The IBM Z incorporates a highly advanced hardware feature known as the Integrated Accelerator for zEDC. Embedded within each processor chip, this facility delivers on-chip compression and decompression performance with extraordinary throughput. It supports standard compression formats such as DEFLATE, gzip, and lzip via zlib and z/OS APIs, while operating transparently to the applications it serves.

How Does PDM Utilize This Capability?

Alebra’s Parallel Data Mover (PDM) is engineered to exploit  the IBM Z architecture by seamlessly integrating with the Integrated Accelerator for zEDC. On z/OS, PDM reads data in block format directly from mainframe storage, compresses the zEDC accelerator within a zIIP processor, and transmits it efficiently to LUW platforms via TCP/IP or Alebra’s FICON-attached gateways. The compression step leverages zIIP eligibility to preserve GP resources, maintaining high throughput with minimal system overhead. 

On the receiving LUW side, PDM decompresses the incoming data in parallel across multiple threads, reconstructing it into records with exceptional speed. This architecture supports both directions of transfer—data can also be read, blocked, and compressed on LUW systems and then sent to z/OS for decompression and writing into z/OS datasets. Compression and decompression operations are always designed to execute in the optimal environment for performance.

By intelligently leveraging the compression acceleration and I/O offload features of the IBM Z, alongside Alebra’s own hardware-assisted transfer solutions, PDM enables high-speed, resource-efficient data exchange between z/OS and LUW systems with minimal impact to primary production workloads.