IBM CICS Transaction Gateway for Multiplatforms, Version 7.0 delivers significant enhancements over previous releases, in three key value areas:
- Systems monitoring capability
- Extended networking support
- Advanced security enablement
Systems monitoring capability
CICS Transaction Gateway for Multiplatforms, Version 7.0 can perform real-time monitoring of the gateway systems. This important capability delivers a window into the CICS Transaction Gateway "black box," enabling its activity to be monitored proactively. This capability enables CICS Transaction Gateway to detect and resolve abnormal occurrences before they cause a problem to production operations. Systems administrators and capacity planners can analyze system utilization metrics, and perform online problem determination of these CICS Transaction Gateway system functions.
CICS Transaction Gateway provides statistics concerning a number of important metrics, including configurable system limits, internal thread usage and processed transaction requests. You can also access critical information about connection management and transaction throughput, and obtain information about the proximity of the workload to the levels set in the configurable limits. If necessary, you can take action to reduce the need for planned outages or prevent the occurrence of unplanned downtime.
These statistics are made available through two methods. First, you can access monitoring statistics through the extended command-based administration interface. You can also choose to exploit the new external C language application programming interface (API). Using this API enables custom-built solutions or monitoring applications to use the system monitoring statistics and exploit their value within integrated monitoring applications.
Extended networking support
With this release, CICS Transaction Gateway includes the ability to process Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) connections from remote Java clients, providing for better routing, enhanced security and global scalability delivered in this latest version of the IP standard. TCP/IP, SSL and TLS connections into the Gateway daemon from remote Java clients can use IPv6 connections along with IPv4 connections. Using IPv6 delivers improved interoperability with CICS applications and enables the enhanced routing and auto-configuration capabilities of IPv6 networks to be seamlessly used within the enterprise.
A new "server idle time out" configuration option is provided by CICS Transaction Gateway, which enables TCP/IP or SNA network connections from the Client daemon to CICS servers to be timed out during periods of inactivity. This capability helps network administrators to reduce overheads when managing large networks of attached clients.
Extensions to SNA compatibility enable support for IBM Communications Server for Linux® on IBM POWER® and Linux on Intel®, and for SNAP-IX V7 for Sun Solaris Operating Environment. These enhancements help provide SNA connectivity to CICS Transaction Server for companies that need to maintain their SNA infrastructure or that need to move away from TCP62 environments.
Advanced security enablement
Support for the TLS, Version 1.0 protocol now enables more-stringent encryption capabilities and better interoperation with a variety of secure clients. Along with the existing support for SSL, Version 3.0, support is added for the TLS 1.0 protocol for security-rich connections into the Gateway daemon.
