IBM aims OS/390 at online business

OS links corporates with suppliers.

To provide a more robust infrastructure for ecommerce, IBM last week rolled out its OS/390 mainframe operating system upgrade, with improved security and systems management capabilities.

Many of the features added to Release 8.0 of OS/390 are aimed at helping corporate users integrate core business processes with those of their suppliers.

"S/390 provides superior availability for internet trading companies, which will welcome solid system management and stronger encryption capabilities," said Mark Lillycrop, director of research at analyst Xephon. "The addition of virtual private networks (VPN) support is important because the days when a mainframe operated in a different SNA-based networked environment are gone."

With the upgrade, the exchange of encryption keys between the end points of a VPN can now be automated and dynamically managed through Internet Key Exchange.

In this OS release, IBM has also centralised the management of digital certificates belonging to server applications and their related private encryption keys. Support for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Version 3 has also been added.

The OS also features an improved version of the Secureway Communication Server, which provides Virtual IP Addressing (VIPA) takeover. VIPA makes it possible for real IP addresses assigned to network connections to be associated with 'pseudo' addresses sometimes assigned to users.

IBM has also improved Release 7's capability to offer differentiated service to various categories of users, allowing administrators to set priorities of service.