SOA on System z

Insight and agility are key to survival in today’s turbulent markets. Insight requires easy access to trusted information. Being able to make the right decisions based on good quality accessible data helps organisations stay ahead of their competition and get to market quickly. Introducing a Data Services layer as part of your Service Oriented Architecture can help deliver that much needed agility. SOA abstracts the physical complexities and whereabouts of data (as well as your applications and processes) into a set of well defined reusable services streamlining and simplifying access to your various data sources. The result is rapid, flexible delivery of applications and transactions that leverage data services consistently across the enterprise.

With 95 percent of Fortune 1000 companies storing their business data on IBM System z due to its business continuity, integrity and scalability it has become the platform for SOA. Find out how IBM Information Management for System z offers best of breed data solutions for your SOA.

5 Steps for you data to successful SOA
There are 5 basic steps in getting you data ready for SOA that apply at both an enterprise level or at the project level.

1. Discover, understand and catalogue key enterprise data entities
2. Map raw diverse and heterogeneous data into a reusable meta-model
3. Cleanse and transform data into trusted content
4. Abstract and federate the data and its functions to simplify access
5. Publish data and access to it as a set of data and information services to be consumed by applications, processes, etc

IBM InfoSphere Information Server for System z and the Foundation tools deliver all of the above capabilities based on common metadata that can be used across the enterprise to enforce consistency and best practice across the enterprise.

DB2 for z/OS and IMS – Your Data on Your Terms – SOA Ready.
SOA has been successful because of its all inclusive approach, making use of all types of data - structured, non structure, relational, hierachical, XML and more.

DB2 for z/OS is IBM’s flag ship relational data base. It has a pureXML feature enabling unified access & management of traditional enterprise data with XML data enabling customers to uniformly and holistically manage, process and query XML and relational enterprise data. DB2 for z/OS stores and processes XML in its inherent hierarchical format, avoiding the performance and flexibility limitations that occur when XML is stored as text in CLOBs or mapped to relational tables. Unlike XML-only databases, DB2 V9 also provides seamless integration of relational data and XML data within a single database, even within a single row of a table. This flexibility is reflected in the language support, which allows you to access relational data, XML data, or both at the same time.

If you have IMS you will realize just how it is with continual SOA enhancements being shipped in each release placing your core business data and transactions at the heart of your SOA. The IMS SOA Ingtegration Suite is a tool kit that offers all you need to fully service enable your IMS data and transactions. It’s performance is outstanding being used by airlines, banks and to track the world’s parcels. Security and reliability are legendary with customers experiencing 1000’s of days without an outage.

It’s flexible in that it offers message queuing, transaction processing and database support. IMS is committed to open standards, connectivity and new and emerging technologies like mashups and Web 2.0. It is also fully integrated into today’s AD tools found in Information Management, Rational and WebSphere – and of course - supports XML.

• Featured white paper (813KB)

  “Information as a Service – A Smarter way to SOA Success”

• Listen to the webcast

  “A Smarter way to successful SOA – Information as a Trusted Strategic Asset”