BMC Software Inc. today introduced a new product portfolio to help customers migrate mainframe data to a hybrid cloud environment.

The BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence Cloud combines hybrid cloud technologies with on-premises mainframe computing to enable enterprises to run large-scale transaction processing while also moving to the cloud.

There are three components to the suite. AMI Cloud Data uses cloud object storage technology to help migrate mainframe backup and archive data to an IBM Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem-compatible cloud quickly and securely, the company said. There’s no need for interim direct access storage devices or the need to rewrite job control language. That eliminates the cost of proprietary, tape-based and virtual tape library-based storage hardware with cost reductions of up to 50%.

AMI Cloud Vault creates an immutable, air-gapped copy of mainframe data and generates multiple compressed and encrypted copies for protection against cyberattacks.

Finally, Cloud Analytics enables organizations to transfer and transform data such as IBM Corp. Db2 image copies to standard or open formats, including JavaScript Object Notation, comma-separated values and extensible markup language for use in cloud-based analytics and artificial intelligence applications.

Extract/load/transform procedures are done in the cloud. The ELT approach to data transformation ensures that data is transformed only after it’s in the cloud. BMC said the process is faster and less expensive than traditional ETL because transformation on the mainframe isn’t required.

The BMC AMI cloud uses an IBM z Integrated Information Processor-eligible agent running on the mainframe with a management server running in a Docker container on Linux, Linux on Z, or the z/OS Container Extension. The agent reads and writes mainframe data from disk or tape directly to cloud storage over TCP/IP. A data set import policy provides automatic discovery of tape data sets and transfers of large amounts of historical data from tape to the cloud.

Photo: IBM