• Industry-leading Business Analytics
• Flexible infrastructure options
• A scalable, secure, reliable, simplified and cost-efficient infrastructure
• Flexible Deployment options

Numius pioneered by porting an existing Analytical Cognos 8 environment from a distributed platform running Windows, HP-UX, Oracle, SQL server to a full System z platform on z/OS and z/Linux.  From this project, Numius learnt to appreciate the advantages of running Cognos on System z.  The advantages we experienced can be summarized as follows:

Improved performance
Because of the inherently different hardware and software architecture on System z, ranging from its optimized processor to memory communication, across its hypersocket based networking, down to its zero latency disk throughput, combined with the power of z/Linux and z/OS, we realized a 100 to 400 fold performance gain over the distributed architecture. 

Superb system stability
Although the implemented logical architecture was very simple, with one logical z/Linux server and one DB2 instance on z/OS, the system behaved in a very stable manner.  We showed that we could generate 400 reports and many thousands of PDF reporting pages on a nearly fully loaded IFL processor during a 45 minute processing run, without incurring any report failure at all.

Tightened data security
Obviously, the data security in the z architecture was much tighter than it was on the distributed environment.  The Cognos environment did not have to use any physical networking communication between the application server and the database server.

Drastically Improved Continuity
The distributed platform, with its various physical and virtual servers, multiple database servers, etc, was prone to hardware and software failures.  The "never down" concept of System z automatically provides a drastically higher level of hardware and software continuity.

Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Total Cost of Acquisition (TCA)
We went from four physical servers, one virtualization layer, six operating systems, two database servers, to just one z/Linux instance and just one DB2 on z/OS.  Obviously, this entails a serious reduction in terms of platform complexity, which translates in a significant reduction of cost in terms of administration.  If you would factor in the measures that would have to be taken to insure the same level of Continuity, the cost of an equally well performing and stable platform on a distributed platform would skyrocket.  We refer to a thorough TCO comparison between Cognos on distributed systems and Cognos on System z, which was carried out by IBM, in collaboration with Numius, using the unbiased RACE methodology.

Are you wondering about the migration efforts?
We highlight that the application level (i.e. the Cognos reporting environment) did not require any redesign after having been migrated to System z.  Although we switched operating systems and even database systems (from Oracle on HP/UX and MS-SQLserver on Windows to DB/2 on z/OS), no developments whatsoever need to be done.  This means that the costs of migrating to System z, in terms of application development effort, are minimal.

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