A common question we get asked at VirtualZ Computing™ is how customers can save money with Lozen™. There are several ways Lozen helps reduce costs, including our z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) engine architecture.
What Are zIIP Engines and Why Do They Matter?
Introduced by IBM in 2006, zIIP mainframe processors are dedicated to specific IBM Z workloads to operate asynchronously with your general processors. IBM has published an easy resource that outlines all the current eligible workloads.
One of the key benefits of a zIIP is that workloads running on them are not included when computing software costs. Designing a product to operate on low-cost zIIP engines, therefore, can help reduce costs, general-purpose processor utilization, and potentially software Monthly License Charges (MLC) charges or tailored fit MSU consumption.
To maximize the benefit of the new data access paradigm, Lozen was specifically developed to be a zIIP eligible workload.
Lozen’s zIIP Engine Architecture
Lozen has several cost saving advantages for customers. The most significant is that it provides a more efficient method for sharing data with other platforms. Unlike Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) or file transfer protocol (FTP) approaches, you only transmit a subset of your data with Lozen — just the individual records needed by applications, not entire datasets. For example, if you have a large file containing millions of records but your application only processes a handful, Lozen only transfers the handful of records your application actually needs. Most ETL approaches would transfer the entire dataset: a much more costly operation.
Lozen is also operating in real-time against live data, so your applications don’t need to do anything special to be sure they are accessing current information. Many ETL approaches periodically copy data from the mainframe to other platforms, resulting in the same data being transferred repeatedly. And even with this approach, the data can be outdated by the time an application can process it. Lozen reduces the cost, complexity, and risk of operating against outdated information.
Another key cost advantage for Lozen is its architecture. Lozen is designed to operate on zIIP engines. In fact, in recent tests, 90-98% of Lozen’s overall processor capacity is typically dispatched to a zIIP engine.
This approach helps reduce costs, general-purpose processor utilization, and potentially software MLC charges. It can also reduce the need and cost for capacity upgrades. Lozen executing on zIIP processors does not take up general-purpose processing capacity, leaving more resources available for other workloads. zIIP processors are also typically much less expensive than conventional general processors, and in many cases, zIIP engines will offer significantly greater capacity than a general-purpose CPU engine, depending on the hardware model.
Eliminate the Sky-Rocketing Costs of Data Access
Customers are increasingly migrating mainframe applications to the cloud. Each migration increases the demand for data access and subsequently increases consumption of general-purpose MIPS and the costs of more custom code and other associated expenses.
Customers are consuming up to 40% of their MIPS to run ETL at costs up to several million dollars.
Not only are the number of application migrations increasing, but customers are increasingly transferring terabytes of static data across their network into data lakes and sharing data with their cloud and distributed applications from there. In addition to driving MIPS consumption, this process also increases the need to create complex change data capture (CDC) routines to synchronize data back to the mainframe.
The increasing costs of legacy data access methods are recognized for eroding expected financial gains of modernization activities. It’s no wonder why data access is top of mind for CIOs.
Summary
With the combination of its zIIP engine architecture and unique capabilities, Lozen offers organizations a new, efficient, and cost-effective paradigm for mainframe data access.
With Lozen, an application running in the cloud or on a distributed environment that needs access to a record on the mainframe can go directly to that record on the mainframe — in real time, with read-write access, through a no-code implementation.
Since the data remains on the mainframe, organizations no longer need to develop and maintain costly and complicated techniques to extract data using ETL, FTP, and/or APIs or to re-sync data using CDC and other methods.
In this way, Lozen’s approach lets organizations eliminate the skyrocketing costs of legacy methods like ETL and CDC, plus they can leverage Lozen’s zIIP engine architecture for additional cost savings.
Learn More
To learn more about how to unlock the power of real-time, read-write mainframe data access with Lozen:
- Try Lozen for free.
- Explore our demos page and YouTube channel.
- Watch webinars and read the blog.
- Still have questions? Contact us.
