If you work with Db2 then you need to know about the IBM zIIP specialty processor. This is true whether you are a DBA or a developer… and, let’s face it, if you work on a mainframe in any capacity, you’ll want to know at least something about zIIPs.
With that in mind, today’s blog post is sort of a meta-post. You see, I’ve been writing a series of blog posts for Cloudframe on the topic of zIIPs. So, the goal today is to provide you with information about those posts and links to their content.
The first blog post, Understanding Mainframe Specialty Processors: zIIPs and More, is introductory in nature. It defines the term “specialty processor” and defines the various types of specialty processors available from IBM. And then it offers a bit more information about the zIIP.
The second post in this series is titled Digging Into the zIIP: What Does zIIP-Eligible Mean? The title is kind of self-describing as to what this post offers!
Next (3 of 8) we have Types of Processing That Can Utilize zIIPs & Why You Want to Use zIIPs which gets into TCBs and SRBs, enclaves, and discusses how zIIPs can reduce your mainframe software costs.
The fourth post in this series digs into one of the major benefits of zIIPs, namely the ability to run Java workloads on the zIIP. In the article, titled Java and the zIIP: Five Major Benefits, we look at the primary advantages that can be accrued by running Java on zIIPs instead of a general purpose CP.
And because the vast majority of mainframe programs are written in COBOL the fifth post, provides Options for Converting from COBOL to Java.
Next, we take a look at Common zIIP Usage Mistakes and How to Identify Them.
Then we turn our attention to the latest IBM pricing model, Tailored Fit Pricing, and examine how it can impact cost savings when it comes to zIIP usage. This post is titled, appropriately enough, The Impact of Tailored Fit Pricing on zIIPs.
And we close out with Predictions on the Future of zIIP and Specialty Processors (of course, this is my personal viewpoint on the topic with the proviso that nobody knows the future for sure)!
So it is my hope that you will take a moment or two and click through the links to the articles above that look interesting to you. And if you have any comments, or suggestions for future articles, as always, please post them below!
Originally published on the Db2 Portal Blog.
Regular Planet Mainframe Blog Contributor
Craig Mullins is President & Principal Consultant of Mullins Consulting, Inc., and the publisher/editor of The Database Site. Craig also writes for many popular IT and database journals and web sites, and is a frequent speaker on database issues at IT conferences. He has been named by IBM as a Gold Consultant and an Information Champion. He was recently named one of the Top 200 Thought Leaders in Big Data & Analytics by AnalyticsWeek magazine.
Hi Craig,
Looking forward to reading all your zIIP articles. Having not read them yet, hoping you might touch on zIIP on CP and why this may be of some concern, especially on sub-capacity Z systems. A couple of mitigations may include, of course, purchasing more zIIP processors, activating SMT2 for zIIP, or even enabling zEDC to offload compression that may be offloaded to zIIP to instead be offloaded to zEDC to make additional zIIP compute capacity available for dB2, especially if using DDF.
Thanks,
Steve