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Delivering insight, and up to date information about your business, empowers people throughout your organization to make better decisions by optimizing your processes with intelligence about your customers, your business, and your products. Business insight is about providing current, up-to-date information to your business leaders, as well as the people that are in contact with your customers on a daily basis. This evolution to operational business intelligence (OPBI) solutions – integrates real-time information into operational processes, while presenting it in an easy to understand way with easy access to the details.
Delivering timely, integrated information demands improved access to data. Data access requirements continue to evolve as business intelligence applications become closely integrated into the operational processes of business. The separation of OLTP and business intelligence processes is vanishing, as more operational applications integrate advanced reporting and analytics to provide business insights. To satisfy this requirement, business intelligence requires access to near real-time data at transaction speeds. By having your data on one platform, the constant need to refresh data marts through complex processes can be reduced.
Consolidating data to support both business intelligence and OLTP on DB2 for z/OS® can simplify your IT infrastructure to enable you to sensibly manage resources. By standardizing and consolidating data marts and data warehouses on System z, organizations can leverage the time-proven capabilities of the z/OS Workload Manager to manage both sub-second OLTP transactions as well as resource intensive, business intelligence processes, harnessing the considerable strength that differentiates the DB2 for z/OS DBMS system. The Workload Manager provides optimum usage of the system resources with the advantage of optimizing performance for mixed workloads. A particular strength of the system is its ability to prioritize widely varying queries and transactions, to deliver efficient and timely execution.
Today, many organizations struggle with database silos that result in multiple copies of disparate data. This increases cost and complexity in backup and recovery, network traffic, storage requirements, database administration and management, as well as server workload management. It also increases the risk associated with distributed privacy, security, and audit policies. Data siloes can breed inefficiencies and spiraling expenses.
The System z10 platform supports IBM's overall dynamic warehousing strategy, designed to help organizations extract the greatest possible business value out of their information. As a leader in data warehousing, IBM has worked with thousands of customers to solve their information management challenges. Based on work with leading retailers, financial institutions, manufacturers, and healthcare providers, IBM has built a path to achieving dynamic business insight.
To enable you to leverage the advanced virtualization, availability, and security capabilities of the System z10 platform, IBM has enhanced the software portfolio supporting business intelligence on the platform. With the recent announcements of Cognos 8, Master Data Management, and Information Server on the platform, you can take advantage of the many strengths of the Linux environment on System z to integrate application servers within the same system as the database.
This close proximity of data and application can take advantage of the z/OS environment as a data serving hub. Known for its strength in processing OLTP workloads, z/OS provides added capabilities to strengthen its leadership in core application and data technologies. When combined with business intelligence, data (DW) warehousing solutions and reporting tools, the platform offers a solid foundation for OPBI. BI/DW applications on System z can benefit from many of the platform's advantages to deliver faster access to data on z/OS while offering a consolidated view of the data with DW, BI, and OLTP on the same platform. Creating a more manageable view of your data by consolidating to fewer copies can resolve consistency issues within your data. Centralizing data on System z can eliminate transmitting data across the network, streamlining your processes, reducing network traffic, and relieving overall infrastructure bottlenecks.
The System z platform has a strong heritage in data management, and its latest offering, System z10, is designed to address today's key data serving requirements such as the following:
- Support for thousands of users with the ability to manage diverse workloads, delivering fast, consistent response times across the organization.
- Providing a scalable centralized server that enables data control, consolidation, and simplified management, with the ability to handle significant processing requirements. System z10 servers offer significant capacity increases over previous generation mainframes.
- Greater scalability and availability, delivered by coupling multiple mainframes together with Parallel Sysplex clustering technology, designed to provide up to 99.999% availability.
- DB2 for z/OS takes advantage of data sharing technology in a Parallel Sysplex to provide applications with full concurrent read and write access to shared DB2 data. Data sharing allows users on multiple DB2 subsystems, to share a single copy of the DB2 catalog, directory, and user data sets. Data sharing provides improvements to availability and capacity without impacting existing applications
- To protect the data secured in the central database, the System z10 platform is offers a strong suite of security features that provide user identification and access control, intrusion detection services, and encryption of data capabilities that can operate across the network.
- The System z10 platform is highly flexible with broad support for open and industry standards along with today's innovative programming models that can allow interoperability with applications and users on other platforms.
To read more about leveraging the new System z platform for business intelligence, please read the thought leadership papers listed on this page.
Security
System z offers a security-rich environment, designed to help your business lower the risks of security by providing industry leading security and encryption solutions with the simplicity of centralized management. System z10 provides end-to-end encryption (IPSec) across heterogeneous platforms and devices. DB2 encryption options have also been expanded with DB2 9 for z/OS database.
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Power down, not up!
Power and cooling demands are becoming important considerations as energy prices rise, and utilities begin to restrict the availability of power in some locations. Establishing a centralized data environment on System z can have a positive impact on the carbon foot print of data centers, as they can consume significantly less energy than a distributed environment.
The IBM System z platform can be configured to require 1/12th the electricity as a distributed server farm with equivalent processor capability.
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In today's data centers, server farms where systems are only 10-30% utilized, are spending 70-90% of their time consuming power and cooling resources without delivering any work.
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By leveraging z/OS and System z availability, security, resiliency characteristics, BI/DW applications can meet the operational requirements of businesses while offering TCO improvements from the exploitation of specialty engines. Now with a selection of BI/DW solutions and tools available on System z today, you have the flexibility you need to meet your business needs.
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