OTMA rules-based routing in IMS Connect Extensions allows you
to route and distribute OTMA workload received by IMS Connect between available IMS data
stores.
OTMA rules-based routing in IMS Connect Extensions allows for another
level of abstraction between IMS Connect TCP/IP clients and IMS applications and data. Instead of transactions being
hard-wired
to specific destinations, OTMA workload can be dynamically redirected to pools of
suitable data stores according to OTMA routing rules that you manage within IMS Connect Extensions. This level of abstraction gives you great flexibility in
managing client workload without having to change either the client or the IMS systems.
OTMA rules-based routing in
IMS Connect Extensions can provide
operational adaptability, optimized performance, workload balancing, and higher availability.
- Operational adaptability and transactional continuity
- IMS Connect Extensions host command environment for
REXX and configuration options allow you to automate responses to changing IMS data store conditions.
IMS Connect Extensions
can temporarily suspend routing of messages to a datastore, allowing it to be 'drained' of
in-progress transactions. This can reduce the likelihood of transactions failing or being rejected
when IMS is shut down. It can also automatically exclude from
routing any data stores that are reporting a flood condition.
IMS Connect Extensions can automate the closing of TCP/IP sessions based upon
transaction counts. In the event of the failure of an IMS
Connect system, this enables the sysplex distributor to balance the number of sessions directed to
each remaining live IMS Connect system.
IMS Connect Extensions supports routing of OTMA messages using dynamically added
IMS data stores without having to restart your IMS Connect instance.
Routing plans effectively allow you
to test different configurations well in advance of making a change. Routing plans can be used to
reconfigure topologies for planned outages or where changes in demand require different routing
behaviors, for example peak and off-peak periods.
- Performance
- IMS Connect Extensions can optimize message processing performance by
preferentially selecting the local data store (primary) for a given destination ID. When the local
data store is not available, the workload can be automatically redirected to remote IMS data stores.
Alternatively, messages can be distributed to a pool of IMS data stores and each of these data
stores can be configured with a capacity weight rating (CWR) to give preference to IMS systems with
greater capacity. OTMA rules-based routing allows you to more easily introduce parallelism in OTMA
by employing multiple data stores that point to the same IMS system. This type of parallelism can significantly improve
performance.
- IMS data store workload balancing
- IMS Connect Extensions can redirect incoming requests
among data stores according to their processing capacity. Data stores with greater capacity receive
more transactions. You specify the relative weighting of each data store in the data store
definition.
- High availability
- When a data store is not available, IMS Connect Extensions
dynamically removes it from the candidate list and routes messages to other available data stores
based on their capacity weight ratings (CWR).