PARALLEL SYSPLEX - A SCALABLE, HIGHLY AVAILABLE, HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMMERCIAL SYSTEM

The IBM System/390 Parallel Sysplex allows a parallel server to grow f rom 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 workloa d to be spread transparently across a collection of systems with share d access to data, By the way of its parallel architecture and operatin g system support, the Parallel Sysplex offers near-linear scalability and continuous availability for customers' mission-critical applicatio ns. Parallel Sysplex optimizes responsiveness and reliability by distr ibuting workloads across all of the processors in the Sysplex. If one or more processors fail, the workload is redistributed across the rema ining 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 mu ltiprocessing system. (C) 1997 Academic Press.