Q&A: To zIIP Or Not — System Z's Dark Horse?

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.