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IBM System z and Service Oriented Architectures

Why is System z center stage in SOA?
After 20 years, and billions of dollars exhausted on trying to migrate applications from mainframes, the industry is no nearer to pulling the plug on the mainframe. Core, back-office applications are still implemented as COBOL transactions running on IBM mainframes. Analysts have estimated that there are 200 billion lines of COBOL still in use, worth more than the stock market value of the largest public corporations.

It is a striking fact that much of the code that will be re-used in SOA-enabled business processes in the next ten years is running on the mainframe, and that amount is growing, not shrinking. It is no exaggeration to say that, without the Internet, many businesses would suffer but, without the IBM mainframe, the global financial system would collapse.

IBM System z is ideally architected to meet the operational requirements of SOA-enabled business solutions. An automated, end-to-end business process is only as strong as its weakest link. In the age of the Internet, business processes need to be highly available, secure and have transactional integrity. In other words, system failures must be transparent to users, and application failures must be recoverable without loss of customer data. Firms that deliver mainframe-class services over the Internet have a distinct competitive advantage.

Enterprises require SOA solutions that can scale efficiently up to national and international standards. Systems underlying service oriented business processes must be able to support mixed workloads efficiently, with individual application service priorities set automatically by policy-based workload managers. SOA-enabled systems must be capable of global integration with the large assemblies of dissimilar systems owned by many large enterprises and their business partners. They must be able to run the latest Web, Java* and Linux* applications with powerful, easy-to-use interfaces.

It's often more productive to meet challenging IT governance requirements - such as security, business continuity, disaster recovery, audit compliance and application portfolio management - by implementing centrally in a mainframe environment rather than hundreds of times across heterogeneous servers.

System z is a great place to run SOA middleware. Key mainframe software products such as CICS*, IMS*, DB2* and WebSphere* are fully enabled for SOA. With the latest CICS release, many transactions can be enabled as Web services without changing a line of code. And WebSphere Developer for zSeries* - an efficient, modern, cross-platform and cross-language development tool - makes SOA-enablement straightforward for System z. WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere Process Server run natively on z/OS* or in a virtual Linux server running on System z. And System z is noted for its superior data handling and systems management capabilities. Running infrastructure services on a virtualized mainframe reduces communication paths, improves service levels and reduces management costs.

System z provides all this in a single package and, in many scenarios, at a lower overall cost per transaction than other platforms. Incomplete accounting can hide the true costs of managing separate production, development and test systems. Because of this, new applications are frequently developed and deployed on platforms with higher overall costs than IBM System z, but improved IT governance is turning the tide on outdated cost arguments and showing the true economies of the mainframe platform.

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