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Capitalize on the strengths of IBM System z™ as an enterprise data serving hub
Continuous, secure access to information is critical in today's business environment. The ability to have immediate access to current information allows your business to seize new opportunities for growth. To meet these challenges, the IBM System z platform offers a robust data serving environment to deliver value to your business.
To compete in today's highly competitive business environment, you need to team across your business to extract every benefit from the servers in your organization – demanding the highest in performance and availability.
For more than four decades System z enterprise systems have been a leader in data and transaction serving. The evolutionary data serving capabilities of the platform provide a secure foundation for delivering information on demand. System z offers continual improvements in software, helping to enhance the flexibility, security, compliance, and access to information while providing a centralized view of your business data. Many of the latest enhancements in software functionality leverage specialty engines that deliver savings to your business, including the System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP), and the IBM System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) for the z/OS environment, and the Integrated Facility for Linux® (IFL) that is a dedicated central processor (CP) for Linux workloads.
Today's business demands access to consistent data that's up to date and accessible 24 by 7. At the same time, you need to protect the data from unauthorized access, comply with new regulations, and 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 results in 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. These can escalate quickly with increased staff to support the growing sea of servers, increased electrical bills that in many companies are doubling every 18-24 months, as well as 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, the application and the data do not need reside on the same platform. In fact, to avoid trying to manage volumes of data that are fragmented and replicated across a multitude of servers, using 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.
With your data on System z, 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, as well as discrete Linux®, UNIX® or Microsoft® Windows® servers that can connect to a z/OS data store through DRDA technology over a TCP/IP network. As long as the SQL functionality is supported, the business application can execute on whatever platform meets the need of the application. Connecting to a central server reduces the cost and complexity in an IT infrastructure, simplifies compliance, and leverages 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, especially as you consider the security and electrical costs of running distributed servers. When centrally located, the data available to applications is more current and consistent than when it's extracted and replicated throughout the enterprise.
The mainframe has a strong heritage in data management, and the System z10 platform – the newest System z offering – is designed to address today's key data serving requirements, including the following:
- Creating a more manageable view of your data by consolidating to fewer copies and resolving consistency issues within your data. Centralizing data on System z can eliminate transmitting data across the network to maintain multiple copies of data, streamlining your processes, reducing network traffic, and relieving overall infrastructure bottlenecks
- Leveraging a scalable centralized server allows for data control, consolidation, and simplified management as well as the ability to handle significant processing requirements. System z10 servers offer significant capacity increases over previous generation mainframes. For greater scalability and availability, multiple servers can be coupled together with Parallel Sysplex clustering technology, designed to deliver up to 99.999% availability.
- The System z10 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 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.
- The System z10 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 protect your most valuable asset, your data, by providing advanced 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 the DB2 V9 for z/OS database.
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Power down, not up!
Establishing a centralized data environment on System z can also address the carbon footprint of data centers that often consume significant energy resources to operate pools of distributed servers within an infrastructure. Companies have been doubling their power requirements on the average of every 18-24 months. Are you? Power and cooling demands are becoming important considerations as energy prices rise and utility companies restrict the amount of power available to businesses. 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 of 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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Consider all your options, and look to System z for technology that works.
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