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	February 10, 2010 Q&A: To zIIP Or Not — System Z's Dark Horse? The What, When, And Why Of IBM's Misunderstood Specialty Processor by Brad Day with Simon Yates, Lauren E Nelson

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Executive Summary

The No. 1 priority of System z users in 2009 was to improve the life-cycle cost of ownership of their mainframe footprints. And while some of this endgame would occur in just hardball negotiation cycles — with mainframe customers taking different negotiation approaches through a variety of different pricing mechanisms and conventions — one of the ongoing opportunities in driving toward a lower life-cycle cost for the System z footprint has started with turning on more specialty processors. Both the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) and the System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) have garnered a significant amount of deployment traction to run new workloads on zLinux as well as to offload any form of Java processing, respectively. However, the most powerful — yet often misunderstood — specialty processor is the System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP), in particular for customers who require potential software cost reductions across both legacy and modernized software stacks targeted at the System z mainframe.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 1. As "offload engines," what are the similarities between zAAP and zIIP processors?
• 2. Which eligible workloads gain the highest deployment traction for the zAAP engine?
• 3. Which eligible IBM workloads have garnered the highest zIIP adoption, and why?
• 4. What are the more recent areas of specialty engine exploitation that favor the zIIP?
• 5. What's the customer adoption motivation for running zAAPs on zIIPs?
• 6. Given the complexity of zIIP-eligible workloads, what is the best capacity planning tool?

This is an excerpt

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