WII Federated Data Server on zSeries?

[Frank Swarbrick]

Is Websphere Information Integrator supported on Linux for zSeries?

Here's the deal... We are a VSE mainframe shop. We do not currently have
access to any relational databases from VSE. We use VSAM and DL/I for our
mainframe data.
Our "distribute d applications" side uses Oracle 9i and 10g.

We have two distinct but related goals.
1) Have a relational database for our mainframe data.
2) Access our existing Oracle databases from our mainframe.
Well, maybe 3...
3) Access our mainframe data from non-mainframe platforms.

Oracle does not have a database client (or server, of course) available for
VSE. So the following is what we are considering for our "mainframe data":
- DB2 Server for VSE as our "VSE client" (*PRPQ)
- DB2/UDB on Linux for zSeries

All of our data would be stored on DB2/UDB and we would access the data from
VSE using the DRDA Application Requester function of DB2 Server VSE.
Several VSE customers are already doing this, so I feel pretty good about
it. There is a price break for using only the "client" portion ("PRPQ
P10154 - allows customers to pay for the DB2 Server for VSE&VM client
connectivity capability only- by storing the data on DB2 ‘UDB on Linux for
zSeries.").

So the next issue is how can we easily access Oracle data from VSE. My
first inclination is to do "data federation" between DB2/UDB and Oracle
using Websphere Information Integrator. While this has "pros", it also
appears to have a couple "cons":
1) Cost. WII Standard Edition appears to have a list price of $25,000. We
already have some Websphere Application Server licenses, so I don't know if
we could get any sort of price break, but $25,000 seems a bit steep
especially considering we just want the data federation part and don't care
(as far as I can tell) about the other WII functions.
2) Is WII even supported on Linux for zSeries? I don't see any specific
mention on the system requirements page
(http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data...uirements.html)
of zSeries support, but I'm not sure if that means its only supported on
Intel or what... If that is the case (no WII for Linux zSeries) that would
mean that if we wanted to do this we'd probably end up with DB2/UDB on Linux
for zSeries to hold our mainframe data and then have DB2/UDB along with WII
on Linux for Intel, but we would use that only for access to Oracle and not
to hold any actual DB2 data.

Any answers/thoughts?

Of course there are other alternatives to access Oracle data from VSE. A
company called Viaserv (http://www.viaserv.com/viaserv/mainpage.htm) has a
product called Blue Direct that can act as a middle tier between VSE and
most LAN based databases. I'm sure there are other companies that officer
something similar. But I figured that if we are doing to use DB2 to some
degree anyway I'd be nice to have just the one VSE "client" product to
access both DB2 data and Oracle data. Perhaps its not worth it?

Oh, and as for number 3, I imagine that accessing DB2/UDB from our existing
distributed and web applications would be just as easy as accessing Oracle,
so I don't see that as being much of an issue. Our web applications use
Java/J2EE/JDBC/Websphere and our Windows applications are written in Delphi
(though they are considering a .NET solution in the future).

Thanks!

Frank
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Frank Swarbrick
Senior Developer/Analyst - Mainframe Applications
FirstBank Data Corporation - Lakewood, CO USA