What's New?

V2.3.1 - January 2022
Security Advisory
Apache Log4j Vulnerabilities To address the recently disclosed Apache Log4j vulnerabilities 
(CVE-2021-44228, CVE-2021-45046, and CVE-2021-45105), Model9 components do not make use of Apache Log4j thus there's no need for any additional actions.
Added
New Resources page - A sneak-peek of Model9’s upcoming new User Interface (UI) is now available! Head to the resources page of the current UI application and you can see new sort, search, and enhanced filtering capabilities. Your feedback counts! Help us improve our application by answering this short survey
New resources page
Record Descriptor Word (RDW) support - The transformation service now includes the RDW field for raw output format supported for record format V and VB.
RACF TRUSTED attribute support - The RACF TRUSTED attribute can now be used instead of the OPERATIONS attribute to run the Model9 agent and the life cycle procedures. This will allow logging all the actions the Model9 components are performing. For more details see the Installation and Upgrade Guide.
Fixed
Fixed an expiration issue for rolled off archive Generation Data Sets (GDS), when the base Generation Data Group (GDG) was defined with the PURGE attribute. Prior to this release the expiration date wasn’t set correctly and the life cycle was unable to delete the data set after it was rolled off.
Fixed Command Line Interface (CLI) LISTDSN returning "no results found" when resource name contains special characters.
Fixed CDS parallelization issue on slow systems, by using a locking mechanism. 
Fixed CDS jobs failures in slow systems, when jobs run one after another.
Other Improvements 
Allow searching resources based on qualified names and with wildcards. This allows filtering more easily for a specific resource.
Run log will now indicate if a full dump has a dump conditional name to allow identifying volumes with temporary names.
Reduce the agent’s General purpose CP (GCP) by setting the default value of _EDC_PTHREAD_YIELD to 0.
​
V2.3 - December 2021
Security Advisory
Apache Log4j Vulnerabilities To address the recently disclosed Apache Log4j vulnerabilities 
(CVE-2021-44228, CVE-2021-45046, and CVE-2021-45105), Model9 components do not make use of Apache Log4j thus there's no need for any additional actions.
Added
New Resources page - A sneak-peek of Model9’s upcoming new User Interface (UI) is now available! Head to the resources page of the current UI application and you can see new sort, search, and enhanced filtering capabilities. Your feedback counts! Help us improve our application by answering this short survey
New resources page
Record Descriptor Word (RDW) support - The transformation service now includes the RDW field for raw output format supported for record format V and VB.
RACF TRUSTED attribute support - The RACF TRUSTED attribute can now be used instead of the OPERATIONS attribute to run the Model9 agent and the life cycle procedures. This will allow logging all the actions the Model9 components are performing. For more details see the Installation and Upgrade Guide.
Fixed
Fixed an expiration issue for rolled off archive Generation Data Sets (GDS), when the base Generation Data Group (GDG) was defined with the PURGE attribute. Prior to this release the expiration date wasn’t set correctly and the life cycle was unable to delete the data set after it was rolled off.
Fixed Command Line Interface (CLI) LISTDSN returning "no results found" when resource name contains special characters.
Other Improvements 
Allow searching resources based on qualified names and with wildcards. This allows filtering more easily for a specific resource.
Run log will now indicate if a full dump has a dump conditional name to allow identifying volumes with temporary names.
Reduce the agent’s General purpose CP (GCP) by setting the default value of _EDC_PTHREAD_YIELD to 0.
V2.2 - October 2021
Added
A new setting was added to control the DFDSS OPTIMIZED used during data set backup and archive.
MinIO artifact upgraded to a release 2021-07-12.
Fixed
Introduced a fix where the life cycle fails with ZM9L014E due to internal data retrieval issue 
Fixed an unclear message when a data set restore through the UI fails.
Model9 UI fix to correct license expiration notice.
Fixed UI restore being unresponsive when no active agents are available.
Improved
UI Resources page table width is now customizable. 
UI Resources page can now filter based on date.
V2.1 - July 2021
Added
Obfuscation capabilities for the object storage credentials allowing for obfuscation of the secret key to prevent it from being in clear text.
Transformation service support for FBA and VSAM with Extended Addressability file types is now available.
Multi delete functionality from the status report page allows clearing the entire content of a specific run. 
Fixed
Reintroduce the CMD origin column for the LISTDSN CLI command to indicate whether the backup originated from CLI or the UI.
Model9 UI CSS selectors were fixed in several places which caused some glitches.
