Enabling Real-time Analytics on IBM z Systems Platform

Enabling Real-time Analytics on IBM z Systems Platform
Author: Lydia Parziale
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2016-08-08
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738441864

Regarding online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, IBM® z SystemsTM platform, with IBM DB2®, data sharing, Workload Manager (WLM), geoplex, and other high-end features, is the widely acknowledged leader. Most customers now integrate business analytics with OLTP by running, for example, scoring functions from transactional context for real-time analytics or by applying machine-learning algorithms on enterprise data that is kept on the mainframe. As a result, IBM adds investment so clients can keep the complete lifecycle for data analysis, modeling, and scoring on z Systems control in a cost-efficient way, keeping the qualities of services in availability, security, reliability that z Systems solutions offer. Because of the changed architecture and tighter integration, IBM has shown, in a customer proof-of-concept, that a particular client was able to achieve an orders-of-magnitude improvement in performance, allowing that client's data scientist to investigate the data in a more interactive process. Open technologies, such as Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) can help customers update single components instead of being forced to replace everything at once. As a result, you have the possibility to combine your preferred tool for model generation (such as SAS Enterprise Miner or IBM SPSS® Modeler) with a different technology for model scoring (such as Zementis, a company focused on PMML scoring). IBM SPSS Modeler is a leading data mining workbench that can apply various algorithms in data preparation, cleansing, statistics, visualization, machine learning, and predictive analytics. It has over 20 years of experience and continued development, and is integrated with z Systems. With IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator 5.1 and SPSS Modeler 17.1, the possibility exists to do the complete predictive model creation including data transformation within DB2 Analytics Accelerator. So, instead of moving the data to a distributed environment, algorithms can be pushed to the data, using cost-efficient DB2 Accelerator for the required resource-intensive operations. This IBM Redbooks® publication explains the overall z Systems architecture, how the components can be installed and customized, how the new IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator loader can help efficient data loading for z Systems data and external data, how in-database transformation, in-database modeling, and in-transactional real-time scoring can be used, and what other related technologies are available. This book is intended for technical specialists and architects, and data scientists who want to use the technology on the z Systems platform. Most of the technologies described in this book require IBM DB2 for z/OS®. For acceleration of the data investigation, data transformation, and data modeling process, DB2 Analytics Accelerator is required. Most value can be achieved if most of the data already resides on z Systems platforms, although adding external data (like from social sources) poses no problem at all.

Real-time Fraud Detection Analytics on IBM System z

Real-time Fraud Detection Analytics on IBM System z
Author: Mike Ebbers
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 70
Release: 2013-04-11
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738437638

Payment fraud can be defined as an intentional deception or misrepresentation that is designed to result in an unauthorized benefit. Fraud schemes are becoming more complex and difficult to identify. It is estimated that industries lose nearly $1 trillion USD annually because of fraud. The ideal solution is where you avoid making fraudulent payments without slowing down legitimate payments. This solution requires that you adopt a comprehensive fraud business architecture that applies predictive analytics. This IBM® Redbooks® publication begins with the business process flows of several industries, such as banking, property/casualty insurance, and tax revenue, where payment fraud is a significant problem. This book then shows how to incorporate technological advancements that help you move from a post-payment to pre-payment fraud detection architecture. Subsequent chapters describe a solution that is specific to the banking industry that can be easily extrapolated to other industries. This book describes the benefits of doing fraud detection on IBM System z®. This book is intended for financial decisionmakers, consultants, and architects, in addition to IT administrators.

Getting Started: Journey to Modernization with IBM Z

Getting Started: Journey to Modernization with IBM Z
Author: Makenzie Manna
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2021-03-15
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738459534

Modernization of enterprise IT applications and infrastructure is key to the survival of organizations. It is no longer a matter of choice. The cost of missing out on business opportunities in an intensely competitive market can be enormous. To aid in their success, organizations are facing increased encouragement to embrace change. They are pushed to think of new and innovative ways to counter, or offer, a response to threats that are posed by competitors who are equally as aggressive in adopting newer methods and technologies. The term modernization often varies in meaning based on perspective. This IBM® Redbooks® publication focuses on the technological advancements that unlock computing environments that are hosted on IBM Z® to enable secure processing at the core of hybrid. This publication is intended for IT executives, IT managers, IT architects, System Programmers, and Application Developer professionals.

