GT Software, a provider of mainframe integration solutions, today announced the release of Ivory Service Architect 4.1, incorporating new features designed to reduce mainframe workloads and improve SOA performance. Ivory's architecture now fully exploits all three IBM System z mainframe specialty engines.
Ivory is known for ease of use and choice in terms of leveraging mainframe subsystems, including CICS, IMS, CA IDEAL, CA IDMS, batch and data, according to Rob Morris, chief strategy officer, GT Software. Using version 4.1, organizations can choose how and where to leverage specialty engines to conserve integration-related MIPS.
Every organization is different in their adoption of these specialty engines, Morris tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Some have IFL [Integrated Facility for Linux], some have zIIP [System z Integrated Information Processor], but the choice you make today will not prevent you from changing your mind later." He adds that he has also seen, for example, organizations that initially intended to deploy System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) but ultimately went with zIIP. "Ivory is never going to get in the way of making that decision," Morris says. "And, in fact, we will give you that flexibility or insurance policy that says that regardless of your strategy for specialty engines, we have a way for you to leverage that in terms of offloading MIPS."
In addition to supporting the IFL, zIIP, and zAAP, Ivory includes a tool, Ivory Workload Manager, which enables enterprises to get the most out of their specialty engine investment. The Workload Manager provides intelligent routing to configure when and how workload is shifted to specialty engines, ensuring, on a service-by-service basis, that maximum MIPS are saved without sacrificing performance.
This approach is both automated and granular, says Morris, explaining that a user can say, "For this service, only send workloads that is of this type, and not of this type. And so you can be very, very smart about how you leverage the specialty engine, making sure that you get the maximum benefit and you are not taking any performance hit."
The new release of Ivory also delivers performance gains across all versions of the Ivory Server and Ivory Studio as a result of an intensive code optimization effort, including support for binary XML, the vendor says. Additional performance improvements include support for processing large XML schemas and orchestration of large Web service projects. For more information, go here.