BMC introduced a new mainframe product for IBM IMS, the leading database management system for the IBM System z mainframe. The BMC Fast Path Online Restructure/EP solution is designed to reduce downtime to improve availability of critical IMS Fast Path applications.
BMC has been providing IMS solutions since 1982 and has hundreds of IMS customers worldwide including some of the largest financial and IT service providers in the industry. According to Nick Griffin, IMS product manager for BMC Software, 80% of banks rely on IBM IMS, 27 of the top 50 IBM IMS accounts use Fast Path, and Fast Path is used by approximately 25% of all IMS customers. These companies rely heavily on IMS and have no plans to migrate off the system, he emphasizes.
The BMC Fast Path Online Restructure/EP software enables IMS Fast Path databases to be restructured in minutes rather than hours, allowing business needs to be met. Databases remain online during the majority of the restructure process, increasing application availability and minimizing the risk of financial losses associated with outages. This is achieved, Griffin tells 5 Minute Briefing, by capturing updates on a shadow database, and then incurring a short outage at the end to implement the updates on the main system. This is particularly useful for large financial institutions and other organizations that have large data sets and process thousands of transactions per second and cannot afford to have lengthy processing outages.
BMC's IMS solutions, go here.