IBM Mainframe Utility Programs - Supporting Programs - DFSMS

DFSMS

DFSMS (Storage Management System) is a set of programs that allows the operating system itself to take over many of the tasks of managing storage, tasks that were previously performed manually by systems programmers. The storage administrator defines classes of storage, and rules defining dataset assignment into these classes. Then the user (programmer) just needs to specify the class for each data file (often by using shop standard naming rules). From then on, the system manages the datasets automatically, taking care of assigning datasets to appropriate storage volumes, providing backup and recovery, migrating datasets up or down between secondary and tertiary storage as needed, and balancing usage of system resources.