Mainframe performance

Suppose you wanted your transaction processing environments to work faster – and come to think about it, who wouldn’t? – what are your choices? Well, one solution is available from Ottawa-based DataKinetics (www.dkl.com) – who, you may recall, sponsored this year’s Arcati Mainframe Yearbook (www.arcati.com/newyearbook10).

DataKinetics produce tableBASE, which they describe as a “real-time in-memory table management solution that reduces mainframe resource usage”. They go on to say that its usage can lower costs and mainframe TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), and it also optimizes MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) usage, and all this results in performance benefits and “more powerful and efficient applications”.

The product, they claim, provides huge performance increases over existing I/O intensive DB2 systems and buffered DB2 or cached DB2 systems. At sites using tableBASE, the DB2 database populates in-memory tables once. Application I/O calls are substituted with calls to memory-based tables, resulting in these improvements in application performance. Instead of fetching data at I/O speeds, or buffered I/O speeds, applications are able to fetch data at memory speeds – without buffering or using extra hardware. By optimizing existing IT resources, expensive and large-scale upgrade projects or even complete IT infrastructure swap-out projects can be avoided.

DataKinetics has recently decided to enter into partnerships with resellers around the world to make its products more easily available to mainframe customers. So, in South America it’s through Sun Software (www.sunsoftware.com.br). In Australia and Asia it’s through Serus Software (SSZ) (www.ssz.com.au). And in the United Kingdom it’s through our old friends at RSM Partners (www.rsmpartners.com).

DataKinetics CEO Allan Zander said: “This is a very important opportunity for us to tap into the mainframe market in the UK. RSM Partners is a significant player in mainframe and IT support for financial services organizations and insurers within the UK, and this agreement will provide us [with] the opportunity to penetrate a key market in which we currently have a very limited presence. We’re very excited about this agreement, as it gives us immediate access to a market that has seen very little of the type of mainframe cost control capabilities that DataKinetics’ products can offer.” 

Mark Wilson, Technical Director at RSM Partners commented: “We enter partnerships with only those companies with a demonstrated track record of providing value to their customers. With DataKinetics’ 30-plus years of delivering optimization and performance solutions, and their unparalleled client list, we’re confident that their technology will make a difference to our mainframe customers.”

So, some good news for UK-based mainframe users.