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 the data hosted on
IBM zSystems - 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 zSystems expertise for the entire ETL process
Leverage Familiar Tools
Lozen leverages NSF to “mount” IBM zSystems 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.
Given this support on non-zSystems platforms, it is a simple and straightforward matter to minimize the tasks associated with extracting data on IBM zSystems, 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 non-zSystems 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 zSystems data in place, while easily accessing it from non-zSystems platforms, you can reduce the load on your IBM zSystems processing, your IBM zSystems support, and your development personnel.
Visit our YouTube channel to watch a Lozen ETL demo and to watch our “Simplify Your ETL and Reduce Costs” webinar.
Learn More
To learn more about how to unlock the power of real-time, read-write
IBM zSystems data access with Lozen:
