IBM has always been known for innovation, and their z16 (2022), and z17 (2025) mainframe servers provide customers with many new functions and capabilities. One noteworthy feature is the IBM Z Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency (aka Flex Capacity) option announced in 2022. In short, Flex Capacity takes the concept of availability to a whole new level.
Innovation Meets Tradition
The traditional Production / DR business model fails to meet today’s business and regulatory requirements. Flex Capacity allows for the regular swapping of workload between two or more locations, multiple times a year. This is both a technical and a business function, as it is now far more affordable to do regular site swaps.
With Flex Capacity, the business model moves from “Prod and DR” to “Site 1 and Site 2,” where either can run production at any time, while the other provides the disaster recovery protection. Some customers swap production quarterly, twice a year, or on some other desired business schedule. The point being that now a business can prove to both stakeholders and regulators that its DR capability is real, tested, and repeatable.
Flex Capacity in the Real World
This happens to matter a lot to one major Southwestern utility company, which required just such a capability for compliance reasons. With a small staff and typical budget constraints, they were able to take advantage of Flex Capacity and now perform site swaps twice a year. Flex Capacity is a new “value add” to their business users made possible with only the cost of planning and testing. Mainframes offer companies excellent value with low total cost of ownership. IBM Z is reliable, agile, secure, and efficient — which helps cut downtime, save on costs, and handle big workloads with ease.
It's worth noting that this customer runs only a typical IBM mainframe equipment consisting of a Z server, a DS8000 flash storage subsystem, and a TS7000 Virtual Tape Server. Nothing more. Many large customers have used IBM’s GDPS software to automate their failover processes. However, the price tag and effort of GDPS is often too much to bite off for a smaller shop. With IBM’s standard suite of mainframe ecosystem products, they can avoid that added cost and complexity.
Getting Started
So, what do you need to implement IBM’s Flex Capacity? Here’s what you’ll need to get started:
- Server: A current IBM Z server (z16 or z17 level boxes), which provides the functional support.
- Storage: The IBM DS8000 flash storage subsystem provides multi-site copy and recovery capability. It is the industry gold standard for a mainframe recovery, and provides the needed data foundation for workload swapping between locations.
- The IBM Copy Services Manager (CSM) product, now a part of the DS8000, scripts the complex storage commands needed for failover and failback. The effort to plan and to implement a workload move is dramatically reduced with CSM.
- VTL: The IBM TS7000 virtual tape subsystem provides a tape “GRID”, a mini cloud connecting up to eight TS7000 subsystems, and automatically syncing all data between subsystems.
- IBM Lab Services staff to review your processes, server, and storage, ahead of time.
Employing the above IBM storage products, this utility now schedules and swaps production loads between sites with ease. The organization has a limited staff, but by letting the storage do the work, this capability is available without added staffing.
LRS Can Help
In essence, the Flex Capacity feature simply helps you optimize the assets you already have installed. That’s where LRS, an IBM Premier Business Partner, comes into the picture. We know our customers, we know the assets they have purchased, and the capabilities of those assets.
LRS provides guidance on product sizing and function, as well as ways to better exploit the product installed. We also provide continuity to the account, and act as a “portal” to the broader IBM company for our customers. LRS navigates the complexity of a large firm for our customers, and brings to them the best IBM resources available, whether hardware, software or services.
Many smaller shops, like the utility company described above, can further leverage your installed mainframe assets to deliver greater value to your business. If this sounds like a benefit that could help your organization, please Contact Us so we can discuss ways to help your computing environment – and your organization – reach their highest potential.