The Cross-System Image Manager (XIM) technology provides sysplex performance improvements by enabling the distribution and management of discrete units of work (UOW) across one or more MVS systems.
BMC utility products that exploit XIM can divide single, long-running tasks into multiple parallel tasks to be run across multiple machines in the sysplex, decreasing the overall elapsed time.
XIM provides the following key features:
Automatically distributes workload across multiple MVS images that was previously performed in a single utility step.
Performs dynamic and reactive workload balancing, based on processor speed and resource usage.
Increases application availability by reducing the time required to complete utility tasks thus minimizing the time your applications are offline.
Optimizes the use of hardware, software, and personnel through workload balancing.
Lets you exploit parallel processing for database utility tasks.
XIM executes as a separate MVS started task or as a job step task in a utility address space and must be started on each MVS/ESA image that is used to execute distributed utility processes. XIM uses XCF to locate and connect to other instances within your MVS/ESA sysplex. XIM distributes any number of utility processes across all known XIM images by default.
XIM provides a messaging facility that permits the processes to exchange information during execution. This message traffic is managed by XIM through a session that is initiated by the utility process.
XIM uses an event-driven, message-based application programming interface (API). The API reduces the amount of recoding that is necessary to exploit the facilities of IBM sysplex systems.
The architectural design of XIM enables the use of single copy of XIM by a product family and the concurrent use of a single copy of XIM by multiple product families.