IBM Announcements : DS8000

As I had a day off yesterday (All Saints' Day) I wasn't able to comment on the new storage announcements. I'm just focusing on the DS8000 in this topic. Last summer, more particularly on 22/08/2006 the new Turbo Models of the DS8000 were announced using the new POWER5+ processors. The announcement included also the new 500GB 7.2K FATA disks and 4Gb Fibre Channel and FICON host adapters. (By the way : the 500GB FATA disks were also announced on the DS6000). Last Tuesday 31/10/2006 additional announcements followed. One of the announcements is the withdrawal of these very models announced in august. The reason is that the DS8000 machine is no longer referred to as the 2107. It is replaced by the 2424 machine type. In addition three machine types are added : 2421, 2422 and 2423. The last digit indicates the warranty period. So this is a major change to the DS8000 : from now one the client can choose the warranty period for the DS8000 instead of having to take the 4-year warranty directly.
Another enhancement on the DS8000 is the HyperPAV feature "planned to be offered on z/OS 1.6 and later releases in November 2006. It "is designed to enable applications to achieve equal or better performance than with the original PAV feature alone while also using the same or fewer z/OS resources.""
What's the difference with dynamic PAV : PAV aliases are pre assigned and Workload manager in z/OS can then dynamically reassign addresses when needed if it sees that some devices need more and others need less. This is mostly reactive, and it takes z/OS cycles to do. With HyperPAV, the aliases are not pre-assigned. Aliases are in a pool and are assigned only when needed. It is done in a more on-demand way. It doesn't use z/OS cycles to reassign Aliases. It does not depend on Workload manager function. It minimizes the number of aliases assigned and therefore, the number of addresses used. The number of PAV-aliases needed may be reduced, taking fewer from the 64k device limitation which is important to large customers. The feature is exclusively offered by IBM and requires purchase of the billable HyperPAV feature and a PAV license on the DS8000 and it also requires z/OS V1.6 and later releases