CA Unveils New Management Controls for IBM zIIP Engines

The company's eight new management software packages aim to bring new levels of efficiency and control to mainframe general-purpose processors.

CA has announced eight IT management software packages that evaluate, monitor and exploit IBMs System z9 Integrated Information Processor, or zIIP, by taking advantage of the zIIPs ability to offload selected computing tasks from a mainframes general-purpose processors.

CA revealed the packages Feb. 12 at the SHARE Technology Exchange in Tampa, Fla. The company announced its intent to support zIIP in January 2006.

The new CA packages enable IT organizations to fine-tune application performance and to extend zIIP-eligible workloads to include functions such as network packet analysis and data encryption, a company spokesperson said.

The "zIIP environment has tremendous potential benefits for IT departments that can take full advantage of its available processing power," said Chris Craddock, senior vice president and principal technology strategist for CA, based in Islandia, N.Y.

CA uses best-of-breed hardware to go with its own software and services in assembling IT management packages, the company said.

Resource Library:

"Most IT organizations are seeing computing workloads associated with their key applications, such as BI [business intelligence] and transaction processing, grow at a much faster pace than their capital infrastructure budget," said Fred Moore, president of Horison, an information strategies consulting firm.

CA adds support for Lotus Domino and DB2 to its BrightStor Storage Resource Manager. Click here to read more.

"By delivering new management and storage solutions that capitalize on the latest advancements in the IBM current mainframe platform, CA is helping its customers overcome this disparity between workload and infrastructure growth," Moore said.

The new CA products introduced at the Tampa conference are as follows:

Unicenter NetMaster Network Management for TCP/IP can offload statistical analysis of packet flows by its Packet Analyzer component and the trace processing performed by its SmartTrace component to one or more zIIP engines.

BrightStor CA-Vtape Virtual Tape System can free up capacity on general-purpose processors by offloading its processing to zIIP engines.

BrightStor Tape Encryption reduces general processor capacity requirements.

Unicenter NeuMICS Resource Management enables system administrators to quickly determine those workloads that will deliver maximum return on investment through zIIP processor exploitation. It facilitates the resource analysis of zIIP environments and can forecast future requirements based on historical utilization trends, a spokesperson said.

Unicenter CA-Sysview Realtime Performance Management monitors the use of general-purpose processors and zIIP, zAAP and IFA specialty engines from a single console, and its graphical analysis displays zIIP and zAAP utilization and eligible utilization.

Unicenter CA-Insight Performance Monitor for DB2 UDB for z/OS provides greater visibility into DB2 performance on a zIIP processor and enhancements for the new DB2 9 will extend this capability.

Unicenter Detector for DB2 UDB for z/OS executes DB2 SQL statistics collection code on a zIIP processor for DB2 SQL activity that is running on a zIIP. This enables users to identify the applications that most significantly affect DB2 performance or consume the most resources so that they can be tuned effectively, when using DRDA (distributed) SQL queries from WebSphere, JDBC, SQLJ, ODBC, or other remote subsystem environments.

Unicenter Subsystem Analyzer for DB2 UDB for z/OS executes DB2 subsystem performance statistics collection code on a zIIP processor for DB2 activity that is running on a zIIP. This enables users to consolidate information in a clear, concise view for quicker understanding of the factors that affect DB2 subsystem performance, when using DRDA activities from WebSphere, JDBC (Java Database Connectivity), SQLJ, ODBC or other remote subsystem environments.

Four of the product releases are available now and the others will be available by June. Individual pricing information can be obtained here.

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