Shadow z/Events
Business Event Processing Via Mainframe Change Data Capture
To facilitate mainframe Business Event Processing, DataDirect Shadow z/Events provides robust Change Data Capture (CDC) for managing data (state changes) events that occur within mainframe databases. Capturing business meaningful events in real-time from DB2 for z/OS, VSAM, IMS DB, CA IDMS, or Adabas, Shadow offers far more precision and range when it comes to mainframe database sources.
Moreover, Shadow’s architecture improves data integration performance while reducing costs. By diverting processing-intensive CDC processing away from the mainframe’s General Purpose Processor to the zIIP specialty engine, Shadow lowers MIPS capacity usage and reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
As mainframe enterprises increasingly embrace the concept of real-time event integration – particularly within the context of SOA – business requirements (and for that matter, Business Process Monitoring and Business Activity Monitoring initiatives) dictate the need for detecting and reacting to complex patterns comprised of multiple events.
Shadow provides a real-time link between mainframe and distributed databases, allowing organizations to use business meaningful data changes for Business Intelligence (BI), Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event-Driven Architectures (EDA).
Capturing mainframe-based events in real-time, Shadow is non-invasive and accomplishes its event capture and publication without touching the database code or data, eliminating any chance of data corruption or database downtime. Moreover, with Shadow developers get the interoperability benefits of XML without additional processing costs.
Shadow shields developers from the complexity of mainframe data source interaction by providing an intuitive, highly-functional development environment, seamlessly tied to a mainframe integration server that provides secure, scalable, enterprise-class performance.
Development
With an open, Eclipse-based development and test environment for the management of mainframe business events, Shadow Studio provides a universal view across all mainframe integration components, including client adapters, server, and mainframe interfaces. With Shadow Studio, developers create an event profile within a mainframe database – identify the location, define rules, timing and destinations – and then run the event capture and destination profiles for validation.
Deployment
Without touching application code, Shadow captures mainframe based business events in real-time and transforms them into XML. Then, Shadow asynchronously pushes the events to distributed databases or business processes via multiple protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS or WebSphere MQ.
Shadow’s z/OS ‘footprint’ appears to the mainframe as a native started task ensuring maximum reliability and minimum resource utilization, without compromising its ability to support thousands of users and thousands of transactions per second.
Unique to Shadow is its patent-pending hybrid threading model called the Logical Dispatchable Unit which has the ability to dynamically switch between the Task Control Blocks (TCB) and enclave Service Request Blocks (SRB) depending on the system need. This fundamental capability of Shadow allows it to run up to 99% of its integration related processing within the non-measured zIIP specialty engine.
Smart Events
Because the initial data state change may be inadequate to provide maximum value to the consumer without additional contextual data, Shadow also enriches events by incorporating environmental data that occurs at the same time.
Through its unified architecture, Shadow simultaneously polls other mainframe databases for environmental data, aggregates all data to essentially create a ‘smart event,’ and as a result immediately increases the business value of the original technical event.
Shadow z/Events comprehensive feature set helps streamline access to mainframe relational and non-relational data and programs:
- Non-Invasive Transformation – Requiring no change to mainframe application code, Shadow transforms captured mainframe events into XML to facilitate utilization with a broad range of distributed application environments and databases.
- Real-Time Filtering – Shadow operates in real-time, reducing latency and expenses associated with traditional batch processing while the Shadow mainframe event manager to logically evaluate and filter multiple events from other mainframe databases.
- Event Aggregation – Shadow aggregates and enriches tagged events to include contextual information and event details from other mainframe databases, transforming an innocuous technical state change into an event with increased business meaning.
- Mainframe Complex Event processing (CEP) – the Shadow mainframe event manager logically evaluates multiple events, enabling decoupled, parallel, asynchronous application processing.
- Transactional Integrity – Shadow detects and logs events 24x7, with enhanced event persistence, ensuring that captured data events are not lost in case of system failure. Shadow embeds all events within the application Unit of Work, never processing until the Unit of Work has been committed, promising transactional integrity of the event.
- Event Auditing – Shadow automatically captures the ID of the user generating the event to provide all necessary information for compliance with audit trail requirements.
Shadow’s foundation architecture provides holistic zIIP exploitation across all of the Shadow integration options, providing up to 99% offload to the zIIP specialty engine for integration-related processing. And, Shadow opens up the zIIP to an expanded range of databases for CDC, including DB2 for z/OS, IMS DB, VSAM, IAM, Adabas, and CA IDMS.
By dramatically offloading CDC transactional workloads from the GPP to the zIIP, Shadow ensures not only a lower TCO for the mainframe, but also more streamlined integration within the context of SOA.
