DataDirect Shadow - Advanced Features of Mainframe
Enterprise class mainframe integration goes beyond the basic capability to connect to mainframe datasources to distributed platforms. It requires that the underlying mainframe integration architecture be engineered to extend the characteristics of mainframe quality of service – high performance, scalability, security, reliability and manageability – to the distributed applications using the mainframe resources. Shadow's exploitation of IBM's specialty engines, the zIIP and zAAP, offers improved performance while lowering the Total Cost of Operation (TCO) by diverting processing intensive data and SOA integration workloads from the General Purpose Processor to the unmeasured, non-speed restrictive environment of the specialty engines.
For organizations that want to more fully exploit the Shadow product set, there are several advanced features that provide incremental functionality for security, scalability, data integrity and auditing.
Advanced Features
- zIIP Exploitation – patent-pending extensions to the Shadow architecture enable core functions including XML , SOAP, xDBC processing to be migrated from expensive mainframe general purpose processors to the zIIP specialty engine. zIIP exploitation offers improved performance and lower costs by transferring expensive mainframe MIPS to the zIIP engine.
- zAAP Exploitation – Shadow BPEL extends the SOA capabilities offered in Shadow z/Services by providing an industry standard BPEL 2.0 run time for the orchestration of mainframe web services and run-time environment for BPEL processes. Exploitation of the zAAP engine by Shadow BPEL offers a high performance low cost platform for BPEL deployment.
- Security Optimization and Management (SOM) and SSL Support – Consists of two components:
- SOM - eliminates the overhead of authenticating loosely-coupled connections making Web services on the mainframe
- SSL - provides support for encrypting HTTP and Shadow z/Direct datastream with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
- Advanced Controls - Consists of two components:
- Shadow Activity Monitor - provides real-time comprehensive graphical monitoring of mission-critical applications accessing z/OS resources
- Shadow Event Facility - enables Shadow administrators to construct a highly automated environment from a rules-based management workbench
- Advanced Scalability – provides support for load balancing and virtual control facility to maximize host/client throughput and minimize response times
- Enterprise Transactions for Two-phase Commits (2PC) - feature to ensure data consistency so that all databases – distributed or mainframe - remain synchronized
- Enterprise Auditing-Provides the ability to extend SMF logging capabilities to application servers and removing the identity masking problem associated with connection pooling
DataDirect has engineered the Shadow foundation architecture with a robust set of capabilities and advanced features to ensure the integrity of the business critical applications that rely on the mainframe integration connection stream and to allow organizations to better support the technology requirements associated data integration and Service-Oriented Architectures.
Foundation Features of Shadow
Systems Management
- Performance Analysis and Tuning - Enables rapid views of workload levels running through Shadow. Organizes data into tables, charts and graphs for high-value capacity planning and trending analysis.
- Application Debugging - Enables detailed tracing and logging with multiple levels of analysis to aid design time and run-time problem diagnosis with 100+ capture points.
- Automation - Allows automated management of large-scale Shadow implementations for improved availability and throughput. Comprehensive execution of events monitored with a wide range of automated actions available.
- Monitoring and Control - Provides online, real-time visibility and measurement of all Shadow-related activity to preserve service. Multiple resource utilization thresholds available with a broad range of automated responses for resource breaches.
Security
- Security Optimization and Management (SOM) – enables the use of cached credentials for improved performance and lower costs while maintaining the integrity of the security infrastructure with the real-time purging invalidated credentials as security policies change
- Auditing - Identifies ultimate, unique end-user of mainframe resources in a standard thread-pooled application platform environment.
- Encryption - Optimizes encryption of information traveling between the application platform and the mainframe. Manages digital certificates on the mainframe.
- Virtual Authentication - Provides authentication flexibility to reduce vulnerabilities of program-initiated authentication requests to a mainframe.
- Subsystem Security Integration - Identifies ultimate end-user of mainframe resources in a standard, thread-pooled application platform environment.
- Mainframe and Distributed Security - Fully integrates with RACF, CA-TopSecret and CA-ACF2 to provide a robust security model. Distributed platforms support for SSL and client-side, certificate-based authentication.
Transactions
- Distributed Transaction Management - Supports prevalent J2EE and .NET distributed transaction management. Built to X/Open XA transaction management standards with support for BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, BEA Tuxedo and Microsoft Transaction Services thread management and choreography.
- Support for Enterprise Transactions - Full "two-phase commit" (2PC) Transaction Support. Extensive support for z/OS Resource Recovery Services (RRS). All XA 2PC semantics are supported and exposed directly or via application server transaction manager support.
- z/OS Resource Recovery Services - Enables transaction management via extensive exploitation of z/OS Resource Recovery Services (RRS). All updates made via Shadow within the same global transaction are handled with a single-phase transaction.
Scalability
- Load Balancing and Failover - Ensures ultimate levels of scalability and availability.
- Connection Virtualization - Allows unlimited concurrency of connections from distributed applications.
- Transactional Activity Blocking - Reduces lock duration for complex transactions and significantly improves response times for Update and Insert intensive applications policy.
- Accounting and Chargeback Support - All integration activity supported by Shadow is logged to the z/OS Systems Measurement Facility (SMF). Various levels of granularity are supported, from session-based accounting to accounting at the interaction level.
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