Optimized Inferencing and Integration with AI on IBM zSystems: Introduction, Methodology, and Use Cases

Optimized Inferencing and Integration with AI on IBM zSystems: Introduction, Methodology, and Use Cases
Author: Makenzie Manna
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2022-11-30
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738460923

In today's fast-paced, ever-growing digital world, you face various new and complex business problems. To help resolve these problems, enterprises are embedding artificial intelligence (AI) into their mission-critical business processes and applications to help improve operations, optimize performance, personalize the user experience, and differentiate themselves from the competition. Furthermore, the use of AI on the IBM® zSystems platform, where your mission-critical transactions, data, and applications are installed, is a key aspect of modernizing business-critical applications while maintaining strict service-level agreements (SLAs) and security requirements. This colocation of data and AI empowers your enterprise to optimally and easily deploy and infuse AI capabilities into your enterprise workloads with the most recent and relevant data available in real time, which enables a more transparent, accurate, and dependable AI experience. This IBM Redpaper publication introduces and explains AI technologies and hardware optimizations, and demonstrates how to leverage certain capabilities and components to enable AI solutions in business-critical use cases, such as fraud detection and credit risk scoring, on the platform. Real-time inferencing with AI models, a capability that is critical to certain industries and use cases, now can be implemented with optimized performance thanks to innovations like IBM zSystems Integrated Accelerator for AI embedded in the Telum chip within IBM z16TM. This publication describes and demonstrates the implementation and integration of the two end-to-end solutions (fraud detection and credit risk), from developing and training the AI models to deploying the models in an IBM z/OS® V2R5 environment on IBM z16 hardware, and integrating AI functions into an application, for example an IBM z/OS Customer Information Control System (IBM CICS®) application. We describe performance optimization recommendations and considerations when leveraging AI technology on the IBM zSystems platform, including optimizations for micro-batching in IBM Watson® Machine Learning for z/OS. The benefits that are derived from the solutions also are described in detail, including how the open-source AI framework portability of the IBM zSystems platform enables model development and training to be done anywhere, including on IBM zSystems, and enables easy integration to deploy on IBM zSystems for optimal inferencing. Thus, allowing enterprises to uncover insights at the transaction-level while taking advantage of the speed, depth, and securability of the platform. This publication is intended for technical specialists, site reliability engineers, architects, system programmers, and systems engineers. Technologies that are covered include TensorFlow Serving, WMLz, IBM Cloud Pak® for Data (CP4D), IBM z/OS Container Extensions (zCX), IBM CICS, Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), and IBM Deep Learning Compiler (zDLC).

DB2 12 for z Optimizer

DB2 12 for z Optimizer
Author: Terry Purcell
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2017-06-28
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738456128

