Book excerpt: This IBM® Redbooks® publication pulls together diverse information regarding the best way to design, implement, and manage a Parallel Sysplex® to deliver the levels of performance and availability required by your organization. This book should be of interest to system programmers, availability managers, and database administrators who are interested in verifying that your systems conform to IBM best practices for a Parallel Sysplex environment. In addition to z/OS® and the sysplex hardware configuration, this book also covers the major IBM subsystems: CICS® DB2® IMSTM MQ WebSphere® Application Server To get the best value from this book, readers should have hands-on experience with Parallel Sysplex and have working knowledge of how your systems are set up and why they were set up in that manner.