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DataDirect Releases Shadow 7 Mainframe Integration Platform

DataDirect Technologies, a provider of data connectivity and mainframe integration, has released its mainframe integration platform, Shadow version 7. The product includes new features that reduce total cost of ownership for mainframe service-oriented architectures (SOAs) while simplifying the orchestration of mainframe Web services, the company says.

As a full-featured mainframe integration middleware that capitalizes on the potential performance and economic value of the IBM specialty engines--the System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) and System z9 Integration Information Processor (zIIP)--Shadow 7 provides the added benefit of transferring Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) 2.0 workload to the unmeasured and speed-unlimited environment of the zAAP specialty engine.

BPEL is an industry-standard, XML-based workflow definition language that lets businesses describe inter or intra-enterprise business processes connected via Web services. Shadow 7 includes enhancements to accelerate mainframe participation in SOA and BPEL. The Shadow BPEL designer and the zAAP-supported mainframe runtime will enable organizations to orchestrate platform-independent, heterogeneous Web services into long-running, macro Web services that underpin business process optimization, the company says.

Additional information on the benefits of mainframe specialty engines can be found in the recent Gartner report, DataDirect Offering Suggests Future for IBM Specialty Engines, by Dale Vecchio and Massimo Pezzini, (http://www.datadirect.com/gartner-research-report/index.ssp).

In a recent survey titled Mainframe SOA Trends by the publication zJournal, more than 48 percent of integration specialists said their Web services strategy for the mainframe included combining or orchestrating multiple Web services into a macro Web service, while 52 percent of respondents indicated they use industry standard BPEL for Web-services orchestration.

The Shadow BPEL designer and BPEL runtime-management interface are contained in the Eclipse-based Shadow Studio, providing a universal view into mainframe resources and how they can be repurposed into new applications using any of the industry-standard interfaces supported by the Shadow platform--whether through industry-standard SQL (ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET) data access, Web services (SOAP) or real-time events (XML).

With the product's middleware design, SOA integration processing and data queries are diverted from the mainframe's General Purpose Processor (GPP) and redirected to the zIIP and/or zAAP specialty engines. Specialty engines are not speed governed, therefore workloads redirected to specialty engines can deliver better performance. Similarly, workloads redirected to specialty engines do not count against an organization's contracted mainframe processing capacity, which can result in significantly reduced total cost of ownership

Additionally, with Shadow 7, organizations wanting to integrate mainframe assets into an SOA using BPEL orchestration (via a Java Virtual Machine within the Shadow runtime) will have the capability to leverage the zAAP specialty engine to run this critical component of the integration scheme, the company says.