Several enterprises continue to host custom business applications and data warehouses on IBM AS400 systems. AS400 is a midrange computing system designed by the IBM community to support modern enterprise workload hosting. This system offers an integrated hosting environment, which consists of an operating system, database, and networking components. The availability of an integrated hosting stack minimizes the complexity of deploying and rendering custom applications.
AS400 systems offer native extract, transform, and load tools. Native ETL tools enable the AS400 warehouse systems to perform rapid data processing, indexing, and storage management.
To ensure reliable workload hosting, businesses should continuously monitor and optimize the performance of AS400 systems. Continuous administration and performance optimization are essential to make the most of AS400 systems. Through continuous monitoring, businesses can remove potential security vulnerabilities in AS400 systems before the impact. This ensures that the AS400-hosted applications and warehouses remain highly functional and secured against cyberattacks.
Value of Offshoring Performance Optimization to AS400 Consulting
Delegating the responsibility of AS400 performance optimization to in-house IT teams is inadvisable for businesses. Optimizing the performance of AS400 systems requires in-depth expertise in IBM i deployment architecture, memory management, and workload balancing. Several in-house IT personnel have minimal expertise in these areas, and they struggle to perform reliable optimization. When IT teams adopt traditional approaches for AS400 monitoring and security evaluation, on-time optimization becomes challenging. This increases the risk of security vulnerabilities in AS400 systems and impacts overall performance.
In this scenario, businesses should consider delegating the responsibility of AS400 performance optimization to an offshore AS400 consulting firm. This approach enables businesses to work with skilled maintenance experts. These experts utilize automated performance investigator tools for continuous monitoring and evaluation of AS400 systems. This enables AS400 specialists to rapidly identify and resolve key vulnerabilities in AS400 systems.
By implementing appropriate optimization measures, maintenance experts ensure that AS400 systems perform seamless workload balancing and memory allocation. These aspects determine the efficiency and performance of AS400 systems.
Some of the benefits of offshoring AS400 performance optimization include:
- Cost Effectiveness – When businesses opt for in-house AS400 performance optimization, they spend more resources on team development and tool licensing. On the other hand, offshoring performance optimization enables businesses to save operational costs at large. This approach facilitates the rapid hiring of a skilled AS400 maintenance team. The consulting firm offers essential tools and training support to the AS400 maintenance team, reducing upskilling costs.
- High Uptime – The dedicated AS400 maintenance team follows a structured performance optimization schedule. Key optimization measures include consistent security auditing, disaster recovery planning, and memory pool management. By implementing these measures, maintenance experts ensure greater uptime of AS400 systems and minimize downtime.
- Rapid Issue Resolution – Apart from optimization, dedicated AS400 maintenance experts offer rapid issue resolution. By setting up automated monitoring tools with AS400 architecture, maintenance specialists gain quick insights into security and performance issues. This enables them to implement appropriate bug fixes or security patches and troubleshoot issues in a minimal turnaround time.
- Improved Data Compliance – AS400 systems should be equipped with advanced security mechanisms to protect data assets in applications and warehouses. Maintenance experts embed user authentication, logging, and encryption mechanisms in the enterprise’s AS400 architecture. These mechanisms enable businesses to secure data assets and maintain compliance with data regulatory standards.
Key Performance Optimization Practices Implemented by AS400 Experts
- Workload Resource Management
When businesses host multiple enterprise apps on the AS400 system, resource management becomes difficult. The rise in AS400 hosting workload results in unstable CPU and memory allocation. The instability in resource allocation impacts application efficiency and incurs higher maintenance costs for businesses. To overcome this, dedicated AS400 maintenance experts configure and implement subsystems and memory pools in the AS400 architecture.
Subsystems are integrable central processing units. By configuring and embedding subsystems in AS400 architecture, AS400 maintenance experts ensure automated processing power allocation for applications. Memory pools are distribution mechanisms that AS400 experts configure to allocate dynamic memory resources to AS400-hosted applications. This approach enables businesses to reduce memory allocation and distribution overheads while ensuring seamless application performance.
- Database Optimization
Database system Db2 in AS400 architecture is accountable for processing data sharing requests of applications and warehouses. It is essential for AS400 databases to process sharing requests and transfer datasets to workloads without delays. Delays in database request processing and data transactions result in major operational inefficiencies. To reduce such delays, dedicated IBM iSeries AS400 experts implement database optimization techniques.
An effective optimization technique that experts implement to increase the database request processing speed is caching. By setting up caching modules in the AS400 database, AS400 maintenance experts facilitate concurrent request processing and minimize delays. To speed up data retrieval, AS400 experts implement an indexing technique. This technique involves assigning identifiers or vector indexes to the datasets in AS400 databases. Indexing enables the database to retrieve and transfer datasets to AS400 workloads without delays.
3. Security Optimization
Optimizing the security of AS400 infrastructure is crucial to protect workloads from external threats and attacks. By securing AS400 infrastructure, businesses can ensure greater integrity and performance of the underlying workloads. Dedicated AS400 maintenance experts implement reliable strategies to optimize the security of AS400 infrastructure.
By leveraging automated auditing tools, AS400 specialists perform a security audit on AS400 infrastructure. This enables them to evaluate the effectiveness of user access permissions, network security, and disaster recovery policies. To strengthen the user access permissions, maintenance experts configure and embed role-based access control mechanisms in AS400 infrastructure. This minimizes unauthorized access to AS400 workloads.
By implementing firewalls in AS400 infrastructure, skilled experts protect network components against potential cyber threats. The firewall mechanisms identify and prevent malicious cyber intrusions within AS400 infrastructure in real-time.
- Workload Performance Improvement
AS400 maintenance experts analyze the performance of workloads hosted on IBM i infrastructure and implement essential modifications. By leveraging automated analysis tools, experts evaluate the performance of AS400 applications and data warehouses. These tools offer insights into key performance metrics like application response time latency rate, warehouse load time, and querying speed.
Based on these insights, AS400 experts devise and implement appropriate optimization measures. For instance, to improve the AS400 application response time, experts optimize the configurations of the AS400 application database and server. Similarly, to improve AS400 data warehouse querying speed, maintenance experts implement ETL optimization and improve query execution efficiency.
Closing Thoughts
Businesses should prioritize maintaining optimal performance of AS400 infrastructure and its workloads to drive operational efficiency. However, to achieve this, embracing the appropriate performance optimization measures is essential. In this scenario, offshoring performance optimization to a recognized IBM iSeries services provider is advisable. These service providers implement the above-mentioned optimization practices and help businesses maintain higher AS400 operational efficiency.
