Overview of Data Gate for watsonx
Data Gate for watsonx is the most efficient way to bring transactional data from an IBM Z® mainframe computer to IBM watsonx.data.
With this valuable transactional data, organizations can better identify fraud, understand constituent behavior and customer buying journeys including customer attrition, and build predictive AI models to understand, anticipate, and influence business outcomes. By bringing transactional data originating on the mainframe into an open, governed data lakehouse like watsonx.data, an organization can readily build AI models to drive greater revenue, improve productivity, and better manage cost.
- Transactional data is essential to understand the current state of the business.
- Transactional data is the most valuable data for the prediction of business outcomes.
- Most enterprise organizations keep their transactional data on IBM Z.
Data Gate for watsonx gives analytics and AI applications access to transactional data on IBM Z by making this data available to watsonx.data.
watsonx.data is capable of providing large Iceberg-type data lakehouses that can serve as the basis for extensive analytics and AI computations. In addition, watsonx.data can offer an SQL view on nearly all types of data, structured and unstructured.
IBM Data Gate for watsonx infuses watsonx.data with data from Db2® for z/OS®, VSAM, or IMS data sources, so that you can use the capabilities of watsonx.data to extract insights from transactional data on a mainframe.
The IBM Z data is not moved; Data Gate for watsonx copies it 1:1 to watsonx.data and synchronizes (replicates) the copied data continuously. This ensures consistent query results on both sides.
The copying of the data is a unidirectional process. The data flow is always from IBM Z to watsonx.data, but not the other way around. This way, data on the IBM Z is kept safe because it cannot be overwritten or compromised by applications at the other end. The operational impact on IBM Z transactional processing is low; operations can continue as they used to.
The copying process is highly parallelized to allow for maximum performance and throughput. Code page conversions are handled automatically and efficiently under the hood.
Benefits of Data Gate for watsonx
- Modernizes access to the mainframe for analytics and AI applications by making Z data readily available to watsonx.data
- Provides Z customers an easy, efficient journey to watsonx.data with the lowest possible overhead, latency, and highest possible throughput compared to other replication options
- First-class integration of IBM Z data in watsonx.data
- Beats competitive offerings with tangible added value for Z data
- High-performance replication with IBM Integrated Synchronization or IBM InfoSphere® Classic CDC for z/OS (CDC)
- Low footprint on Z and ZIIP eligibility
- Enable transactionally consistent queries in a synchronized cloud
- Containerized cloud-native application
Example workflow for provisioning a Data Gate for watsonx instance
The figure shows the wizard for provisioning a Data Gate for watsonx instance. The Data Gate for watsonx user interface (UI) that includes this wizard runs on Cloud Pak for Data.
Steps to complete on the UI:
- Select the data source
- Supported data sources:
- Db2 for z/OS.
- IMS (Information Management System).
- VSAM (IBM Virtual Storage Access Method).
- Select the target
- An object store (bucket) in watsonx.data.
Create a target instance if it does not exist on the cluster. Your Cloud Pak for Data user ID is used to access the target data, which requires the admin role.
- Provide access
- Provide the access key and the secret key for accessing the object store.
- Validate credentials
- Validate the watsonx.data target information and login credentials.
- Define resources
- If your data source is Db2 for z/OS, define Data Gate for watsonx resources (CPU, memory, and namespace).
- Confirm
- Confirm your choice and start provisioning.
For a detailed description, see Provisioning Data Gate for watsonx.