About the course

z/OS RAS and PD

This course provides an overview of Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) principles and their importance to the IBM Z hardware and z/OS operating system. The course introduces the major characteristics of the different aspects of RAS, distinguishing serviceability and problem determination. It also covers the broad area of Reliability and Availability functions and the value that they bring to the IBM Z installation, as well as the management processes required by an installation to ensure that the highest levels of Availability can be attained. The reliability and availability topics covered include: an introduction to RAS concepts, general approaches for enabling a highly available environment, IBM Z hardware and software availability features including parallel sysplex, and z/OS reliability including program recovery environments. z/OS Serviceability topics include: storage dumps, logging, and tracing, z/OS messages, operational problem determination (including Runtime Diagnostics, Predictive Failure Analysis and zAware) and an introduction to using IPCS to analyze two classes of storage dumps.

The topics covered include:

• Introduction to RAS concepts
• General approaches for enabling a highly available environment
• z Systems Hardware and software Availability features, including Parallel Sysplex
• z/OS Reliability, including program recovery environments
• z/OS Serviceability: storage dumps, logging
• z/OS Serviceability: tracing
• z/OS Messages and logging
• Operational problem determination
• Introduction to using IPCS to analyze storage dumps