There has been a considerable focus on performance improvements as one of the main themes in recent IBM DB2® releases, and DB2 12 for IBM z/OS® is certainly no exception. With the high-value data retained on DB2 for z/OS and the z Systems platform, customers are increasingly attempting to extract value from that data for competitive advantage. Although customers have historically moved data off platform to gain insight, the landscape has changed significantly and allowed z Systems to again converge operational systems with analytics for real-time insight. Business-critical analytics is now requiring the same levels of service as expected for operational systems, and real-time or near real-time currency of data is expected. Hence the resurgence of z Systems. As a precursor to this shift, IDAA brought the data warehouse back to DB2 for z/OS and, with its tight integration with DB2, significantly reduces data latency as compared to the ETL processing that is involved with moving data to a stand-alone data warehouse environment. That change has opened up new opportunities for operational systems to extend the breadth of analytics processing without affecting the mission-critical system and integrating near real-time analytics within that system, all while maintaining the same z Systems qualities of service. Apache Spark on z/OS and Linux for System z also allow analytics in-place, in real-time or near real-time. Enabling Spark natively on z Systems reduces the security risk of multiple copies of the Enterprise data, while providing an application developer-friendly platform for faster insight in a simplified and more secure analytics framework. How is all of this relevant to DB2 for z/OS? Given that z Systems is proving again to be the core Enterprise Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) system, it is critical that DB2 for z/OS can handle its traditional transactional applications and address the requirements for analytics processing that might not be candidates for these rapidly evolving targeted analytics systems. And not only are there opportunities for DB2 for z/OS to play an increasing role in analytics, the complexity of the transactional systems is increasing. Analytics is being integrated within the scope of those transactions. DB2 12 for z/OS has targeted performance to increase the success of new application deployments and integration of analytics to ensure that we keep pace with the rapid evolution of IDAA and Spark as equal partners in HTAP systems. This paper describes the enhancements delivered specifically by the query processing engine of DB2. This engine is generally called the optimizer or the Relational Data Services (RDS) components, which encompasses the query transformation, access path selection, run time, and parallelism. DB2 12 for z/OS also delivers improvements targeted at OLTP applications, which are the realm of the Data Manager, Index Manager, and Buffer Manager components (to name a few), and are not identified here. Although the performance measurement focus is based on reducing CPU, improvement in elapsed time is likely to be similarly achieved as CPU is reduced and performance constraints alleviated. However, elapsed time improvements can be achieved with parallelism, and DB2 12 does increase the percentage offload for parallel child tasks, which can further reduce chargeable CPU for analytics workloads.

Creating IBM z/OS Cloud Services

Creating IBM z/OS Cloud Services
Author: Jeffrey Bisti
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2016-02-08
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738441538

This IBM® Redbooks® publication discusses the real world experience of an enterprise that developed and implemented IBM z/OS® cloud services. This book shares the experience of a team at Walmart Technology, Walmart Stores, Inc.® and some of the decisions they made to create business critical cloud services. These experiences and approaches relate to the z/OS platform, and might not apply to other hybrid cloud approaches. This book highlights the strengths and characteristics of z/OS that led the Walmart infrastructure and software engineers to use this platform as they transitioned from a traditional IT deployment to a cloud model. Embarking on a cloud strategy can be overwhelming. No shortage of approaches to cloud computing exists. This book focuses on a pragmatic approach for enterprises that are struggling to take advantage of their business assets in the cloud. This book introduces the basic cloud concepts as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Each chapter explains the importance of a particular NIST characteristic, the z/OS role in accomplishing the characteristic, and how it was implemented by the Walmart Technology team. This book is intended for IT professionals who are considering extending their IBM z SystemsTM environment to a hybrid cloud by unleashing the power of cloud services on z/OS. For information about creating cloud services that are hosted in IBM CICS®, see How Walmart Became a Cloud Services Provider with IBM CICS, SG24-8347.

Introduction to IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems

Introduction to IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems
Author: Domenico D'Alterio
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2018-07-26
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 073845706X

IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems collects, filters, and formats IT operational data in near real-time and provides that data to target analytics solutions. IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems enables authorized IT operations teams using a single web-based interface to specify the IT operational data to be gathered and how it needs to be handled. This data is provided to both on- and off-platform analytic solutions, in a consistent, consumable format for analysis. This Redpaper discusses the value of IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems, provides a high-level reference architecture for IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems, and introduces key components of the architecture. It shows how IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems provides operational data to various analytic solutions. The publication provides high-level integration guidance, preferred practices, tips on planning for IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems, and example integration scenarios.