Model9’s lifecycle process should now take into consideration the previous run results when it initiates to verify if previous dates need to be reprocessed.
Fixed support issues for special characters in the SMS Management Class name.
Fixed CLI DELBACK command to support more than a 1000 backup versions for a single data set.
Transformation service infinite loop prevention fix for DB2 image copy processing.
Improved
Policy Finalization process will now be a parallelized process which will reduce the server time for policy runs. 
UI API Keys page internal infrastructure upgrade to speed up its loading times and fix keys removal issue.
UI Resources page would now allow filtering based on the origin of a data set backup.
V2.0 - March 2021
Added
Management server resources search page: removed the 350 version limitation. The search page now allows searching through all versions in the system. Maximum page has has been increased to 500 versions. As part of this change, the '**' wildcard has been superseded with '*' which now implies zero or more characters.
​AWS S3 Infrequent Access and Azure Blob Cool tier support which allow a considerable reduction in storage costs for newly written blobs.
Archive policy retention override support.
Backup versions originating from CLI can now be deleted and restored from the management server's resources search page.
Official support for Scality S3 as an object storage vendor.
Transformation services now support converting DB2 Image Copies to open system formats such as JSON and CSV.
Fixed
In some cases, archive errors were reported incorrectly in the management server's backup logs.
Restore data sets did not retain the original backed up data set's creation and reference dates.
In some cases, full volume dumps ended in error due to DCOLLECT warnings.
Incorrect backup and archive handling of data sets with the special EXPTD date of '99000'.
Full dumps of volumes with short VOLSERs completed with a warning.
Archive policies edit page incorrectly showed a generations field.
LISTVOL and LISTDSN CLI commands did not show a warning in the case of failed object storage connectivity.
In some cases, a restore operation's error was not propagated to the backup log on the management server.
Fixed several stability issues in M9SAPI.
Improved
Improved z/OS below the line memory management.
Improved memory management in M9SAPI.
V1.8
Added
Azure Active Directory (AD) authentication support for Microsoft Azure cloud users. Model9 introduces Azure Active Directory (AD) authentication and proxy support, providing simplified access to Azure’s public cloud. Model9 users can now use their enterprise-provided AD credentials to gain access to the Azure cloud. See Microsoft Azure configuration for more details.
Ease migration from CA-Disk to cloud data management. Gain better control of backup policies with the ability to specify per-policy retention periods and deletion dates. This capability helps smooth the migration from legacy backup software such as CA-Disk to modern, cloud-oriented solutions. See Backing up data sets for more details.
Enhanced system health visibility. Version 1.8 provides at-a-glance system health and connectivity data for the Model9 management server and database, as well as the object storage service. See Server status for more details.
Improved access to log data. Mainframe users can download server logs for advanced analysis - without having to set up an SSH session on the Linux server. See Where to look for error messages for more details.
In addition, log summary reports can be viewed on the Model9 browser page without having to open and scan individual log files. See Viewing resources that were created by an activity for more details.
Enhanced CLI security permissions verification. See Security considerations for more details.
V1.7
Added
You can use the new BACKDSN CLI command to perform on-demand, data-set level backup operations directly from the mainframe to any cloud/on-premise, hybrid or public. This functionality enables the execution of backup operations within scripts and JCLs, and simplifies storage administration.
The BACKDSN CLI command also includes NEWNAME, NEWDATE and NEWTIME parameters intended for simplifying migration from legacy backup software by allowing you to specify the same backup attributes as were stored by the original backup software.
In addition, the BACKDSN CLI command supports specifying a backup retention period. The life cycle management process is enhanced to delete backups whose retention period has expired.
A new DELBACK CLI command is used to delete data set backups created using the BACKDSN CLI command. Moreover, the command enables management of backups within scripts and JCLs, and simplifies storage administration using native Mainframe tools only.
The agent is enhanced to manage the number of concurrent system utilities, such as ADRDSSU (DFDSS), active at the same time and queue additional requests when no more instances can be run in parallel due to address space virtual storage constraints. This enhancement enables running multiple server policies in parallel and avoiding errors due to agent resources being unavailable.
Obsolete activity logs can now be deleted to free up space on the management server file system and remove unneeded information from the management interface. New server parameters control how long activity logs shall be retained after all resources have expired.
The life cycle management process has been enhanced to parallelize backup and archive deletes providing a performance improvement of up to 90% in processing time for large data sets.
The restore and recall actions, whether invoked from CLI or from the management UI, have been enhanced to better utilize network throughput, providing up to 35% reduction in restore or recall times for large data sets.
