DataDirect Shadow - Mainframe Integration

Balancing the return on investment (ROI) and the quick time-to-market requirements presents a daunting challenge to IT organizations when faced with SOA initiatives that involve mainframe systems. Shadow offers a single, unified integration architecture to allow organizations to rapidly redeploy and reuse existing mainframe assets. Shadow's unique exploitation of IBM's™ new mainframe specialty engines, the zIIP and zAAP, offers an improved ROI by lowering mainframe software costs, while also improving the performance of mainframe SOA and data connectivity.

A Unified Mainframe Integration Architecture
Growth, mergers, new technologies — all add to the increasing problem of integration complexity. Left unchecked, this gridlock of interconnectivity can drain infrastructure agility and lead to competitive disadvantage. DataDirect's Shadow addresses this problem with a high-performance foundation architecture to support all the industry standard requirements for integrating mainframe data, business logic, and screens with SOAs and composite application development initiatives. Industry standard access through bidirectional web services, direct SQL access, and real-time events has been extended to include industry standard BPEL 2.0 support to expand your mainframe SOA initiatives with web services orchestration, enabling your mainframe to help drive business process optimization.

The Industry Leading Mainframe Integration Suite
Industry research firms Gartner and Forrester have both reviewed Shadow technology as the leading technology for mainframe integration. The Shadow server is a robust, multi-threaded, native runtime that serves as the architectural framework underpinning DataDirect’s standards-based mainframe integration products:

• Shadow z/Services - Web services for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Shadow z/Events - Real-time events for event-driven integration
• Shadow z/Direct - SQL for direct data access and transactional support
• Shadow z/Presentation - Automatic presentation layer generation for extending screen-based applications to the Web

Flexible Options To Increase Developer Productivity
Developers on distributed application platforms have a broad choice of options for quickly developing new applications using mainframe artifacts — data, applications, and screens — using tools with which they are already familiar. Your developers use their existing skill sets, and your new applications use your existing assets. The Shadow product suite includes flexible development and deployment options:

Shadow Architecture

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• Development
  • Studio support for Java/Eclipse
  • Optimized for Visual Studio .NET
• Deployment
  • Native mainframe deployments on host (Shadow)
  • Distributed or off-host
  • Within mainframe CICS environment

Shadow Studio
Shadow enables simple administration to publish legacy data, business logic, and process (screen-based) assets into reusable industry standard components. With its intuitive, Eclipse-based GUI, The Shadow Studio enables non-mainframe-experts to quickly and easily publish mainframe resources as Web services, real-time events, SQL tables or stored procedures, or web resources. To meet the increasing requirements of mainframe SOA, The Shadow Studio has been enhanced to include full BPEL 2.0 support, including a graphic BPEL designer and BPEL run-time management interface. To ensure integration integrity, The Shadow Studio provides a universal view into all mainframe resources for rapid diagnostics and ease of management.

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Comprehensive Features To Ensure Integration Integrity
The best integration technology offers little real value if the integrity of the connection cannot be maintained. Shadow provides a comprehensive list of features to ensure the availability of business critical applications that rely on Shadow technology.

For organizations that want to enhance their Shadow implementations, there are Advanced Features that provide expanded functionality for security, scalability, transactional integrity and auditing.

Topping the list of these features is the Shadow Instrumentation Server (SIS), which maintains a fully integrated, comprehensive real-time, end-to-end systems management environment for all mainframe integration scenarios. Within SIS, activity is traced and integrated from all mainframe nodes within a Sysplex and exposed graphically via the Shadow Studio. Such information is ideally suited for development productivity, operational support and corporate compliance.

Foundation Features of Shadow
Shadow became the leader in mainframe integration by offering best-in-class technology capable of handling the mission-critical requirements demanded by the world’s largest enterprises. The list of features underpinning Shadow technology include:

Exploitation of IBM zIIP and zAAP Speciality Engines
The Shadow architecture has been extended to exploit IBM's latest mainframe architectural facilities, specifically, the zIIP and zAAP specialty engines. Speciality engines are processors very similar to the mainframe General Purpose Processor (GPP), with two key differences — their workloads do not count against mainframe MIPs or MSUs and they are not speed restricted, but run at full capacity. With Shadow's advanced middleware design, processing intensive workloads associated with SOA or data queries are diverted from the GPP and offloaded to the zIIP. A cost effective strategy for expanded mainframe SOA initiatives is provided by Shadow's exploitation of the zAAP, allowing high performance industry standard BPEL 2.0 to drive Web services with the processing burden in this case being moved from the GPP to the zAAP engine. Shadow's exploitation of the zIIP specialty engine provides both improved performance and lower software costs.

Systems Management

• Performance Analysis and Tuning - Enables rapid views of workload levels running through Shadow. Organizes data into tables, charts and graphs for high-value capacity planning and trending analysis
• Application Debugging - Enables detailed tracing and logging with multiple levels of analysis to aid design time and run-time problem diagnosis with 100+ capture point.
• Automation - Allows automated management of large-scale Shadow implementations for improved availability and throughput. Comprehensive execution of events monitored with a wide range of automated actions available
• Monitoring and Control - Provides online, real-time visibility and measurement of all Shadow-related activity to preserve service. Multiple resource utilization thresholds available with a broad range of automated responses for resource breaches

Security

• Security Optimization and Management (SOM) – enables the use of cached credentials for improved performance and lower costs while maintaining the integrity of the security infrastructure with the real-time purging invalidated credentials as security policies change
• Auditing - Identifies ultimate, unique end-user of mainframe resources in a standard thread-pooled application platform environment
• Encryption - Optimizes encryption of information traveling between the application platform and the mainframe. Manages digital certificates on the mainframe
• Virtual Authentication - Provides authentication flexibility to reduce vulnerabilities of program-initiated authentication requests to a mainframe
• Subsystem Security Integration - Identifies ultimate end-user of mainframe resources in a standard, thread-pooled application platform environment
• Mainframe and Distributed Security - Fully integrates with RACF, CA-TopSecret and CA-ACF2 to provide a robust security model. Distributed platforms support for SSL and client-side, certificate-based authentication

Transactions

• Distributed Transaction Management - Supports prevalent J2EE and .NET distributed transaction management. Built to X/Open XA transaction management standards with support for BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, BEA Tuxedo and Microsoft Transaction Services thread management and choreography
• Support for Enterprise Transactions - Full "two-phase commit" (2PC) Transaction Support. Extensive support for z/OS Resource Recovery Services (RRS). All XA 2PC semantics are supported and exposed directly or via application server transaction manager support
• z/OS Resource Recovery Services - 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

Scalability

• Load Balancing and Failover - Ensures ultimate levels of scalability and availability
• Connection Virtualization - Allows unlimited concurrency of connections from distributed applications
• Transactional Activity Blocking - Reduces lock duration for complex transactions and significantly improves response times for Update and Insert intensive applications policy
• Accounting and Chargeback Support - All integration activity supported by Shadow is logged to the z/OS Systems Measurement Facility (SMF). Various levels of granularity are supported, from session-based accounting to accounting at the interaction level

Additional Features

Shadow zServices Distributed Shadow zServices CICS Region Security Optimization Management