Accelerating Digital Transformation on Z Using Data Virtualization

Accelerating Digital Transformation on Z Using Data Virtualization
Author: Blanca Borden
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 38
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738457299

This IBM® RedpaperTM publication introduces a new data virtualization capability that enables IBM z/OS® data to be combined with other enterprise data sources in real-time, which allows applications to access any live enterprise data anytime and use the power and efficiencies of the IBM Z® platform. Modern businesses need actionable and timely insight from current data. They cannot afford the time that is necessary to copy and transform data. They also cannot afford to secure and protect each copy of personally identifiable information and corporate intellectual property. Data virtualization enables direct connections to be established between multiple data sources and the applications that process the data. Transformations can be applied, in line, to enable real-time access to data, which opens up many new ways to gain business insight with less IT infrastructure necessary to achieve those goals. Data virtualization can become the backbone for advanced analytics and modern applications. The IBM Data Virtualization Manager for z/OS (DVM) can be used as a stand-alone product or as a utility that is used by other products. Its goal is to enable access to live mainframe transaction data and make it usable by any application. This enables customers to use the strengths of mainframe processing with new agile applications. Additionally, its modern development environment and code-generating capabilities enable any developer to update, access, and combine mainframe data easily by using modern APIs and languages. If data is the foundation for building new insights, IBM DVM is a key tool for providing easy, cost-efficient access to that foundation.

IBM Integrated Synchronization: Incremental Updates Unleashed

IBM Integrated Synchronization: Incremental Updates Unleashed
Author: Christian Michel
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2021-01-27
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738459283

The IBM® Db2® Analytics Accelerator (Accelerator) is a logical extension of Db2 for IBM z/OS® that provides a high-speed query engine that efficiently and cost-effectively runs analytics workloads. The Accelerator is an integrated back-end component of Db2 for z/OS. Together, they provide a hybrid workload-optimized database management system that seamlessly manages queries that are found in transactional workloads to Db2 for z/OS and queries that are found in analytics applications to Accelerator. Each query runs in its optimal environment for maximum speed and cost efficiency. The incremental update function of Db2 Analytics Accelerator for z/OS updates Accelerator-shadow tables continually. Changes to the data in original Db2 for z/OS tables are propagated to the corresponding target tables with a high frequency and a brief delay. Query results from Accelerator are always extracted from recent, close-to-real-time data. An incremental update capability that is called IBM InfoSphere® Change Data Capture (InfoSphere CDC) is provided by IBM InfoSphere Data Replication for z/OS up to Db2 Analytics Accelerator V7.5. Since then, an extra new replication protocol between Db2 for z/OS and Accelerator that is called IBM Integrated Synchronization was introduced. With Db2 Analytics Accelerator V7.5, customers can choose which one to use. IBM Integrated Synchronization is a built-in product feature that you use to set up incremental updates. It does not require InfoSphere CDC, which is bundled with IBM Db2 Analytics Accelerator. In addition, IBM Integrated Synchronization has more advantages: Simplified administration, packaging, upgrades, and support. These items are managed as part of the Db2 for z/OS maintenance stream. Updates are processed quickly. Reduced CPU consumption on the mainframe due to a streamlined, optimized design where most of the processing is done on the Accelerator. This situation provides reduced latency. Uses IBM Z® Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) on Db2 for z/OS, which leads to reduced CPU costs on IBM Z and better overall performance data, such as throughput and synchronized rows per second. On z/OS, the workload to capture the table changes was reduced, and the remainder can be handled by zIIPs. With the introduction of an enterprise-grade Hybrid Transactional Analytics Processing (HTAP) enabler that is also known as the Wait for Data protocol, the integrated low latency protocol is now enabled to support more analytical queries running against the latest committed data. IBM Db2 for z/OS Data Gate simplifies delivering data from IBM Db2 for z/OS to IBM Cloud® Pak® for Data for direct access by new applications. It uses the special-purpose integrated synchronization protocol to maintain data currency with low latency between Db2 for z/OS and dedicated target databases on IBM Cloud Pak for Data.