Syncsort™ MFX
Increase mainframe efficiency by accelerating sort, copy, and join workloads—while offloading processing to IBM zIIP engines to reduce CPU costs and protect batch windows.
Optimize mainframe sort performance and efficiency
As IBM Z data volumes continue to grow and batch windows shrink, sort, copy, and merge operations are increasingly becoming performance and cost bottlenecks. These workloads are among the most CPU-intensive steps in batch processing, driving higher MSU consumption, increasing software charges, and putting SLAs at risk.
Mainframe teams face growing pressure to reduce costs while keeping pace with expanding workloads—without disrupting existing jobs or workflows. Optimizing sort performance is one of the fastest, most effective ways to regain control of both performance and spend.
Benefits
Optimize sort performance
Deliver industry-leading sort, copy, and merge performance to eliminate batch bottlenecks and support growing workloads.
Reduce CPU usage
Offload up to 90% of Copy, SMS Compression, Sort CPU cycles to zIIP
Save money
Reduce billable time of sort jobs on the primary CPU by 30-40%
Complete jobs faster
Elapsed time for sort jobs can be improved by 20-40%
Syncsort™ MFX
Syncsort™ MFX offers high-performance sort, copy, and join capabilities purpose-built for IBM Z environments where cost control, batch performance, and reliability are critical. After more than 45 years of continual development and taking advantage of the latest IBM Z architectures, SyncsortTM MFX can dramatically reduce the billable time of sort jobs while also significantly reducing elapsed time.
Our sorting solution makes it easy to prioritize between elapsed time and CPU time focus, depending on what’s most important to you. Data functions, including field-type comparisons and parsed field identification, along with 64-bit addressing, allow developers to achieve more in less time, increasing productivity and saving even more money.
By optimizing one of the most CPU-intensive steps in mainframe batch processing, Syncsort™ MFX helps organizations reduce operational risk, defer costly capacity upgrades, and free resources for higher-value business workloads.
Customer Story – Underutilizing zIIP Engines was costing this global bank serious MIPS & money
White Paper Getting the Most Out of Your Mainframe
Offload, accelerate and lower cost of your mainframe
Syncsort™ PipeSort
Designed for environments with especially tight batch windows and large, complex datasets, Syncsort™ PipeSort addresses one of the most common causes of end-to-end batch delays. It is a key component of the Syncsort™ MFX Suite and offers the fastest way of sorting the same file many times with different key sequences. It can simultaneously execute up to eight differently sequenced sorts from a single pass, without having to enter data multiple times. Using cutting-edge parallel sorting technology, Syncsort™ PipeSort can cut the total elapsed time by more than 50% compared to running separate sorts, while also significantly reducing the I/O overhead.
As a licensable feature of Syncsort™ MFX, Syncsort™ PipeSort is the perfect utility for helping customers to meet batch windows’ constraints with especially large files and multiple sort key sequences. It can be a powerful solution to help save time, computing resources and mainframe costs.
Syncsort™ ZPSaver
Syncsort™ ZPSaver can reduce costs for your company by offloading sort, copy and SMS compression from primary CPUs to IBM z Integrated Information Processors (zIIP). This can help you significantly lower CPU utilization resulting in lower software licensing costs.
By shifting eligible workloads away from general-purpose CPUs, Syncsort™ ZPSaver helps organizations directly reduce MSU consumption and improve predictability of mainframe costs.
By freeing up primary CPU for other workloads, you can get more work done with the same computing resources. Lower costs can also come with lower risks: Syncsort™ ZPSaver’s capabilities can allow you to more easily meet SLAs and batch window requirements.
As a licensable feature of Syncsort™ MFX, Syncsort ZPSaver requires no changes to Syncsort™ MFX and it works transparently with your current JCL and control statements to offload copy, compression, and sort to zIIP processors whenever possible. Syncsort™ ZPSaver also provides informational messages when engaged zIIP processors force work to be processed on a regular CPU.
