Mainframe users are continuously challenged to keep pace with rising data volumes from distributed applications that depend on mainframe transaction processing power. The pressure to squeeze more performance and value out of existing mainframes, while avoiding or deferring major upgrades, never stops.
There are ways to improve the efficiency of core workloads, like sorting, that help you uncover additional capacity, save money, and increase the ROI for mainframe expenditures. In addition, you can deliver more value to your business by integrating mainframe data into next-generation cloud and data platforms like Databricks, Snowflake, Splunk, ServiceNow, and more.
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Optimize Mainframe Value with Precisely
1. Optimize the Value
of Your Mainframe
Bill Hammond | Director, Product Marketing
Denise Tabor | Product Management Director
2. Today’s Conversation
• Precisely offerings
• IBM Z Platform optimization
• IBM Z Platform data integration
• Precisely’s IBM Z Platform projects
• How we work with IBM
• Encryption
• Sort Performance
2
3. The leader in data integrity
Our software, data enrichment products and
strategic services deliver accuracy, consistency, and
context in your data, powering confident decisions.
of the Fortune 100
99
countries
100 2,500
employees
customers
12,000
Brands you trust, trust us
Data leaders partner with us
3
4. Precisely offers broad capabilities
Change Data Capture
ETL
Machine Data
Integration
Process Automation
Data Governance
Data Catalog
Data Quality
Master Data Management
Self-Service Analytics
Spatial Analysis
Geocoding
Routing
Visualization
Geographic Data
Business Data
Industry-Specific Data
Integrated Comms
Personalized Video
Chatbots
Responsive Messaging
Digital Self Service
Integrate Verify Locate Enrich Engage
5. Mainframes host the most critical applications
71%
Fortune 500
2.5 Billion
Transactions / day / per MF
Top World
Banks
92 of World’s
Top Insurers
10 of Top 25
US Retailers
23
5
6. Mainframes
deliver
increasing value
with each new
technology
wave
of executives say their
customer-facing applications
are completely or very reliant
on mainframe processing.
92%
•72%
See the mainframe as a
platform for long-term
growth and new workloads
$1.65 trillion
invested by enterprise IT
to support data warehouse &
analytics workloads over the past
decade
Forrester Consulting, 2019
Wikibon “10-Year Worldwide Enterprise IT Spending 2008-2017”
BMC Mainframe Survey, 2021
6
7. Precisely Mainframe Products
7
Syncsort MFX +
Cutting-edge sort, copy and join, while offloading workloads to IBM zIIP
engines to slash CPU costs
Syncsort Optimize IMS
Low-risk, efficient migration tools for businesses switching from IMS to Db2
Syncsort Capacity Management
Ensure high-performing IT resources are available when and where you
need them
Syncsort Network Management
Network monitoring, security and performance management to increase
your network security and efficiency
Syncsort Optimize IDMS
Syncsort Optimize DB2
Improve IBM and CA database performance
Ironstream
Integrate mainframe and IBM i systems into leading IT analytics and
operations platforms for an enterprise-wide view
Connect
Integrate data seamlessly from legacy systems into next-gen cloud and data
platforms with one solution
ACR
Analyze data across your mainframe and host-based
environments for accurate, consistent and reliable data
10. Proven solution
Almost 50 years of continual
development and
enhancements
Performance
Improves sort performance
while optimizing overall
system efficiency
zIIP offload
Sort workloads can be
directed to the zIIP, thereby
lowering the CPU time and
costs
Encryption
Enhanced security and
compliance with regulations
such as GDPR
The high-performance
solution that delivers better
performance and
saves money
Syncsort MFX
10
11. 11
History of Product Innovation
11
Unique Capabilities of Syncsort MFX
Support Encryption of Basic/Large datasets*
Sort Performance for large datasets*
Encryption of Sortwork
zIIP Offload of Sort
zHPF Exploitation
Create & E-Mail PDF, RTF, HTML Files
zIIP Exploitation
MIDAW Exploitation
PAV Exploitation
Direct DB2 Access
PARASORT
XSUM
PipeSort
Global DSM
SAS PROC SORT Replacement
Incremental DYNALLOC
MAXSORT
First to Deliver Syncsort MFX
JOIN Processing 2004
