Podcast with Gregg Willhoit: zIIP and SOA

In this podcast, Gregg explains the impact of exploiting the zIIP specialty engine within SOA. The podcast runs for 1:26.

To listen to the podcast, please click on the following link: http://blogs.datadirect.com/media/GreggWillhoit_zIIPandSOA_4.mp3

Podcast text:

What is the impact of exploiting the zIIP specialty engine for organizations migrating to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

Gregg Willhoit:

Quite frankly it makes it doable. It actually makes the direction that the company is going in with regards to SOA an achievable goal. XML is the entire aspect of SOA with regards to how SOAP payloads are structured, and how everything is message based places a significant strain on the existing mainframe resources. This, quite possibly causing companies to even delay or to reduce the amount of SOA exploitation they’d like to achieve. The zIIP is basically a free appliance operating within the same memory as the application which with company is attempting to expose via web services. The ability of the product to offload almost 100% of the processing related SOA for the exposing of web services.

SOA workloads are very computationally expensive on System z. With the zIIP and the right product, one can offload about 100% of that processes, which then allows for the more rapid adoption of SOA into the environment – because it’s more cost effective. Without the zIIP, significant general purpose processor capacity is consumed and used, which in many cases will have a negative effect on the adoption of SOA.