More than fifty years after the first mainframe entered the enterprise, big iron continues to find use with the world’s largest institutions, and continues to impose many of the original operational challenges on its prestigious user base. Standing out in particular is the matter of ongoing costs, which Syncsort Inc. hopes to tackle with the latest update to its ZPSaver Suite.

The bundle consists of two utilities that offload common operations involved in managing data from the main processors of an IBM mainframe to the secondary System z Integrated Information Processors, or ZIIPS for short, which are considerably cheaper to acquire. That allows customers to scale their big iron much more cost-efficiently, but that’s just the tip of the savings iceberg.

IBM uses the number of computational cycles executed on the main chips as the primary billing metric for both its mainframe software and maintenance services, which means that any action relegated to the ZIIPs translates into several saved on the balance sheets. Syncsort claims that its software is helping customers reduce processing time by up to 90 percent for some workloads, a figure that the update is meant to increase even further.

In addition to compression and copy operations, the ZPSaver Suite can now also offload the task of sorting information to the secondary processors, which should come particularly useful for database deployments. Syncsort is offering complementary application analysis services to go along in order to help organizations identify exactly how much their workloads stand to gain the most from its technology.

The benefit is measured not only in saved money but also time, since reducing the load on the primary processors can help a mainframe become more efficient. The company boasts that its suite can cut the duration of some operations by as much as a quarter.

Photo via IBM