by Joseph Brady, Director of Business Development and Cloud Alliance Leader at Treehouse Software, Inc.
When we begin working with customers who have chosen Treehouse Software’s tcVISION mainframe data replication tool to synch data on AWS, many are just beginning to explore AWS. Some customers haven’t even chosen their desired target database(s) or service(s) yet. This blog focuses on helping customers identify the most popular tools and services needed when planning a Mainframe-to-AWS data replication project.
tcVISION‘s data replication connectivity to AWS puts some of the world’s most advanced technologies at customers’ fingertips. On the Mainframe side, the customers’ familiar on-premises environment with their mission critical data resides on various databases, such as IBM Db2, IBM VSAM, IBM IMS/DB, Software AG Adabas, CA IDMS, CA Datacom, or flat files. On the AWS side, there are over 200 fully featured Cloud-based products, including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications. How can customers choose what’s right for them?
It’s like a big, virtual grocery store…
As we all know, in a grocery store there are many items that appear to do the same thing, but closer inspection shows that certain products can meet specific needs. Here is a list of some of the most popular AWS products and services that we have seen our customers explore and implement for their mainframe data modernization projects:
Amazon EC2 – Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.
Amazon RDS – Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the Cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need. Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types – optimized for memory, performance or I/O – and provides you with six familiar database engines from which to choose, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server.
Amazon S3 – Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.
Amazon S3 Bucket – An Amazon S3 Bucket is a resource that the user creates in an Amazon region, in which to upload data (photos, videos, documents, etc.).
Amazon CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch is a powerful Cloud infrastructure monitoring service that gives developers, system operators, site reliability engineers (SRE), and IT managers actionable insights to monitor applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and obtain a unified view of operational health. Given the dynamic nature of AWS resources, proactive measures including the dynamic re-sizing of infrastructure resources can be automatically initiated. Amazon CloudWatch alarms can be sent to the customer, such as a warning that CPU usage is too high, and as a result, an auto scale trigger can be set up to launch another EC2 instance to address the load. Additionally, customers can set alarms to recover, reboot, or shut down EC2 instances if something out of the ordinary happens.
AWS Direct Connect – AWS Direct Connect is a Cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated, secure network connection from your on-premises computing environment to AWS. While in transit, your network traffic remains on the AWS global network and never touches the public internet.
Amazon Kinesis – Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost-effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements of your application. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data for machine learning, analytics, and other applications. Amazon Kinesis enables you to process and analyze data as it arrives and respond instantly instead of having to wait until all your data is collected before the processing can begin.
AWS Lambda – AWS Lambda is an event-driven, “serverless” computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of the Amazon Web Services. It is a computing service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code.
AWS Machine Learning – AWS Machine Learning Services offer the broadest and deepest set of machine learning services and supporting Cloud infrastructure, putting machine learning in the hands of every developer, data scientist and expert practitioner.
Amazon Redshift – Amazon Redshift is a popular and fastest growing Cloud data warehouse allowing customers to run and scale analytics in seconds on all of their data without having to manage a data warehouse infrastructure.
Video: tcVISION Mainframe-to-AWS data replication
tcVISION focuses on changed data capture (CDC) when transferring information between mainframe data sources and modern databases and applications. Through an innovative technology, changes occurring in any mainframe application data are tracked and captured, and then published on a variety of AWS targets. The product provides mainframe customers bi-directional, real-time data synchronization of changes on either platform to be reflected on the other platform (e.g., a change to a PostgreSQL table is reflected back on mainframe). The customer can then modernize their application on AWS without disrupting the existing critical work on the legacy system.
Treehouse Software was recently invited by AWS mainframe modernization technical teams to do a presentation and demonstration of tcVISION, our innovative Mainframe-to-Cloud data replication software product.
In this video, an introductory overview to Treehouse Software’s tcVISION is shown, along with a live demonstration of mainframe data replication on AWS RDS for PostgreSQL:
Contact Treehouse Software for a Demo Today…
No matter where you want your mainframe data to go – the Cloud, open systems, or any LUW target –tcVISION from Treehouse Software is your answer.
Just fill out the Treehouse Software Product Demonstration Request Form and a Treehouse representative will contact you to set up a time for your online tcVISION demonstration.
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