Addressing mainframe challenges

First, Syncsort is announcing the latest release of its flagship mainframe software product - Syncsort MFX for z/OS ? further extending the performance and functionality lead that Syncsort has held for decades. Second, Syncsort is releasing a new solution suite built on Syncsort MFX, called Syncsort ZPSaver, which includes utilities that enable IT organisations to achieve tremendous cost savings and meet performance SLAs by offloading both Copy and SMS Compression workloads to zIIP processors, effectively reducing CPU time for those tasks by up to 90%.

The new release of MFX builds on Syncsort’s experience since the early 1970’s of being the gold standard in high-performance data sorting and transformation engine on the mainframe, delivering the fastest and most efficient sort, copy and join technology. By exploiting IBM’s zHPF architecture ? the most recent advance in optimising mainframe I/O for storage devices ? MFX extends its performance lead by further reducing elapsed time to help meet SLAs.

In connection with the availability of ZP Saver Suite, Syncsort is also offering potential customers free comprehensive workload analysis services, which will deliver a crisp and clear estimate of the potential cost savings and performance benefits of these new Syncsort products for a given customer’s mainframe deployment.
“Even as Big Iron evolves to play a key role as the back-end transactional platform for Big Data, mobile, and Internet of Things use cases, organisations face greater challenges in achieving their performance and expense goals,” said Harvey Tessler, Founder, Syncsort. “Our new products exploit every significant hardware and operating system development IBM has delivered to help customers process more data in less time while reducing expensive processing costs.”

Syncsort’s new solutions also allow technology organisations to easily calibrate trade-offs between CPU utilisation and performance on the mainframe so they can pay less for CPU cycles while delivering better performance levels to their users.

In addition to the new solutions to help manage mainframe processing costs and performance, Syncsort also recently announced Ironstream, a unique-in-the-market product that provides real-time, operational insights for Splunk® Enterprise and Splunk Cloud. Ironstream allows customers to continuously push valuable mainframe data into their Splunk environments in real-time for advanced analysis of operational health without disrupting or adding costs to the mainframe operating environment.

“Mainframes continue to be the go-to platform for many organizations’ mission-critical data,” said Jeff Kelley, principal analyst, Wikibon. “Syncsort’s recent organic innovations and acquisitions around the mainframe have been extraordinary, helping to lower costs, improve performance, and also to liberate locked-away mainframe data by making available to next generation Big Data environments.”