Parallel Sysplex: A scalable, highly available, high performance commercial system

Abstract

The IBM System/390 Parallel Sysplex allows a parallel server to grow from a single system to a configuration of 32 systems, and appear as a single image to the end user and applications. It can provide capacity growth for today's largest commercial workloads by enabling a workload to be spread transparently across a collection of systems with shared access to data. By the way of its parallel architecture and operating system support, the Parallel Sysplex offers near-linear scalability and continuous availability for customers' mission-critical applications. Parallel Sysplex optimizes responsiveness and reliability by distributing workloads across all of the processors in the Sysplex. If one or more processors fail, the workload is redistributed across the remaining processors. Because all of the processors have access to all of the data, it can provide a computing environment with near-continuous availability. Empirical performance data are used to demonstrate that Parallel Sysplex provides better scalability than a tightly-coupled multiprocessing system. © 1997 Academic Press.