Horizontal Arithmetic on OUTREC 1999
Data Space Exploitation 1989
Variable/Fixed Conversion 1989
Multiple Output 1983
Report Writing 1983
IEBGENER Replacement 1979
INREC 1979
INCLUDE/OMIT, SUM, OUTREC 1977
COBOL Exits 1976
EXCPVR 1975
Syncsort MFX has a commitment to
innovation with over 50 years of consistent
product leadership
12. IMS to Db2 Migration Challenges
Minimize risk Lack of skills/resources Time to value
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13. Minimize
Risk
Time and effort to complete
project is minimal,
compared with an
application rewrite
Information
Access
Make data securely
available across the entire
enterprise – consolidate to a
single RDBMS – Db2
Transparent
migration
Syncsort Optimize IMS is a
transparent data migration
solution, no application
changes required
Proven
solution
Has proven itself around the
world in a wide variety of
vertical industries
The smart approach to IMS
data migration, providing
low-risk and efficient
migration tools for businesses
wanting to eliminate IMS DB
and consolidate to Db2.
Syncsort
Optimize IMS
13
15. Single Solution
with 360◦ View
Covers multiple platforms and
everything from servers to storage
to networks for visibility into all
your performance and capacity
metrics
Replaces Manual
Processes
Interactive automated reporting
and flexible templates let you
quickly hone in on potential
problems – without spreadsheets
and manual processes
Prediction and
Alerting
See impact of potential
changes and set up monitors
to identify when and where
thresholds are exceeded
Brings metrics from across
your enterprise into one
place for a comprehensive,
real-time view of your
infrastructure.
Syncsort
Capacity
Management
Flexible
Deployment
Options
Deploy on-premises or in the
cloud. Management of the
solution in the cloud
available through Precisely
Services
15
17. Data silos impact availability,
performance, services and security
Lack of data for
operational analytics
No single view of IT
entire infrastructure
Status and security of
systems is unknown
17
18. Complete
visibility
Get a comprehensive, real-
time view of your IT landscape
for better, faster decision-
making
Improved
agility
Proactively identify, and quickly
resolve, security threats and
performance problems
Service
Availability
Avoid downtime, meet
demanding SLAs, and deliver
great customer and employee
experiences
Integrate mainframe and
IBM i systems into leading IT
analytics and operations
platforms for an enterprise-
wide view to support your
digital business
Ironstream
Cost
savings
Eliminate manual processes
and inefficient tools, and
optimize your infrastructure
spend
18
19. Confidential: Prepared for Precisely Customers and Prospects
Strategic data projects without legacy data
sources = missed opportunity
1
The value of big
data investments
are diminished
2
Large, rich
datasets never
even get analyzed.
3
Inaccurate or
incomplete
analytics
When you leave mainframe and IBM i out of your strategic projects such as analytics, AI and machine learning:
20. Simplify
integration
Take a one solution approach
to integrate, prepare, load,
cleanse, transform and stream
data across clustered or cloud
frameworks
Data access
Integrate all enterprise data,
from mainframe and IBM i to
cloud, while keeping secure
integrations
Real-time
replication
Stream changes to data
instantly for use in
downstream applications,
data lakes and warehouses
Integrate data seamlessly
from legacy systems into
next-gen cloud and data
platforms with one solution
Connect
Future-proof
Quickly and easily add new
sources and targets. Deploy
in new environments with no
redevelopment required
20
25. Encryption
Customer Value
Provides data security at the data set level (file system),
minimizing administration costs
Challenge
Consumes additional processor cycles to decrypt/encrypt
– adding costs
Solution
Syncsort MFX and encryption on zIIP
26. Integrated Sort Accelerator
Customer Value
Reduces CPU usage and improves elapsed time by
speeding up sorting
Challenge
Limited ability to take advantage of the chip
Solution
Syncsort MFX and offloading to zIIP
27. Future Projects
Additional optimization improvements
Leverage new technologies
Encryption enhancements
Compression enhancements
Precisely's IBM Z Platform product
portfolio
Why does that matter?
