This video belongs to the openHPI course Mainframe - Crucial Role in Modern Enterprise Computing. Do you want to see more?
An error occurred while loading the video player, or it takes a long time to initialize. You can try clearing your browser cache. Please try again later and contact the helpdesk if the problem persists.
Scroll to current position
- 00:00Yeah, hello, it's me again, Wolfram Greis from the European Mainframe Academy,
- 00:06and in the next video clip, I want to talk about
- 00:11z/OS components. z/OS is the main operating system running
- 00:15on IBM mainframes and with this
- 00:20clip, I want to talk about the components that are the most important
- 00:24components, I don't talk about all of them, just the most important components
- 00:29that are running in a z/OS environment.
- 00:32And when we talk about these components, there are two components where
- 00:37we talk a little later in more detail.
- 00:41These two components have a direct interface to the users and these interfaces
- 00:45on the one side, the top management we see Job Entry Subsystem.
- 00:51Job Entry Subsystem is the component that is necessary
- 00:56for running batch jobs for running so-called starter tasks.
- 01:00I think Professor Brune already mentioned them, what are starter tasks,
- 01:05and also z/OS users get in contact with JES without
- 01:10having to know that. But other people who
- 01:15want to submit so-called batch jobs, they need, in any
- 01:20case, the interface to the Job Entry Subsystem.
- 01:24We have another component that has a direct interface to the
- 01:28users. This is the Data management and the IO supervisor.
- 01:33This is where the data is managed to and
- 01:39you have managed on the datasets and the datasets
- 01:44reside on DASD.
- 01:47DASD is the abbreviation, for Direct Access Storage
- 01:51Device. In other environments, we just talk about disks, and also
- 01:56in the mainframe environment, sometimes we talk about disks.
- 02:01And now we have a set of components, these screened components,
- 02:08the so-called supervisor and the supervisor can be seen as something
- 02:12like a kernel in our operating system.
- 02:16It's a base of 'z' operating system and we don't go into
- 02:21more detail just to mention them here, we have an interrupt handler, as
- 02:26the name states, it handles interrupts and interrupts are really important.
- 02:31All stuff that is coming into an mainframe operating
- 02:36system comes via interrupts.
- 02:39We can say that the IBM 'z' mainframe is a
- 02:44100 percent interrupt-controlledenvironment.
- 02:47So all the work that comes into the
- 02:52system and also works that ends within the system, all are controlled
- 02:57by interrupts.
- 02:59In the middle of the management of such an environment are the so-called
- 03:03Address Spaces.
- 03:06Professor Brune already mentioned them in the last video clip.
- 03:09Address Spaces, there are different kinds of address spaces, one of the more important
- 03:13address spaces as examples are the so-called Starter Tasks.
- 03:17In other operating system environments, you will talk about
- 03:22daemons. So a daemon is very
- 03:27well compatible with starter tasks and in general the address spaces.
- 03:31Again, there is a nice comparison, if you compare it with other
- 03:36operating systems, you would talk about processes.
- 03:39So a process on a Unix or Linux system for example
- 03:44is comparable to an address space and the address spaces have to be
- 03:49managed and the interface and the components that manages
- 03:53these address spaces is a so-called dispatch off and on
- 03:58the right side with these green rectangles, we
- 04:02have program management, how programs are managed.
- 04:05We have task management, task can be compared to other
- 04:10system environments like threads.
- 04:13A task is like a thread. So when we talk about multitasking in a
- 04:18mainstream environment, it's the same as if you talk about multithreading
- 04:22in a Unix or Linux environment.
- 04:25And then we have the storage management and just to emphasize,
- 04:30it has nothing to do with the disk management.
- 04:34It's really the storage management within the
- 04:39system and we have three subcomponents, it's
- 04:44RSM, VSM, and the ASM. This is the Real Storage Manager (RSM) controlling
- 04:48the real storage. It's Virtual Storage Manager
- 04:54managing your virtual storage, and the Auxillary Storage Manager (ASM)
- 04:59is the paging manager.
- 05:02The last components are System Resource Manager and the Workload Manager.
- 05:07These are really important subcomponents, the system
- 05:11resource manager as the name states, controls system resources
- 05:16and in very, very former days, it was the only component
- 05:21to control such an environment.
- 05:23Though in former days, we had a focus on resource management.
- 05:29In between, we got the workloadmanager, workload manager is an
- 05:33extension of these control management things
- 05:38and the workload manager, as although the name states, controls some workloads
- 05:43and it's really important because on our IBM mainframe,
- 05:48normally they are running very different workloads, they are
- 05:53running batch workloads, time-sharing, online workloads, databases,
- 05:58transactions and so on. These are workloads and the workload manager
- 06:02controls these workloads and in between, we talk about the so-called Goal
- 06:07Mode. It means that we set the goals for each and every one of our
- 06:11workloads and the workload manager tries to keep this goal
- 06:17exactly as they are set, and they can do it normally really,
- 06:21really very efficiently. So it's not uncommon in a mainframe environment that
- 06:26we have for a longer interval, let's say, one or
- 06:30two hours, 100 percent CPU utilization.
- 06:34It's normally no problem at all because these different workloads have different
- 06:38priorities and the workload manager controls who gets control of the
- 06:42resources.
- 06:45This was a very brief overview of
- 06:50the z/OS components and this was this video clip for
- 06:54these components. If you have any questions, remarks, and so on.
- 06:57Please use the discussion forum on the HPI
- 07:02platform. Thank you very much and see you again in the next video
- 07:07clip.
To enable the transcript, please select a language in the video player settings menu.