IBM System/390 Division: Overview of IBM System/390 Parallel Sysplex - A Commercial Parallel Processing System

Scalability has never been more a part of System/390 than with Parallel Sysplex. The Parallel Sysplex environment permits a mainframe or Parallel Enterprise Server to grow from a single system to a configuration of 32 systems (initially), and appear as a single image to the end user and applications. The IBM S/390 Parallel Sysplex provides capacity for today’s largest commercial workloads by enabling a workload to be spread transparently across a collection of S/390 systems with shared access to data. By way of its parallel architecture and MVS operating system support, the S/390 Parallel Sysplex offers near-linear scalability and continuous availability for customers’ mission-critical applications. S/390 Parallel Sysplex optimizes responsiveness and reliability by distributing workloads across all of the processors in the Sysplex. Should 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, the Parallel Sysplex provides a computing environment with near-continuous availability.