Well….it turns out that mainframes are still the backbone for the biggest organizations in the world
71% of the fortune 500 rely on the mainframe for their mission critical transactional systems
They span every vertical from FinServ to Insurance to Retail
When talking to these organizations, it’s not unusual to hear that up to 80% of their corporate data originates on the mainframe. That’s Big Data.
And organizations cannot afford to neglect it.
Most large enterprises have made major investments in data environments over a period of many years - legacy data can provide a treasure-trove of information that can transform your business when leveraged via a streaming paradigm
These environments contain the data that these business run on and that today power the strategic initiatives driving the business forward – machine learning, AI and predictive analytics
Legacy platforms (mainframe and IBM i) continue to adapt with each new wave of technology and are not going away anytime soon
Integrating legacy data into your projects brings several advantages such as:
Connect applications together, leveraging the existing transactional capabilities of the current application platform, and the wealth of new capabilities of the cloud
Feed analytics with up-to-date information so your business runs on current insight
Port workloads to less-expensive, strategic platforms
Eliminate Risk
Developed to provide rapid /efficient migration between IMS and Db2
Applications remain unchanged
Set of powerful mapping and migrations tools
Stop worrying about keeping IMS skills and using third party IMS tools
Increased Access to Information
Data can be locked up in IMS
Db2 is more accessible solution
Reduced software expenses by eliminate IMS
Transparent Migration
No need to rewrite software
Applications continue to issue requests as before
Proven Solution
Many reference-able customers success stories
Q: [Bill} Thanks for joining us today Denise. Why don’t we start off with you telling us a little about your role here at Precisely?
A: [Denise] Direct from the university, I started my career at a state agency, learning MVS systems programming skills with a small but highly intelligent group of people. They mentored me for several years, and I learned the basics of maintaining several systems, but then focused on Db2. From there, I became a production and application Db2 DBA and then transitioned to a vendor company. I am fortunate enough to have held positions in technical support and sales engineering, where I really enjoyed being a customer advocate and internal liaison across the different departments. This was a natural segue into my current experience in Product Management, where I’ve been for several years. I joined Precisely in early 2020, and I’m currently responsible for the mainframe and capacity management products. I love working with customers, listening to their challenges and formulating solutions that meet their needs. In order to do that, of course, I need to work closely with sales, support, engineering, marketing, and of course, our IBM partnership feeds into that collaboration as well.
Q: [Bill] You mentioned you need to work closely with IBM. Tell us a little about the interactions you have with IBM people or departments.
A: [Denise} We have a very close relationship with IBM – the Db2 Utility team, the z/OS hardware architects, and the DFSMS engineering team know us very well. We have been working with the Db2 Utility team for almost 10 years to develop the IBM Db2 SORT product together. About 5 years ago, we started work with the z/OS Poughkeepsie team and hardware architects for z15’s integrated accelerator for Z SORT research. And finally, about 2 years ago, we started work with the DFSMS team to implement the EXCP encryption API for basic and large format datasets. This collaboration allows us to provide a performant solution for sorting with encryption (more on that later). We will continue to work with IBM in the future to ensure that we take advantage of any opportunities provided by their engineers.
Q: [Bill] Thanks Denise… obviously we value our close working relationship with IBM very highly. I would like to move us into the meat of our discussion today. Here at Precisely, we have number of products designed to help customers get the most from their IBM Z platform. Across our portfolio, what projects are you working on that will help customers as they continue to optimize their IBM Z Platform environments?
A: [Denise] Over the past few months, we’ve delivered a couple of major enhancements to assist our customers who want to process encrypted datasets and take advantage of some new hardware on the z15 machine
Q: [Bill] Q: [Bill] So for the project to improve sorting for encrypted data sets with pervasive encryption, could you explain in details why our customers need that improvement, what solution has been implemented into our products and any performance benchmark information you can share here?
