Technical Features & Benefits
Secure and Scalable Mainframe Modernization
Shadow offers a highly-intuitive development environment that leverages industry-standard drivers and interfaces to reduces the cost and complexity of mainframe modernization and data access.
In effect, Shadow empowers a range of legacy databases as well as mainframe business and screen logic with direct SQL access, service-centric transformation, event-driven integration, and screen Web enablement. Shadow effectively modernizes this mainframe data and functionality into modern Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and ensures secure, scalable, and reliable connectivity with newer enterprise systems such as Business Intelligence applications.
Shadow dramatically lowers mainframe Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by diverting processing intensive integration workloads from the General Purpose Processor to unmeasured specialty engines. And, Shadow opens the zIIP beyond DB2, to include integration associated with Adabas, IMS DB, and VSAM databases; as well as application environments such as CICS, IDMS, IMS TM and Natural.
The Shadow Instrumentation Server (SIS) is a fully-integrated, real-time, systems management environment for all mainframe integration scenarios. Shadow Studio traces, integrates and graphically exposes activity from all mainframe nodes within a SYSPLEX, enhancing development productivity, operational support and corporate compliance. Shadow’s management functionality includes:
- Performance Analysis, Tuning and Debugging - Shadow enables rapid views of workload levels and organizes data into tables, charts and graphs for high-value capacity planning and trending analysis. Shadow enables detailed tracing and logging with multiple levels of analysis to aid design time and run-time problem diagnosis with 100+ capture points.
- Monitoring and Automation - Shadow allows automated management of large-scale implementations for improved availability and throughput. Shadow monitors the complete execution of events with a wide range of automated actions. Shadow preserves service with online, real-time visibility and measurement, leveraging multiple resource utilization thresholds and a broad range of automated responses for resource breaches.
- Real-Time Visibility – The Shadow Activity Monitor (SAM) provides visibility and measurement into workload levels running through Shadow from distributed applications. SAM establishes user-specified data collection and reporting intervals to meet organizational requirements. The intuitive ISPF interface and graphical user interface allows point and click access to data, tables, charts and graphs. The display presentation is user configurable, with filtering capabilities for user, resources (I/O, CPU, network), time intervals and subsystems.
- Rapid Trend Analysis – SAM provides detailed information – through multiple formats including SMF data, DB2 tables, the SAM GUI and mainframe SDF panels – that analyzes SQL executed by users and performance statistics. SAM’s graphical output simplifies analysis of system performance and resource utilization, allowing administrators to uncover problems and degradations before they disrupt application service levels.
- Granular Control – The Shadow Event Facility (SEF) tunes Shadow parameters and execution characteristics based on the application, user, group and time of day. Shadow also offers control over multiple resources, including the ability to tune z/OS and subsystem parameters. SEF enables automated management of large-scale Shadow implementations for improved availability and throughput. Shadow optimizes resource utilization at all times by automating performance characteristics based on application and business needs.
- Automated Problem Resolution – SEF automatically executes predefined responses to specified events related to simple or recurring problems. By automating responses to common situations, SEF reduces the amount of manual effort required to maintain Shadow, helping Systems and Operations more effectively manage their ever-increasing workloads. SEF support for security events notifies appropriate personnel about suspicious activity and automates system changes to prevent a breach. SEF automates corrections on many levels and improves the performance of Shadow, the applications that use Shadow, and the z/OS system where Shadow is running.
Stateless SOAP protocols call for appropriate security and management features. However, the overhead of addressing sign-on processing for the thousands of Web services related connections back to the mainframe security manager creates a potential bottleneck that can throttle application performance and waste CPU cycles.
Shadow's SSL support and Security Optimization and Management enhancements reinforce existing mainframe security protocols, while properly authenticating and authorizing each and every SOAP request.
- SSL Support – Shadow fully integrates with RACF, CA-TopSecret and CA-ACF2 to provide a robust security model. At the same time, when it comes to distributed platforms, Shadow supports SSL and client-side, certificate-based authentication. Shadow fully supports the choreography of SSL between the application platform suite and the mainframe. Shadow facilities manage digital certificates and exploit the cryptographic coprocessor on mainframes, optimizing encryption of information traveling between the application platform and the mainframe for enhanced performance.
- Security Optimization and Management (SOM) – For any process requiring authentication, for example, a Web service or SQL call, Shadow SOM works in conjunction with the established client and host security protocols to optimize user authentication for sign-on processing. Shadow also supports virtual authentication which provides the flexibility to reduce vulnerabilities of program-initiated authentication requests to a mainframe. These capabilities result in a significant reduction in resource costs associated with processing of loosely-coupled connections. Shadow testing shows an overall reduction of 138% in authentication overhead for 99.3% of the processes requiring authentication – faster than IBM's VLM.
- Transparent Load Balancing – Shadow extends the mainframe's native load balancing capabilities, transparently distributing work across multiple Shadow address spaces on the mainframe and providing support for IBM's Workload Manager. This dynamic load balancing reduces the possibility of application failures, improves application availability and performance, as well as supports virtually unlimited concurrent users and transaction rates. Shadow transactional activity blocking reduces lock duration for complex transactions and significantly improves response times for Update and Insert intensive applications policy.
- Virtual Connection Facility (VCF) – The VCF significantly increases the number of client connections possible. Shadow seamlessly switches from ‘real’ connections (active clients) to ‘virtual’ connections (idle clients) without interrupting a logical unit of work. Shadow VCF also maintains a thread pool that is accessible to all active clients. When a client is idle, Shadow drops the thread, eliminating the overhead and time required for z/OS thread creation, database creation and security checking. Shadow dynamic connection pooling and thread activation improves application availability and performance, while decreasing mainframe CPU utilization.
Shadow Enterprise Transactions provides 2PC functionality for both mainframe and non-mainframe environments. The two-phase commit protocol (2PC) protocol ensures that all data operations, in all steps of a process, are committed or rolled-back as a single unit of work. This eliminates the risk of inconsistent data within an organization.
2PC functionality enables organizations to integrate and update data on multiple platforms with integrity. While many vendors provide products that support two-phase commit on a single platform (forcing manual synchronization or manual updates – an error-prone process),
- Built on X/Open XA – Shadow Enterprise Transactions is built on X/Open XA, today's leading two-phase commit standard. X/Open XA ensures Shadow provides 2PC support for both mainframe and non-mainframe data from a single product. Shadow works with multiple transaction coordinator products; enabling organizations to obtain 2PC support on multiple platforms.
- Distributed Transaction Management – Shadow supports the J2EE Java Transaction Service enabling work with J2EE compliant application servers such as BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and BEA Tuxedo. And, Shadow supports .NET distributed transaction management via Microsoft Transaction Services.
- Comprehensive Application Support on z/OS – Shadow Enterprise Transactions supports popular mainframe data and transaction sources supported by the Shadow product set, including CICS, DB2 and IMS. Shadow enables transaction management via extensive exploitation of z/OS Resource Recovery Services (RRS). All updates made via Shadow within the same global transaction are handled with a single-phase transaction.
- Multiple Communication Protocol Support – Shadow Enterprise Transactions works with MQSeries, SNA, or TCP/IP communications protocols, so it can be easily incorporated into multiple environments.