The output of the LISTDSN CLI command has been changed to include an additional column indicating whether a data set backup was created using a CLI command or a policy run. Please refer to the CLI User Guide for more information.
Fixed
The management graphical user interface is updated to correctly handle data set delete actions performed on Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) protected storage, such as Hitachi HCP WORM or AWS S3 ObjectLock, and avoid inconsistencies between the management server database and the object storage. Note that data immutability is only maintained by the object storage platform..
Blocked the erroneous ability to restore archived data sets, which led to pending ENQs being left standing in the Model9 agent address space.
Fixed discovery process not to skip storage groups and volume serial names containing the ‘$’ sign.
Fixed discovery process not to skip data sets residing on EAV volumes during an archive policy run, which marked the entire run as ‘Ended Error’.
Fixed an issue with listing objects using certain API calls when using Hitachi HCP object storage as the target storage.
The Policies page in the user interface has been enhanced to remember the page number, sort order and search filter for the duration of the session, whether editing or creating a new policy.
V1.6
Release 1.6 features an enriched set of mainframe-focused operations that eliminate dependence on external systems
Added
Use the new CLI ARCHIVE (Command Line Interface) command to perform on-demand, data-set level archiving operations directly from the mainframe to any cloud - on-prem, hybrid or public. This functionality enables the execution of archive operations within scripts and JCLs, and simplifies storage administration.
Run the Model9 management server in a z/OS container extension (zCX), and eliminate dependence on external systems. The Model9 docker container can be deployed on zCX, Linux on Z, or any other docker, while supporting the familiar graphical user interface. To learn more, join the Model9 speaking session at SHARE Virtual 2020, on September 30, 2020, 4:15 PM-5:00 PM.
Simplify monitoring by extracting the policy’s run logs from the management server to the SAPI batch job in z/OS.  No need to access the logs via the server.
Convert the “discovery” phase to a zIIP eligible process for improved policy performance and reduced CPU consumption. See the installation guide for further details.
The Archive policy now skips data sets with expiration date in the past, instead of archiving them. The policy run log reports these data sets to notify the user that an action may be required outside of the archive policy in order to delete these data sets.
The Archive policy now uses the correct scope of SYSPLEX instead of the previously used SYSTEM when checking whether a data set is eligible for archive. The false scope would cause certain data sets to be marked as eligible for archive in the discovery phase of the policy, but to fail during the archive action itself.
When backing up a symbolic link to a file, the policy will only backup the symbolic link itself and not the file that the link is pointing to. If the policy's filter matches the actual file itself, it will be backed up (just not via the link). When backing up a symbolic link to a directory, the policy will backup the directory's contents and the link pointing to the directory, but the directory itself (which might have permissions) will not be backed up.
IBM Java 8 SR6 FP15 is not supported for the z/OS agent.
V1.5.3
Added
Added full integration with Cohesity's Data Platform and marketplace, consolidating onto Cohesity for unified management, simpler protection, and deep security.
Added detection and notification on recall and restore of objects that were moved to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
Added support for archive and recall of GDG Extended format data sets.
Added detection and handling of write inconsistencies in the underlying IBM JVM. The fix detects an incomplete write attempt, reports it to the log and performs a retry. Additionally, a change to the JVM interface was implemented to significantly decrease the probability of this situation to happen. 
Fixed
Fixed the Export action to support SMF files format.
Fixed policy execution to prevent it from skipping the rest of a volume or of a storage group when encountering an unexpected error.
Reduced automatic recall retry attempts, to avoid long waits and excessive messages to the agent’s log and to the SYSLOG.
Fixed policy scheduling to ignore disabled policies.
Increase the CLI LISTDSN output size to accommodate very large queries.
Improved
Provide a configurable UI session timeout.
Support multiple licenses in a single license file to better facilitate SYSPLEX spanning over different machines and to avoid manual license updates in disaster recovery scenarios.
Simplify installation by improving the configuration file structure.
The server logs by default now rotate every 24 hours or 500MB.
The location of the server logs has been changed and is now under MODEL9_HOME/logs to allow easier retrieval of the logs when needed.
Improved jclouds log visibility to allow faster diagnosis of network-related issues.
Automatic recall does not perform as expected in situations such as IDCAMS DELETE MASK and LISTDSI NORECALL. These situations are documented internally and will be handled in a future release. The suggested workaround is to use the CLI DELARC command to delete archived data sets and the ZM9$NORC DD to exclude automatic recall from specific jobs.
Model9 Documentation
Next - Before You Install
Firewall and network connectivity settings
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