Treetip: Treehouse Software can help enterprise mainframe customers accelerate their data analytics, machine learning, and AI journeys by targeting the new Amazon S3 Express One Zone

by Joseph Brady, Director of Business Development and Cloud Alliance Leader at Treehouse Software, Inc.

Treehouse Software specializes in helping enterprise customers with Mainframe-to-Cloud, Multi-Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud data modernization projects. Many times, our customers not only discuss strategies for replicating their mainframe data, but also their plans for what they want to do with that data on the Cloud side.  This makes it important to our team to stay current on the latest Cloud offerings that can benefit our customers’ enterprise modernization planning. Consequently, a very exciting announcement caught our attention during the 2023 AWS re:Invent conference—the general availability of a new type of S3 storage service referred to as Amazon S3 Express One Zone Storage Class. 

For those unfamiliar, Amazon S3 (“simple storage service”) is the basic file storage service of AWS, and as such it forms a foundational pillar of the entire AWS world. Amazon S3 Express One Zone is a new type of S3 bucket called a “directory bucket”, which is purpose-built to deliver consistent, single-digit millisecond data access for an enterprise’s most frequently used data and latency-sensitive applications. The new S3 directory buckets allow customers to store data in a single Availability Zone (AZ) that they specifically select, as opposed to the default of three AZs for standard S3. This eliminates the latency associated with spreading data across multiple AZs, providing applications with lower-latency storage. S3 directory buckets also follow a different request scaling model compared to traditional buckets, and their authentication is based on sessions rather than on a per-request basis. Bottom line… reduction in compute time = greater cost reduction.

S3 Express One Zone is ideally suited for services such as Amazon SageMaker Model Training, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue Data Catalog to accelerate Machine Learning (ML) and interactive analytics workloads. With S3 Express One Zone, storage automatically scales up or down based on consumption and need, and customers no longer need to manage multiple storage systems for low-latency workloads.

So, why is S3 Express One Zone important to Treehouse mainframe modernization customers?

Amazon S3 Express One Zone just made the Amazon S3 targeting in the Treehouse Dataflow Toolkit (TDT) potentially much more potent and valuable to our enterprise mainframe customers.  When an enterprise uses TDT to land their mission critical data in Express One Zone flavored Athena/S3 buckets, it becomes more directly accessible and manipulable by the various AWS ML and AI tools. In short, if customers choose, Express One Zone Athena/S3 becomes an intermediate data store for big data processing workloads and advanced analytics.

So, when we are asked, “What should Treehouse Software be doing to respond to the burgeoning interest in ML, Generative AI, etc.?”, the answer is — We are doing exactly what we need to be doing.  AI and ML frameworks are the newest incentive for people to use RDRS (Rocket Data Replicate and Sync — formerly called tcVISION) and TDT from Treehouse Software to replicate their mainframe data on advanced data analytics frameworks, or possibly into super-charged S3 Express One Zone buckets.  

Video – Deep Dive Introduction to Amazon S3 Express One Zone Storage Class:

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Contact Treehouse Software today to discuss your project, or to schedule a demo of our Mainframe-to-AWS real-time and bi-directional data replication solution.