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Status Not under consideration
Workspace z/OS
Categories DFSMS ICKDSF
Created by Guest
Created on Apr 20, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Volume initialisations in ranges

Today we can only initialise a single disk volume with the ICKDSF INIT command. It's common practice for customers to perform the first initialisation of their volumes as spare volumes with a volser of 2 digit prefix and device address (eg XX1234) during the installation of a new disk controller. This requires customers to build ICKDSF jobs with thousands of INIT statements, which is open to mistakes/typos even if there is in-house automation in place to build these jobs automatically.

It would be very useful if ICKDSF provides the functionality to initialise volumes in ranges (one INIT statement per LCU as an example), which will greatly reduce the effort to build disk init jobs and make the jobs much more readable.

Idea priority Low
  • Guest
    Jul 20, 2026
    Thank you for the submission. We understand the benefit of simplifying volume initialization for large numbers of volumes. However, this request is primarily an automation and provisioning concern rather than a functional limitation in ICKDSF. Existing automation approaches can already generate and manage the required INIT operations, and we generally prefer to address bulk workflows through a higher-level automation layer rather than adding new syntax to low-level utilities. As a result, this item is unlikely to be given high enough priority to be placed into the product plan, so we are declining this request at this time.
    Reply

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