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The ZIIP chip: opening up mainframe possibilities? |
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Article by William Hoffman, mainframe-upgrade.com
Published January 2006, Copyright © 2006 mainframe-upgrade.com
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The ZIIP chip |
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IBM are keeping up the momentum of their 'virtualization' and 'Business Integration' strategy with the announcement that 2006 will see the release of a new speciality mainframe 'engine'. The ZIIP chip will set you back the familiar $125,000 and extends the family of specialised processing chips that up until now consisted of zAAPs (Java application environment) and IFLs (integrated facilities for LINUX). With regards to costs, the good news is: NO SOFTWARE FEES unlike the general mainframe chip where all your MIPS are charged.
This ZIIP chip has been designed to handle the workloads of Business Intelligence, Enterprise Resource Planning applications (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This sounds on the face of it pretty much everything! and IBM say that its focus is data intensive tasks - we all know data is at the throbbing heart of Enterprise these days but the details are a bit more specific:
No surprise then that then ZIIP is intimately integrated with DB2, and according to Collette Martin - IBM program director - this strong synergy should mean much faster speeds in 3 key areas:
1. The database portion of ERP and CRP applications such as SAP (the biggest ERP provider). A BI, ERP or CRM network connected application, running on z/OS, UNIX, Linux, Intel or Linux for System z9, that accesses DB2 for z/OS V8, via SQL calls using DRDA over a TCP/IP connection can have portions of these queries directed to the zIIP by DB2.
2. Data mining and associated Business Intelligence tasks in the terabyte world of atomic level data warehoused transaction and customer data. Such query processing that utilises DB2 for z/OS v8 star-schema parallel capabilities can have some of the processing diverted to a ZIIP engine by DB2.
3. Background DB2 Maintenance and Optimization jobs. Part of certain DB2 utility functions that are used to maintain index maintenance structures (Load, Reorg and Rebuild Index) will be diverted to the zIIP for processing.
z/OS will recognise the workloads appropriate for the ZIIP chip and divert them as appropriate - NO CHANGES TO SOFTWARE WILL BE NECESSARY
Note: DB2 v8 is required
ZIIP will support both distributed and virtual network architectures and looks to be one more step in the relentless march to the holy grail of affordable high performance web and network server technology with all the speed, security and scalability that we know the mainframe can provide.
$125,000 is a lot of money, but with the lack of software fees and the expected performance enhancements (particularly with a the new 2006 release of DB2) the offering will be tempting. Here at mainframe-upgrade.com the key thing we advise is get your strategy worked out - don't throw these specialist chips at half-baked, messy architectures. Get your best people working on Business Integration, Virtualization and the Service Orientated World, and if you come out of that still wanting your mainframe to evolve into the security rich enterprise data hub it wants to be, then it is things like the ZIIP engine that will help you free up your regular processors, centralise your data, and very importantly, minimise the need for all this duplication of data that goes on in today's distributed networks - the speed and accessibility will be there in spades we hope!
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