A: [Denise] Let me first explain our need to support the encryption initiatives of our customers.
Regulatory requirements such as GDPR and CCPA, are designed to protect data and safeguard privacy. Loss of data or compromised information can come with high penalties, and new innovations to assist with this data protection have been implemented to fortify security.
The IBM Z Pervasive Encryption solution is a method to enable extensive encryption of data in-flight and at-rest to meet these protection standards. This solution is enabled by administrative policy controls and is designed to be application transparent, without requiring application changes. Data set encryption provides data security at the data set level using DFSMS access methods. This system-wide solution is more cost effective than traditional software encryption solutions. And DFSMS access methods provide data set encryption for sequential, basic, large, and extended format datasets.
The challenge to implementing data encryption is it consumes processor cycles, so it doesn’t come without penalty. And although mainframe customers love the pervasive encryption approach, no one likes the additional resource consumption. For Syncsort MFX users, if the input or output data set is encrypted, BSAM must be used instead of our high performant low level IO access methods, and there is an extra cost from that perspective.
Last year, IBM’s DFSMS team developed an EXCP encryption API solution called IGGENC to help vendors like us use our low-level IO for encrypted data sets and improve encryption performance. DFSMS splits the encryption/decryption processing from the I/O processing, so we will use our low-level IO methods to read and write the data sets and use IGGENC to encrypt and decrypt data on the zIIP processors. This will significantly reduce the CPU cost and elapsed time.
We’ve seen some great performance improvements from our preliminary benchmark testing. For Syncsort MFX, we have seen up to 45% CPU and 40% elapsed savings, and for ZPSaver we have seen up to 80% CPU and 40% elapsed time savings when processing encrypted, basic and large format datasets.
Q: [Bill] You also mentioned you are working on a project to improve sorting performance using the integrated accelerator for Z SORT. What is the integrated accelerator for Z SORT? Any performance improvement have you seen by leveraging Z SORT technology?
A: [Denise] The IBM Integrated Accelerator for Z Sort is a new coprocessor designed for the z15. Z Sort can help reduce CPU usage and improve elapsed time for eligible workloads by speeding up sorting, shorten batch windows, and improve select database functions. The challenge to taking advantage of this new hardware is that customers need our utilities, Syncsort MFX and its zIIP-offload capabilities, to optimize sorting workload and achieve performance gains. As I mentioned before, we worked closely with the IBM z/OS Poughkeepsie team and hardware architects for the sort accelerator. We have developed new algorithms in Syncsort MFX to take advantage of the coprocessor and with the new algorithms, our customers can see dramatic improvements to batch sort job performance.
In the Precisely lab, we conducted some benchmarks in several modes to compare performance metrics with and without the sort acclerator. We have seen average savings of 26% CPU and 19% Elapsed time savings using the accelerator, however, ZPSaver and its zIIP offload capabilities still offer superior performance advantages.
We also collaborated with the Db2 Utilities team to develop Z Sort enablement in Db2 Sort – used in the LOAD, REBUILD INDEX and REORG utilities. The support was delivered at the end of 2020, and Db2 Sort customers can see both CPU and elapsed time benefits up to 37% better than using DFSORT (which only supports the Db2 REORG utility).
Q: [Bill] Those sound like really impactful enhancements for our IBM Z Platform customers. Precisely has a long history … over 50 years… of software solutions for mainframe customers? As you look at continuing that long support, what are some of the areas of innovation you are looking forward to?
A: [Denise] We are always assessing performance and efficiency improvements to make to our products, so we will be focusing on these in the future. In addition to that, as new technologies come from IBM, we will examine them to see if we can exploit them for further performance boosts. We’re currently working with IBM to address similar challenges this year and will continue to collaborate with them to help our mutual customers.
By the way, Bill, we have spent the majority of time discussing MFX, but I will remind our audience that we have performance and efficiency solutions that address Db2, IMS, IDMS, and Network challenges for the z/OS platform. Ironstream and Connect will solve problems for our mainframe clients as well.