IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe - March/April 2009 - 32

System z products have remained competitive with a range of warehouse plat for m f r om ma ny i n novat ion i n t he a r t ic le offerings, as packaged solutions ser ver c hoices. Today, ot he r t hese “Complete 360,” on page 24. ) differences are no longer just critical Investments during the past 15 years (OS and middleware) in online transaction processing (OLTP) have created an open programming have come into the environments; they’re mandator y in BI environment that supports Java* and C++. environments. SAS enhances these controls Far from being outdated, the IBM mainframe BI market. has been a trendsetter. Many of the platform’s innovative technologies have been adopted into other environments. For example, IBM first developed partitioning on mainframes in the 1980s, and predecessors of workload management were first offered in the 1970s. These have been recent additions to other platforms. System z products have remained competitive with a range of warehouse offerings, as packaged solutions (OS and middleware) have come into the BI market. These mainframe offerings automate installation, migration and maintenance tasks, making these easy to perform and less costly overall. Business analytics company SAS has worked to provide innovative offerings that take advantage of recent System z enhancements, ensuring synergy between the software and hardware platform. The System z10* server supports modern BI components such as a true real-time or low-latency operational data store (ODS), high-speed data-management technologies, integration with Microsoft* Office, advanced data-mining techniques and high performance in mixed workloads. As BI workloads integrate into business systems, a key consideration is the capability to effectively control the various workloads a business must run in an integrated environment. The System z platform can manage dynamic BI mixed workloads, BI and transactional workloads and a combination of data-warehouse and data-smart workloads on the same system. The System z10 server deals with issues such as varying levels of query concurrency, resource adjustments to exploit available capacity, the capability to handle different work priorities and protecting against killer queries– all while maintaining consistent response times regardless of workload. Providing dynamic resource allocation while reacting to shifting workloads can help avoid application outages in a 24-7 economy. These inherent management capabilities found in the System z platform are particularly important in today’s BI environment due to the range of query run times, types of queries and varying user sophistication. Having a robust workload manager is key to avoiding difficulties that result when you can’t control and differentiate between the critical work and less important queries in the system. Simple queries for operational support must execute quickly; queries for strategic analysis can tolerate a slower response, and complex analytical queries and data mining work can afford a slightly longer elapsed time. These fine points in managing workloads differentiate the System z 32 M A R C H/A PRIL 2009 by providing user interfaces to the mainframe. Analysts must no longer access mainframe data through a green-screen code interpreter. The mainframe operations model addresses security, resiliency, workload and capacit y management, storage management and business process integration. This model has proven nearly infallible. From a security perspective, the System z platform has the highest government security rating. In today’s business environment, this is a key factor when considering servers host your business’ most critical asset: its data. Data Integration Support Is Minimal Advances in System z hardware and software technologies have optimized the platform for enterprise data integration and business availability. The System z environment leverages popular capabilities—such as parallel processing—without requiring any design changes while simultaneously supporting batch and real-time operations. Both are important to evolving BI requirements, par ticularly when integrating BI into operational processes. The latencies associated with data integration and transfer also can greatly impact an enterprise’s capability to use its data to make better decisions. Today, much of an enterprise’s data still is hosted by the platform. When the raw data resides on one server, the extract, transform and load (ETL) process is streamlined, since the data doesn’t need to migrate to another platform. Having a single system—designed to manage data integration, cleanup and transform—means the overall process is easier and less costly to manage. With the advent of operational BI and the prominent role of the ODS, the goal to have all or most data reside on the mainframe in real time becomes feasible. Designing BI applications around a single, centralized data copy accessible to all users can help avoid many data-consistency issues that result when data is replicated and distributed across many discrete systems. Gone are the issues of micro-managing your data integration, extraction and replication processes that frequently result in application outages on other less robust servers. With System z solutions and the latest enhancements in DB2* technology, you can enjoy the benefits of a synergistic environment, designed to deliver near-continuous availability of your business’ information. ibmsystemsmag.com/mainframe

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IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe - March/April 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe - March/April 2009