In a recent survey conducted by zJournal that was designed to collect meaningful data on the evolutionary trends being experienced by mainframe users, it was identified that over 80% of Fortune 1000 companies are managing dual ESCON and FICON infrastructures.
Compared to ESCON, FICON offers the following well documented benefits:
• Increased number of concurrent connections
• Longer supported distances
• Increased link bandwidth
• Enhanced channel device addressing support
• Greater quality of service (priority I/O queuing)
And yet, why do the vast majority of System z enterprises continue to operate ESCON infrastructures? The zJournal survey indicates that the primary and compelling reasons that applications remain on ESCON is due to the need to “maintain stability of mission critical applications” and the “risk of change being too great”. In many cases, these legacy applications use specialized ESCON and even Bus/Tag-based tape, communications controllers and/or printers that are tightly integrated with the company’s core business transactions. These devices are either not available with FICON support or are simply too costly to convert. This results in the requirement to manage dual ESCON and FICON channel infrastructures, and prevents migration to, and realization of, the full benefits of an ‘all FICON’ architecture.
IBM announced End-of-Marketing (EOM) for 9032 Models 3 and 5 ESCON directors and FICON Bridge Cards as of Dec 31, 2004. Based on the typical 5 year time period for IBM to offer maintenance services on equipment that has been announced as EOM, it is anticipated that End-of-Support (EOS) will be announced for ESCON Directors to be effective Dec 31, 2009. Based on this, ESCON director users should be planning now for their replacement.
In addition to the fast approaching EOS date, ESCON directors are also costly to power, cool and maintain, which provides an immediate financial incentive to replace them. Optica’s Prizm FICON Converter is the ideal replacement solution because it provides the same device connectivity capability as ESCON directors when used in director emulation mode. When Prizm is used to replace ESCON directors, the return on investment is compelling based on the savings realized in power, cooling, floorspace and maintenance expense.
Example of ESCON Director replacement via Prizm, and consolidation of ESCON devices onto a homogenous FICON infrastructure
Original Configuration
New Configuration with FICON Director
New Configuration without FICON Director
See also the ESCON Director Replacement solution brief:
