One of Alebra’s longest-standing customers users of Parallel Data Mover and z/OpenGate is a well-known credit card processing company, who had been struggling to scale an application that would dump DB2 data from z/OS into a data lake hosted on AIX, making the data accessible to various business units for transformation and analysis.
Initially, the team developing the application thought to use traditional FTP to preform the data movement from IBM Z to AIX, but ultimately found that this approach had a few major disadvantages:
-
FTP moved data via TCP using the Open Systems Adapter, which consumed a relatively large amount of CPU time, network bandwidth, and was a little too slow to allow for these reports to be run at the desired frequency.
-
FTP read the data on IBM Z using BSAM, which used time on a general purpose processor.
-
The EBCDIC data needed to be translated into ASCII; this conversion was performed by FTP, also using time on the general purpose processor.
That’s where Alebra stepped in. Using Parallel Data Mover (PDM) and Alebra’s z/OpenGate appliance, the team was able to solve the problems presented by FTP:
-
Rather than using the TCP stack, PDM could move data off-network at high speed via the z/OpenGate. PDM writes the data out to the z/OpenGate via 16 GB/s FICON CTC connections, and reads it back on the AIX side via 16 GB/s FibreChannel connections.
-
PDM reads the data directly from DASD via z/HPF, and performs this IO at full speed and low cost on a zIIP processor.
-
PDM offloads EBCDIC to ASCII translation and deblocking to the AIX side, eliminating a large share of the processing previously performed on the IBM Z system.
Thanks to Alebra PDM, this development project was a success and the application is streaming many gigabytes of data from IBM Z to AIX each day.
In addition to the success of the project on a technical level, Alebra has received great feedback about the responsiveness and deep z/OS and Unix knowledge provided by our support staff. They also value the always-improving reliability of Parallel Data Mover and z/OpenGate.