Rocked by record losses, acquisitions and takeovers, the financial services sector is in need of some relief. Gregg Willhoit, chief architect of the DataDirect® Shadow® product addresses today's economic concerns and offers conference attendees effective strategies for lowering mainframe total-cost-of-ownership in his presentations, "Exploiting the zIIP Specialty Engine: New Technologies for Cost Effective Mainframe SOA," at the System z show and "Cost Effective SOA Enablement for CA-IDMS Systems Using Specialty Engines" at the CA World user conference.
Mainframes are essential infrastructure technology at large-scale financial institutions. Business reorganization relies on integration technologies that can quickly combine business systems and the underlying data. The DataDirect Shadow integration platform provides unique capabilities to lower the cost of integrating mainframe data and programs with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) or Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives.
In the Gartner, Inc. research report, IBM Mainframe Specialty Engines Affect General Purpose Processor Performance, May 27, 2008 analysts John R. Phelps and Mike Chuba cite in their recommendations, "specialty engines, regardless of multiprocessing (MP) ratio impact, represent the most attractive price/performance environment for a mainframe..."
The DataDirect Shadow product is the first and only mainframe integration middleware capable of diverting processing intensive SOA, event publishing and data workloads from the mainframe general purpose processor to the non-restricted, more economic, mainframe specialty engines. As a result, organizations can more readily and cost-effectively expand the use of the mainframe with SOA and across a broad set of applications, while improving performance and lowering mainframe total-cost-of-ownership.
Mainframe Cost Savings Use-Case Example
Assume a 20 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for the System z computing power calculation, Millions of Instructions Per Second (MIPS), with a current capacity utilization rate of 66 percent, and an average incremental SOA processing load of 10 percent. With traditional solutions, an organization will require a mainframe capacity upgrade in the first year in order to avoid capacity constraints. Utilizing DataDirect Shadow for Web-services transformation and assuming a 70 percent SOA offload rate to the zIIP specialty engine, the organization could potentially delay a mainframe capacity upgrade for another 12 months. In addition, the total MIPS required are on average 6.8 percent less due to the efficiencies of the Shadow product. Consider the fully loaded costs of a single mainframe, where licensing software based on MIPS can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the savings provided by DataDirect Shadow are significant.
DataDirect Technologies Mainframe Cost-Cutting Sessions
IBM System z Expo
Presentation: Exploiting the zIIP Specialty Engine; New Technologies for Cost Effective Mainframe SOA Enablement
Date: Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008
Presenter: Gregg Willhoit
Room: Miranda 5
Exhibitor Booth #3, Pavilion 5-11
Product demonstration times and location:
- Monday, Oct. 13, 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. during the Solution Center Reception located in Pavilion 8-11
- Tuesday, Oct. 14, 11:50 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. during the Solution Center Open located in Pavilion 8-11 and again at 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 PM during the Solution Center Reception located in Pavilion 8-11
- Wednesday, Oct. 15, 11:50 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. during the Solution Center Open located in Pavilion 8-11
CA World
Presentation: Cost Effective SOA Enablement of CA IDMS Systems Using zIIP/zAAP Specialty Engines
Date: Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008
Track: MF Databases IDMS
Time: 11:00 a.m. -- Noon
Presenter: Gregg Willhoit
Product demonstration times and locations:
- Sunday, Nov. 16 from 7:00 p.m. -- 9:30 p.m. during the Exhibition Center Grand Opening
- Monday, Nov. 17 -- Wednesday, Nov. 19 from Noon -- 4:00 p.m. during the Exhibition Center Open
About DataDirect Technologies
DataDirect Technologies is the software industry's only comprehensive provider of software for connecting the world's most critical business applications to data and services, running on any platform, using proven and emerging standards. Developers worldwide depend on DataDirect® products to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC and ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP. More than 300 leading independent software vendors and thousands of enterprises rely on DataDirect Technologies to simplify and streamline data connectivity for distributed systems and to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration. DataDirect Technologies is an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS). For more information, visit www.datadirect.com.
DataDirect and Shadow are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
SOURCE: DataDirect Technologies