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FCP – increased performance for small block sizes
The Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) Licensed Internal
Code has been modifi ed to help provide increased I/O
operations per second for small block sizes. With FICON
Express4, there may be up to 57,000 I/O operations
per second (all reads, all writes, or a mix of reads and
writes), an 80% increase compared to System z9. These
results are achieved in a laboratory environment using
one channel confi gured as CHPID type FCP with no other
processing occurring and do not represent actual fi eld
measurements. A signifi cant increase in I/O operations per
second for small block sizes can also be expected with
FICON Express2.
This FCP performance improvement is transparent to oper-
ating systems that support FCP, and applies to all the
FICON Express4 and FICON Express2 features when con-
fi gured as CHPID type FCP, communicating with SCSI
devices.
SCSI IPL now a base function
The SCSI Initial Program Load (IPL) enablement feature,
fi rst introduced on z990 in October of 2003, is no longer
required. The function is now delivered as a part of the
server Licensed Internal Code. SCSI IPL allows an IPL of
an operating system from an FCP-attached SCSI disk.
FCP Full fabric connectivity
FCP full fabric support means that any number of (single
vendor) FCP directors/ switches can be placed between
the server and an FCP/SCSI device, thereby allowing
many “hops” through a Storage Area Network (SAN) for
I/O connectivity. FCP full fabric connectivity enables mul-
tiple FCP switches/directors on a fabric to share links and
therefore provides improved utilization of inter-site con-
nected resources and infrastructure.
FICON and FCP for connectivity to disk, tape, and printers
High Performance FICON – improvement in performance and
RAS
Enhancements have been made to the z/Architecture
and the FICON interface architecture to deliver optimiza-
tions for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads.
When exploited by the FICON channel, the z/OS operating
system, and the control unit, High Performance FICON for
System z (zHPF) is designed to help reduce overhead and
improve performance.
Additionally, the changes to the architectures offer end-
to-end system enhancements to improve reliability, avail-
ability, and serviceability (RAS).
zHPF channel programs can be exploited by the OLTP
I/O workloads – DB2, VSAM, PDSE, and zFS – which
transfer small blocks of fi xed size data (4K blocks). zHPF
implementation by the DS8000 is exclusively for I/Os that
transfer less than a single track of data.
The maximum number of I/Os is designed to be improved
up to 100% for small data transfers that can exploit zHPF.
Realistic production workloads with a mix of data transfer
sizes can see up to 30 to 70% of FICON I/Os utilizing zHPF
resulting in up to a 10 to 30% savings in channel utilization.
Sequential I/Os transferring less than a single track size
(for example, 12x4k bytes/IO) may also benefi t.
The FICON Express4 and FICON Express2 features will
support both the existing FICON protocol and the zHPF
protocol concurrently in the server Licensed Internal Code.
High performance FICON is supported by z/OS for DB2,
VSAM, PDSE, and zFS applications. zHPF applies to all
FICON Express4 and FICON Express2 features (CHPID
type FC) and is exclusive to System z10. Exploitation is
required by the control unit.
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