Data serving and data warehousing

In today's world, business data needs to have consistent data, that's up to date, and accessible 24/7. At the same time, there is the need to protect the data from unauthorized access, comply with new regulations, provide real time customer service, to maintain a competitive advantage. These increased requirements come at a time when data can be fragmented across a server farm that has multiple copies of data scattered across an organization.

As your server pool grows, so does the fragmentation of your data, and so do your operational costs. Increased staff to support the growing sea of servers, increased electrical bills that in many companies are doubling every 18-24 months, greater floor space demands that are forcing companies to look at expanding their data centers.

What's the right answer? You need to make smart decisions on how you spend your IT budget. Will it be on paying the electrical bill to maintain an inefficient infrastructure? Or will it be to deliver new applications that can help your business grow? Which decision makes sense to your CEO?

The Benefits of a Central Data Server
When considering the deployment of a solution, where the application and where the data reside do not need to be the same platform. In fact, to avoid trying to manage volumes of data fragmented and replicated across a multitude of servers, having a centralized data server makes sense. Managing a single master copy of data simplifies many of the processes related to ensuring the data is secure, consistent, and available.

Business applications can be deployed on an application server that can reside on a range of options, including System z running z/OS or Linux on System z, to discrete Linux®, UNIX® or Microsoft® Windows® servers that can connect to a Z/OS data store through DRDA over a TCP/IP network. As long as the SQL functionality is supported, the business application can execute on whatever application server meets the need of the application. Connecting to a mainframe central server helps reduce the cost and complexity in an IT infrastructure, simplify compliance, and leverage your core asset: your data.

Centralizing your data on one platform, can eliminate the constant need to refresh distributed data. Consolidation makes sense from a business data, and a business cost perspective. Particularly, as you consider the security, and electrical costs of running distributed servers. When centrally located, the data available to applications can be more current than if it is extracted.

The mainframe has a strong heritage in data management, and today's System z9 is designed to address today's key data serving requirements, including:

• Creating a more manageable view of your data by consolidating to fewer copies can help consistency issues within your data. Centralizing data on System z may eliminate transmitting data across the network to maintain multiple copies of data, stream lining your processes, reducing network traffic, and relieving overall infrastructure bottlenecks.
• Leveraging a scalable centralized server allows for data control, consolidation, and simplified management, with the ability to handle significant processing requirements. The latest System z9 servers offer significant capacity increases over previous generation mainframes. For greater scalability and availability, multiple mainframes can be coupled together with Parallel Sysplex technology, and the System z server family is designed for up to 99.999% availability with Parallel Sysplex clustering.
• The System z9 platform is protected by 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 z9 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.
• The System z9 platform supports IBM's overall dynamic warehousing strategy, designed to help organizations to extract the greatest possible business value out of their information. As a leader in data warehousing, IBM has worked with hundreds 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.

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 z9 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.

Power down, not up!
Establishing a centralized data environment on System z can also address the carbon foot print of data centers, as they consume significant energy resources to operate the pool of servers, and have been doubling their power requirements on the average of every 18-24 months. Power and cooling demands are becoming important considerations as energy prices rise and utilities restrict the amount of power some customers can use. IBM System z offers substantial energy efficiency capabilities to help you address these issues.

The IBM System z platform can be configured to require 1/12th the electricity as a distributed server farm with equivalent processor capability.

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.