Challenges
As you move from the mainframe into "open systems," you may be working with the Mainframe Rehosting Solutions team at NTT DATA (formerly Dell, Clerity, Sun, Blue Phoenix, and UniKix) to migrate CICS sort (UniKix) jobs. One of the components of your migration will likely be the sort tool.
You therefore are looking for a proven solution for UnixKix sort operations, JCL sort step conversion, VSAM file processing, related data transformation, and reporting services running in Linux, Unix or Windows (LUW).
In addition to a better UniKix sort you may also need a way to modernize a variety of other data management and masking operations. Howefver, you prefer to work with a single, proven, affordable vendor to reduce your learning curves and the inherent techncal and commercial complexities involved with multiple vendor tools.
Solutions
Because it improves UniKix sortint techniques, IRI CoSort is part of the NTT Data Mainframe Reference Architecture, as well as a decades-long-proven solution for legacy sort software migration (including automatic JCL parm conversion) and application modernization. Since 1985 when CoSort was first made available on Unix systems, it became renowned as "The Open Systems Standard" for sort software worldwide.
Thanks to close collaboration with NTT Data and its predecessors, you can leverage the power of CoSort directly within the UniKix Batch Processing Environment (UniKix BPE) and UniKix Transaction Processing Environment (UniKix TPE). These environments support multiple mainframe data types, including virtual storage access method (VSAM), sequential, and relational-based data.
In addition to serving as the fast UniKix sort in CICS migrations, CoSort packages also include free z/OS MVS and VSE sort parm translation tools to create JCL-equivalent job scripts ready for use in CoSort Sort Control Language (SortCL) programs. These translators also map the JCL commands for other legacy sort/merge software functions to SortCL, including: record selection, field reformatting, aggregation, de-duplication, and data type conversion. IRI can also help you move many ICETOOL, IEBGENER, SyncSort, and File-AID jobs overt to SortCL equivalents to save you money in the long run.
Beyond "lift and shift" activities, CoSort uniquely and affordably positions you for a wide range of big data processing and governance challenges off the mainframe. Through SortCL and the broader IRI Voracity "total data management platform", CoSort users can:
- rapidly integrate data for data warehouse and data lake operations
- report on or wrangle data for BI and analytics
- protect PII with field-level masking
- improve data quality
- generate smart, safe test data.
All these activities use the same simple SortCL 4GL scripts of CoSort, and are supported in a free Eclipse IDE for job design, IRI Workbench.
If you are involved in a mainframe migration and require CoSort and related conversion assistance, please contact IRI below, or NTT Data, for references and more information.
