Rocket Data Mainframe Unified Platform

The Benefits of A Single Unified Platform

Few organizations today are embarking on significant new application developments that run in the IBM zSystems/OS mainframe environment. Most modern applications, designed to improve operational efficiencies and streamline customer, supplier, partner and employee interaction, run within J2EE or .NET environments on distributed UNIX or Windows server systems. However, for the Global 2000 and many government agencies the vast majority of the data that these new applications require is maintained under control of IBM mainframe systems.

Mainframe integration, if not approached strategically, is almost guaranteed to fail or at best be a long-term drain on both hard and soft finances. Traditional approaches for accessing mainframe systems such as CICS, IMS, Db2, Adabas, IDMS and VSAM have failed to deliver reliable and cost-effective mainframe integration. Mainframe integration implementations have rarely attracted a strategic approach and consequently, most organizations, with a history of connecting mainframes with distributed applications, find themselves with multiple fragmented and incompatible systems. Such implementations have huge implications for business agility, costs and application reliability

Dealing with Complexity

Growth, mergers, new technologies—all add to the increasing problem of integration complexity. Left unchecked, this gridlock of interconnectivity can drain infrastructure agility and lead to competitive disadvantage.

Complexity in commercial computing systems emerges from a relatively narrow set of reasons. Many of these reasons exist in the wake of the shift away from the single-vendor, vertically integrated solutions. Cost savings from the increased competition brought by a move to a more varied vendor environment, have been offset by the increased systems management and consulting costs required to implement systems that are no longer integrated at source. Standards and other initiatives, aimed at making systems from various vendors compatible, is an important step towards mitigating some of these costs, but it will certainly not eliminate all of them; the most intractable exist as a fundamental consequence of the modern computing landscape.

Reducing Cost and Risk

The only justification to embark on any architectural analysis is cost-efficiency. The more technologies that are employed to satisfy an integration requirement, the higher the overall ongoing software maintenance and license fees will be. For individual projects faced with a mainframe integration requirement, organizations often purchase a standalone solution, with the costs included in the project budget. Consequently, there is rarely a systematic way to determine how much has been spent on mainframe integration across all projects within the entire enterprise. Furthermore, most mainframe integration solutions have significant hardware dependencies associated with Windows, UNIX, and Linux intermediary servers. Such architectures have ongoing hardware costs to support workload scaling and, for mission critical workloads, have gateway duplication to support failover.

The answer would be to find a single enterprise product to support all z/OS subsystems, implement service-oriented architecture, and streamline data integration for business-critical data on the mainframe. A single product implementation for mainframe integration should come with a single interface to systems to manage the transactions from the point they touch the integration software to the point they are returned to the calling application.

A Single Unified Platform Approach

Shadow, mainframe middleware software, addresses this problem with a single, unified architecture that simplifies and accelerates the integration of mainframe data, business logic, and screens with new Java, .NET or web applications. Using industry standards interfaces—SOAP, XML and SQL, Shadow enables organizations to easily extend their mainframe systems to participate with SOA, business intelligence (BI) initiatives and/or composite application development.

Balancing the Return On Investment (ROI) and the quick time-to-market requirements presents a daunting challenge to IT organizations when faced with SOA and data integration initiatives that involve mainframe systems. Shadow's single, unified integration architecture allows organizations to rapidly redeploy and reuse existing mainframe assets without the need for multiple, redundant point integration solutions, reducing the costs to maintain these products and eliminating potential points of failure.