great need to extra protect their data, though in certain environments it may be otherwise.
Apart from the additional protection, RAID 6 provides high fault tolerance, thus sustaining simultaneous disk failures. It is a safer option given that in today's environment there are a lot of organizations having SATA-based drives which are extremely huge in terms of capacity but low on reliability. Thus, RAID 6 is more valid when there is a large capacity to address. SATA is less reliable than SCSI drives or FC drives, hence when environments need added security, RAID 6 makes a lot of sense.
On the downside, one would need to buy a lot more in terms of raw disk space. It will cost more upfront due to the additional drive that needs to be procured. As two of the disk drives are being used for parity, the dilemma is between raw disk space and usable space.
Also, for RAID 6, one needs a more complex system with a method for encoding. One also needs hardware acceleration, otherwise the performance suffers. Thus, performance loss is one more disadvantage. Nowadays we get intelligent raid controllers which enhance the performance. SSD drives from different vendors provide high IOPS, which reduce the performance impact for RAID 6.
The pros and cons
The main question that arises: Why should organizations shift to RAID 6 leaving their comfort zone of a certain RAID level? Also, for which organizations does it make sense? To find the answer, one needs to take a close look at the advantages of RAID 6 as well as its downside.
The biggest advantage is its ability for dual disk parity. Currently, some hard disk drives (HDDs) have a capacity of almost 1 TB, in contrast to HDD capacities just a decade ago which were not over 30 GB. Thus, the amount of time needed to fix the fail drive would be more, and it would be a smarter decision to have dual disk failure protection. RAID 5 seems to work really fine with SMBs, which are cost-conscious and do not have any great need to extra protect their data, though in certain environments it may be otherwise.
Apart from the additional protection, RAID 6 provides high fault tolerance, thus sustaining simultaneous disk failures. It is a safer option given that in today's environment there are a lot of organizations having SATA-based drives which are extremely huge in terms of capacity but low on reliability. Thus, RAID 6 is more valid when there is a large capacity to address. SATA is less reliable than SCSI drives or FC drives, hence when environments need added security, RAID 6 makes a lot of sense.
On the downside, one would need to buy a lot more in terms of raw disk space. It will cost more upfront due to the additional drive that needs to be procured. As two of the disk drives are being used for parity, the dilemma is between raw disk space and usable space.
Also, for RAID 6, one needs a more complex system with a method for encoding. One also needs hardware acceleration, otherwise the performance suffers. Thus, performance loss is one more disadvantage. Nowadays we get intelligent raid controllers which enhance the performance. SSD drives from different vendors provide high IOPS, which reduce the performance impact for RAID 6.
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