By Nogi Simanjuntak, IDAA and Data Gate Development, and Guanjun Cai, Db2 for z/OS and Data Gate Content Design
IBM Data Gate for watsonx is the latest addition to the IBM Data Gate family of products. The Data Gate offerings have already enabled you to bring your enterprise transactional data residing on IBM Z to the cloud environment for your AI and cloud initiatives. The new solution extends that capability by seamlessly synchronizing the same mission-critical data to watsonx, IBM's next-generation Lakehouse-based data and AI platform, for accelerating and scaling your AI and Lakehouse workloads with significantly reduced complexity, cost, and time to value.
Using IBM advanced Integrated Synchronization and IIDR CDC technologies, Data Gate for watsonx replicates selected data in Db2 for z/OS, IMS, and VSAM sources and ingests it into target object stores in watsonx.data. The source data is not moved off the Z platform; instead, Data Gate for watsonx simply copies, transforms (if needed), and loads the data into watsonx.data. To keep the copy up to date, Data Gate for watsonx asynchronously reads the log records on the source server and continuously captures, consolidates, and synchronizes the delta to the target store. Optimized for high throughput and low latency, the continuous synchronization ensures transactionally consistent data across the source and the target at all time.
The integrated and zIIP-enabled synchronization is secure and efficient. With built-in end-to-end encryption, data is securely transferred unidirectionally, where it always flows from the IBM Z sources to the watsonx.data targets and is never the other way around. This ensures the safety and integrity of the source data. Under no circumstances, data at the source can be overwritten or compromised by applications at the other end.
Data Gate for watsonx ingests relational data in the source on Z as Iceberg files in the target on watsonx.data. As the data store component of the watsonx platform, watsonx.data not only provides large Iceberg-type data lakehouses that can serve as the basis for extensive analytics and AI computations, but also offers a SQL view on nearly all types of data, structured and unstructured. With Data Gate for watsonx, your AI and lakehouse applications can now securely access the most up-to-date transactional data in Iceberg open-source table format, run Presto-based SQL queries or Spark-powered analytics across the data at scale and regardless of its original sources, build accurate predictive AI models, and extract AI insights in real time.
Data Gate for watsonx will prove a perfect solution if you plan to put your valuable Db2 for z/OS, IMS, and VSAM data originated on IBM Z for greater use while taking full advantage of the following unrivaled benefits:
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Integrated, simple, and efficient synchronization of your IBM Z data to your cloud and lakehouse environments in real time.
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Seamless, secure, ultra-fast, and cost-efficient access of your up-to-date and transactionally consistent data in watsonx by your AI and analytics applications within a data fabric.
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The most cost-effect way to analyze your enterprise data off IBM Z and extracting AI insights for your business without consuming your Z compute resources or impacting your transactional workloads in Db2 for z/OS, IMS, and VSAM.
Learn more about IBM Data Gate for watsonx and how to get started with it in IBM Documentation at https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/dg-for-watsonx/1.1.x.
A special thank-you to Daniel Martin, Director and CTO of IDAA, Data Gate, and zSW Design, and Vassil Dimov, Technical Lead, Db2 for z/OS Data Gate, for their contributions.
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