Official Announcement : z/OS 2.1

I thought about creating one post with the rest of the announcements that were made yesterday, but perhaps it's easier to put them in several posts. It also makes it easier to find them back afterwards.

So after a lot of speculations first, a statement of direction and a preview announcement, it has now been officially announced : 'IBM z/OS Version 2 Release 1 delivers the foundation for Smarter Computing (Zp13-0371)'. And with it of course z/OSMF 2.1 is also announced : 'IBM z/OS Management Facility V2.1 enables you to optimize productivity and simplify management tasks (Zp13-0391)'.

I'm not going to give you another highlights show, but let me point out some practical data.

First of all, the hardware requirements :

• IBM zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12)
• IBM zEnterprise BC12 (zBC12)
• IBM zEnterprise 196 (z196)
• IBM zEnterprise 114 (z114)
• IBM System z10® ( z10™ EC, z10 BC)
• IBM System z9® ( z9® EC, z9 BC)

So, older than z9 is not possible.

Planned availability date is September 30, 2013 (as was already expected too).

I must say it's quite an extensive read if you want to go through the entire announcement. Do check out the Statements of Direction where I read e.g. that "BM plans a number of changes to z/OS preventive service ordering for third quarter 2014".

The product id is 5650-ZOS.

More reading ? The datasheet (16p) is over here.

Oh, one more thing that might interest you. What about the price ? Well, the announcement says "For all local charges, contact your IBM representative". But I see that the prices have been published and I can say that, for Belgium, prices will go up with about 4% to 5%. I guess that will be pretty much the same elsewhere too.