You have invested hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in your ETL tools and process. It is up and running and doing its job. There are tradeoffs in terms of additional MIPS consumption and constant maintenance, but you do not want to rip and replace what you already have. Can Lozen help, even if you already have ETL in place? There are several ways Lozen can help simplify your ETL — and possibly reduce processing costs. Here are some examples:
- Leveraging Lozen on cloud or desktop systems allows the use of familiar and usually less costly tools to access IBM Z data
- Portions of the ETL process can be replaced by Lozen using industry-standard file access protocols and methods
- Developing or leveraging existing processes, tools, and techniques in your cloud and desktop systems relieves the need to utilize increasingly scarce IBM Z expertise for the entire ETL process
Leverage Familiar Tools
Lozen leverages NSF to “mount” mainframe VSAM and sequential files in the local filesystem of your Linux and Windows servers and desktops. All applications and processes running on those systems will access those files with standard file Open/Read/Write/Close commands. This can be as simple as a command line “copy” or an application “File…Open” to read the file.
For more advanced access, you can leverage the Lozen API or our support for popular data integration tools (such as MuleSoft) to read or write VSAM records by key or to start a keyed browse operation to read only a portion of the records.
With this support, it is a simple and straightforward matter to minimize the tasks associated with extracting data on IBM Z, then copying the extract to another platform. You can see that portions of your existing ETL processes can be augmented or replaced by your familiar server and desktop tools.
Strategic Replacement
If you have existing data in files that are being processed by applications in the cloud (or vice versa), you could also replace components of ETL with Lozen to streamline the data movement (the “Load” or “L” in “ETL”). You can continue to use your ETL solution to extract the data from whatever source it is in and transform it, so it is in the format you want (the “Extract” and “Transform” part of “ETL”). Or you can simply do the extract and let Lozen do the data transfer, code page (e.g. EBCDIC to ASCII), and data format transformation in a single step.
Reduce Costs
To the extent you leverage Lozen, you can also offload the processing for the “L” or the “TL” to a zIIP processor, rather than your general purpose processor. This saves processing costs that are currently charged to your ETL process.
Summary
Lozen provides new flexibility, ease of use, and potential cost savings compared to existing ETL solutions. By leaving the IBM Z data in place, while easily accessing it from other platforms, you can reduce the load on your mainframe processing, support, and development personnel.
Learn More
To learn more about how to unlock the power of real-time, read-write mainframe data access with Lozen:
- Watch our “Simplify Your ETL and Reduce Costs” webinar.
- Watch a Lozen ETL demo.
- Visit our Customer Briefing Center.
- Review all VirtualZ Use Cases, Thought Leadership papers, and Solution Briefs.
- Explore our YouTube channel, podcasts, and blog.
- Still have questions? Contact us.
