DataDirect Technologies, a mainframe integration provider and operating company of Progress Software Corporation, announced the availability of a web-based calculator designed to measure the total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) for deploying applications on IBM's System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) in combination with DataDirect Shadow integration middleware.
The calculator, developed by a team of analysts at DataDirect and WinterGreen Research, is intended to compute the daily and annual savings in dollars and MIPS capacity that can occur by exploiting the zIIP specialty engine. "The intent of the DataDirect Shadow TCO Calculator is to provide a user-friendly tool for analyzing the software licensing costs, and savings achieved by utilizing a zIIP specialty engine in combination with our Shadow mainframe software," Gregg Willhoit, chief software architect for DataDirect Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Unlike any product on the market today, Shadow provides a risk-free, proven method for unlocking the zIIP engine to run additional workloads beyond DB2, in particular, the processing involved with integrating mainframes with SOAs."
The DataDirect Shadow TCO Calculator is based on a model-driven architecture for delivering transparent ROI calculations. These calculations can be used to develop a business case for using the zIIP engine in combination with DataDirect Shadow for SOA-related processing, versus IBM's central processor on the mainframe. DataDirect Shadow is capable of offloading up to 99 percent of process intensive SOA, event publishing and data workloads from the mainframe GPP to the non-restricted, more economic zIIP specialty engine, the vendor says.
"In the new world, the bulk of this processing involves transformation, such as going to and from XML, as well as other protocol related processing," Willhoit explains. "Our approach is to implement this new processing in such a way that the customer can quickly and efficiently SOA-enable their current working mainframe transactions to allow the new processing done by Shadow to run economically on the zIIP specialty engine."
The DataDirect Shadow TCO Calculator is analyzes and models the impact of web services/SOA-related processing on mainframe MIPS capacity. Users provide information such as the mainframe model in use, Web service invocation (type and size) and time span and a detailed report is then calculated and assembled providing the potential saving in MIPS dollars and MIPS capacity when a zIIP specialty engine is used in combination with the DataDirect Shadow mainframe integration software.
The tool address a wide range of mainframe target systems including CICS, IMS, IDMS, Natural, DB2, Adabas, IMS and VSAM, Willhoit continues. "With Shadow, DataDirect has implemented an efficient mechanism for switching between ineligible zIIP environments-like CICS transactions, which must run on standard central processors-and our own processing code, which runs in enclave SRB mode, and is eligible to run on zIIPs. In the SOA environments we serve, the Shadow code constitutes the majority of the processing involved to transform the mainframe transaction into a Web service."
Processing associated with SOA integration and data queries can be diverted from the mainframe's GPP to be handled by the zIIP specialty engine-which does the work without using any of the mainframe licensed MIPs capacity. "DataDirect does not cause IBM or other third party code to become zIIP-enabled," says Willhoit.
To learn more about the DataDirect Shadow TCO Calculator, click here.