Mission: Possible
DB2 and the System z platform can turn challenges into possibilities
In today’s information–driven business world, reliability and performance of IT systems are essential to keeping a business running smoothly and profitably. This is especially true of ERP systems and business intelligence (BI) systems. Application users demand that the hardware and software be available when needed. In such an environment, outages must be avoided. An outage that affects ERP impacts not just one business segment, but also the entire organization. The more severe the outage, the more consequences for your business.
How costly are outages? They can run into millions of dollars. That’s why using the IBM* System z* platform makes sense. According to an April 2007 report from Los Altos, Calif.-based International Technology Group titled, "Economic Value of the System z: For SAP Enterprise Deployments in Supply Chain Operations," outage-related business costs for the System z platform “are between 12.0 and 14.5 times lower” than for other systems.
By adding IBM DB2* for z/OS* to the mix, companies can build on the quality of service that the System z platform provides and augment those characteristics through the DB2 database’s tight integration with the hardware and z/OS as well as adding its own leading-edge database technology features. “DB2 for z/OS on the System z platform is the premier database platform where security, data and hardware scalability, and continuous availability are important to your business,” says Steve Bergmann of the IBM/SAP International Competence Center.
DB2 for z/OS and leading business-solution provider SAP enable you to design, implement and operate next-generation business applications. DB2 Version 9 provides several unique capabilities that help ensure the success of your most strategic applications, including: cost-based optimization for frequently changing operational and objects parameters; partition independence for growing amounts of data; integrated utilities for enabling unobtrusive database maintenance such as online backups and online reorganizations; automatic detection and recovery of physically inconsistent data; and autonomic execution optimization.
Integration is Key
The synergy of DB2 and the System z platform really counts when running mission-critical processing. The System z platform is known for its performance, scaling and continuous availability capabilities and DB2 is engineered to take full advantage of those characteristics. There’s no compromising performance of reliability, availability, serviceability (RAS) in DB2. One of the reasons customers choose the System z platform is that “its availability is demonstrably 99.999 percent,” notes Peter Harris, IBM/SAP Global Alliance Sales Manager.
Further, the System z platform delivers superior database quality of service characteristics. Frequently executed database functions like sorting, compression, Unicode conversion, large storage pools and data sharing can be handled with ease. DB2 can automatically exploit System z features such as processor- and memory-sharing and Capacity on Demand. Other unique values that z/OS brings to DB2 include the z/OS Security Service, RACF*, and DB2 internal authorization and security mechanisms; the z/OS Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem (DFSMS), which is characterized by superior, policy-based disk and tape management, providing virtualization over the external storage resource; z/OS Workload Manager, which enables users to consolidate and manage mixed workloads with different service-level agreements; and exploitation of System Modification Program, which means software fixes can be applied selectively rather than applied as fixpacks in their entirety.
Open Access to DBMS Products
While the tight synergy between DB2 and z/OS gives the customer a smooth-running system, DB2 is flexible. It’s open to many of the other database-management system (DBMS) products on the market. DB2 fully supports standard interfaces such as SQL, JDBC, CLI, DRDA and Web services. DB2’s support of standard programming interfaces and tooling means that application programmers can still use the development environments that are most comfortable for them. DB2 also provides pureXML* for seamless and efficient integration of XML and relational data.
DB2 was designed to anticipate and manage those daily operational challenges that are part of DBMS. These include cost-based optimization for changing operational and objects parameters frequently; partitioning and partition independence to handle the ever-growing amounts of data; integrated utilities to enable database maintenance to run unobtrusively; automatic detection and recovery of broken pages or physically inconsistent data; and autonomic execution optimization via such techniques as buffer-pools throttling, sequential access-pattern detection, hierarchical locking and dynamic adjustment of degrees of parallelism.
One of the key DB2 competitive advantages over other DBMS platforms is the exploitation of System z Parallel Sysplex*, also known as DB2 Data Sharing. IBM believes this characteristic puts DB2 ahead of the competition by providing a superior scaling environment for SAP deployments. DB2 Data Sharing uses special-purpose coupling facility hardware that acts as a clustering hub and enables inter-system data coherency and global locking algorithms that aren’t dependent on the number of computing nodes. That gives DB2 advanced scalability and availability.
Any unplanned outages can be handled by the robust failover mechanisms, which allow the surviving nodes to take over the processing of the failed node without any expensive resynchronization logic that could lead to the temporary outage of the entire system. Planned outages, too, are handled efficiently with the DB2 Data Sharing architecture encompassing controlled failover including quiescing the activity at the nodes that need maintenance and routing the work to the remaining nodes.
System z Parallel Sysplex handles DB2 software upgrades and maintenance in a sophisticated manner. DB2 uses a unique relational database system that allows rolling software upgrades while nodes within the same cluster run different versions of the database software. The software can be upgraded and the system remains fully available and operational while the upgrade is being performed.
“DB2 for z/OS on the System z platform is the premier database platform where security, data and hardware scalability, and continuous availability are important to your business.” —Steve Bergmann, IBM/SAP International Competence Center