Author Description

Many companies have built data warehouses (DWs) and have embraced business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions. Even as companies have accumulated huge amounts of data, however, it remains difficult to provide trusted information at the right time and in the right place. The amount of data collected and available throughout the enterprise continues to grow even as the complexity and urgency of receiving meaningful information continues to increase. Producing meaningful and trusted information when it is needed can only be achieved by having a proper information architecture in place and a powerful underlying infrastructure. The amounts of data to mine, cleanse, and integrate are becoming so large that increasingly the infrastructure is becoming the bottleneck. This results in low refresh rates of the data in the data warehouse and in not having the information available in time where it is needed. And even before information can become available in a BI dashboard or a report, many preceding steps must take place: the collection of raw data; integration of data from multiple data stores, business units or geographies; transformation of data from one format to another; cubing data into data cubes; and finally, loading changes to data in the data warehouse. Combining the complexity of the information requirements, the growing amounts of data, and multiple layers of the information architecture requires an extremely powerful infrastructure. This IBM® RedguideTM publication explains how you can use IBM System z® as the foundation for your information management architecture. The System z value proposition for information management is fueled by the traditional strengths of the IBM mainframe, the specific strengths of DB2® for z/OS®, and the broad functionality of the IBM information management software portfolio. For decades, System z has proven its ability to manage vast amounts of mission-critical data for many companies throughout the world;