Mainframe Blog

Resiliency for Mission-Critical Mainframe Applications | Broadcom

Written by Aysen Svoboda | Aug 21, 2023 3:00:00 PM

In today's hyper-competitive landscape, businesses cannot afford application downtime. This is especially true for mission-critical applications on the mainframe that directly impact productivity and revenue. Enter Smart/RESTART, a technology focused on helping enterprise customers take reliability and resiliency to the next level.

Did you know that Smart/RESTART now supports IDMS applications? This blog describes many of the advantages that Smart/RESTART for IDMS applications provides. 

Ensuring Business Continuity

In a complex computing environment, unexpected errors or interruptions can occur at any time, leading to potential data loss or corruption. Restart functionality allows your application to recover from such failures gracefully.  

Applications that can recover quickly from errors and interruptions are better equipped to handle increased workloads and peak times. Smart/RESTART's ability to efficiently manage restarts allows your application to scale more effectively without compromising on performance.

Integration with IDMS

Smart/RESTART integrates with z/OS Resource Recovery Services (RRS) to provide basic support for IDMS applications running on an RRS-enabled IDMS Central Version (CV). By leveraging the power of Smart/RESTART, you can enable restart functionality in your IDMS applications, ensuring business continuity and minimizing downtime in the event of errors or system failures.

Designing Restartable Applications

To enable restart functionality, your IDMS application should be designed around the concept of Unit-of-Work (UOW), ensuring that database objects are consistently updated at the completion of each UOW.

Restart capabilities are critical because, without them, the application might be required to start entire processes from scratch after a failure—which typically extends downtime and increases recovery time. Smart/RESTART simplifies the restart process by providing mechanisms to identify the last successful checkpoint, allowing your application to resume processing from that point onward. This results in time savings and helps ensure you meet your critical service-level agreements (SLAs), while minimizing disruptions to end-users.

Simplified Restart Process

Enabling Smart/RESTART for an IDMS application can significantly streamline the restart process. In the case of a restart, instead of manually restoring resources and resetting the application state, Smart/RESTART automates many of these tasks. It can reposition sequential files and restore working storage automatically, reducing the need for extensive custom coding. In essence, Smart/RESTART expedites the recovery process and minimizes the impact of errors or failures.

Time to value Smart/RESTART is short because integrating Smart/RESTART into your IDMS applications is a straightforward process.

Boosting Reliability and Resiliency

If you run IDMS, the Smart/RESTART support for IDMS applications provides a powerful solution to equip your business with increased reliability and resilience. Incorporating restart functionality helps you effectively reduce downtime, mitigate error impacts, and bolster business continuity. Regardless of whether you rely solely on IDMS or maintain a hybrid IDMS-Db2 environment, Smart/RESTART seamlessly integrates with your existing infrastructure, streamlining the restart process and ensuring a more fluid application performance.

We invite you to contact us today to learn more. Our team of dedicated experts are happy to help you unleash the power of Smart/RESTART on your IDMS applications.