A major American firm managed a large hybrid cloud environment to serve their business and operational needs. The environment was comprised of a diverse set of operating systems and platforms, both on-premises and in the cloud, virtual and physical servers, all supporting a wide variety of applications and services.

Along with this heterogeneous environment came a patchwork of data movement solutions, added incrementally as new application projects were completed and brought online. Over time this unplanned approach to data movement became expensive, resource intensive, and cumbersome. The company’s management therefore sought to find a comprehensive data movement solution that could suit the needs of all applications and services while lowering costs and simplifying support.

None of the solutions currently in use fit the bill, for one or more of the following reasons:

• Too expensive, especially because many of these solutions were priced by the amount of data moved.
• Inefficient solutions could not scale to the requirements of critical services and/or consumed an unacceptable level of system and network resources.
• Lack of support for operating systems/platforms in use, in particular IBM Z and AIX Unix.
• Inflexible interfaces that may work for one application, but would require major re-engineering of existing applications to adapt to new paradigms.

Lucky for the firm, they found Alebra Parallel Data Mover.

• Alebra offers affordable, predictable pricing, which doesn’t change whether an application is moving gigabytes or terabytes of data every day.
• PDM offers comprehensive support for a wide variety of operating systems, including IBM Z, Linux (on x86 and s390x), Windows, and AIX Unix.
• PDM is the most efficient solution on the market, taking advantage of hardware and operating system features wherever possible to maximize performance and minimize resource consumption.
• PDM offers robust, flexible interfaces and APIs on all supported platforms. This allows the data movement solution to be tailored to the requirements of the project, not the other way around.

Migrating the firm’s data movement processes to PDM was a success, helped along in no small part by the dedicated expertise of Alebra’s engineering support team in converting jobs and scripts to use the new software. In addition, the firm took advantage of Alebra’s z/OpenGate FICON-FCP appliance, which allowed much of the data movement to occur off-network, drastically improving performance and freeing up network bandwidth for other uses.