On November 18th, 2021, IBM announced Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres for IBM Linux on Z and LinuxONE. This unprecedented announcement between companies that just a few years ago were competitors demonstrates the new market with IBM’s remarketing and support of Fujitsu’s Enterprise Postgres database. So, what is this agreement?
IBM Technology Support Services (TSS) entered into a global partnership with Fujitsu Software Business Unit to sell IBM support for Fujitsu’s Enterprise Postgres offering. Fujitsu’s Enterprise Postgres enhances the open source PostgreSQL database with security, high availability, scalability and performance boosts. It also utilizes Linux on Z and LinuxONE unique features resulting in better performance and enhanced security. Let’s look at this closer.
IBM Unique Features
IBM is proud of the unique capabilities built into the IBM Z and LinuxONE servers. Inherent hardware features include:
- Hardware accelerator with a specialized instruction set for cryptographic execution called the CP Assist for Cryptographic Function (CPACF). CPACF provides improved encryption performance compared to other solutions. It executes on the IBM Z’s traditional Central Processors (CPs) and Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL).
- Specialized Cryptographic Coprocessor is delivered in the Crypto Express card (IBM CXE7S). This card offloads the encryption function from the traditional Central Processors (CPs) to specialized processors, thereby improving performance while eliminating the overhead on IBM Z Central Processors.
- zEnterprise Data Compression (zEDC) is a hardware compression accelerator designed to increase the speed of data compression and offload the overhead of compressing data from the customer’s traditional Central Processors (CP).
- Large Cache on z15 models houses 4 levels of cache. Level 1 and 2 cache, 128k and 4MB respectively in combination with Level 3 cache on the chip of 256MB and Level 4 cache of 960MB per drawer.
- Fast processor speeds of 5.2 GHz, the fastest processor in the industry.
Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres (FEP) exploits all of these features, resulting in an enterprise database management system for both the transactions OLTP and analytical OLAP applications workload.
Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres
Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres (FEP) is 100% compatible with the open source PostgreSQL database management system. Standing out amongst the industries DBMS is FEP’s feature called VCI. VCI feature of FEP provides DBMS managed data structures for traditional transactions through rows tables and as columnar data for enabling analytics. FEP manages, maintains, and optimizes access and updates of both the row and columnar versions of the data. Administrators are removed from maintaining a replicated environment for data lakes or data warehouses. This also eliminates the currency lag due to the ETL data transfer process, and instead offers real-time analytics on the data.
Other features are also provided by Fujitsu’s Postgres offering including:
- Mirroring Controller which continuously monitors the system and seamlessly switches online processing to the alternate server database for high availability.
- Database Mirroring, which allows two copies of the database to reside on different servers to ensure availability.
- Transparent Data encryption – uses 256-bit encryption methodology
- Data Masking used for development and testing using production data that may include sensitive customer information.
- Dedicated audit logs, which are compliant with PCI DSS.
Above are some features that highlight the difference between the open source PostgreSQL product and the Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres offering. But these features are on FEP x86 and on IBM Linux on Z and LinuxONE servers. So, what is unique for FEP on IBM Linux on Z or LinuxONE?
Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres and IBM Linux on Z and LinuxONE join forces
With IBM’s newest processor, z15, database management systems, such as FEP, benefit from inherent hardware features, such as the fastest processing in the industry, along with large caches, as described above. These and other IBM Z features offer performance improvements over other platforms.
Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres uses software encryption on every hardware platform but IBM Z. Uniquely on Linux on Z and LinuxONE is the exploitation of the IBM Z Crypto Express cards. Application can see a 4.3 times higher OLAP throughput when compared with FEP on x86(1). The IBM Z Crypto Express cards are the only hardware encryption mechanism that FEP has enabled to date. The Crypto Express cards offer their own key management functionality through the Trusted Key Entry (TKE) workstation. But for those companies that standardize on an external key management implementation, it can be simplified by using the newly announced IBM Z as a Service (ZaaS) Hyper Protect Crypto Services that will handle key management for your FEP data.
With the zEnterprise Data Compression (zEDC), workloads will see a 42% faster compression process compared to using software compression, as seen when it offloads the compression overhead to specialized compression hardware.(1) IBM performed benchmarks on PostgreSQL and saw 93% reduction in disk space with 38% reduced elapsed time and 31% less processor time when backing up uncompressed data.(1) IBM and Fujitsu will publish similar benchmarks in the future, so watch this space. In addition, these compression and encryption features reduce both storage and network traffic utilization.
Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres and IBM Technical Support Services
As companies decide to move toward open source products, they weigh the enterprise’s risks involved with the implementation of open source products. The Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres solves this risk from an entirely open source solution. When combined with IBM’s Technology Support Services (TSS), customers experience a proven global support team. IBM supports over 2000 open source products for over 130 countries. IBM TSS has 22 years of experience in 24×7 product support. IBM TSS is Level 1 & Level 2 support who utilized Fujitsu for new problem Level 3 resolution.
IBM TSS offers three pricing options: Standard, Operator and both Standard and Operator. Standard is the virtual server implementation (or bare metal) supported on the leading Linux distributions. Operator is FEP running in Red Hat OpenShift (OCP). The combined Standard and Operator is ideal for companies running both versions of FEP.
Customers benefit from the best support services combined with the Fujitsu’s enterprise product offering, ensuring they receive the best in breed for their database management systems requirements.
Get More Information
As an IBM Platinum Business Partner, Mainline has extensive experience with IBM systems, including IBM Z mainframe systems and operating systems (z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, and Linux), and we can help you with Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres on IBM Z and LinuxONE. To set up an in-depth discussion about exploiting these technologies, please contact your Mainline Account Executive directly or click here to contact us with any questions.
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