Alebra Announces Industry's First FICON-to-FCP Gateway Appliance for High-End Data Centers

MINNEAPOLIS, Jan. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Making vast amounts of data available at the right place, at the right time, and in the right format is a huge problem in large data centers running new age enterprise applications on mixed platforms. Alebra Technologies announced today the availability of PDM's new datasharing accelerator appliance, z/OpenGate(TM) (patent pending).

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20030912/CGF031LOGO ) Industry's first FICON-to-FC-FCP gateway

z/OpenGate(TM) is the industry's first FICON-to-FC-FCP gateway providing secure channel-based infrastructure and extremely high bandwidth -- in excess of 225 MB/s -- for data sharing.

Martin Gardner, Director of Product Management at Alebra, states that "the increased functionality provided by z/OpenGate(TM) is exciting and significant. With z/OpenGate(TM), a customer can integrate their FICON SAN fabric with their Fibre Channel SAN fabric for data access or copy at very high data rates, actually at disk read speed, while insuring that the data is secure."

With the bandwidth that FICON/Fibre Channel provides, customers can significantly reduce the CPU resources used for data replication, thus reducing their internal costs. Deployments have been underway since the beginning of this year.

z/OpenGate(TM) is a 2U (3.5 inches) rack mount unit designed for high availability and redundancy featuring a SUSE Linux OS, dual Intel XEON(R) processors, hot swappable power supplies, and internal mirrored disks. Integrating the world's data stores

Alebra CEO Gerry Fisher notes that "since a very large portion of the world's operational data is stored in mainframe environments, typical PDM end-users require highly reliable, secure sharing and replication of data between mainframe and UNIX / Windows systems, integrating the mainframe and SAN worlds. PDM is heavily used, for example, to support data warehousing applications, especially in multi-vendor environments with very large data movement requirements. PDM does the 'heavy moving' at many of the world's leading and largest data centers worldwide, sometimes simply to meet extremely tight scheduling requirements. z/OpenGate(TM) extends our performance lead to CTOs and CIOs and delivers a compelling cost of ownership value to CFOs." Parallel Data Mover is storage neutral

Parallel Data Mover (PDM) is a cross platform application that allows users to reliably copy large volumes of data using parallel data streaming technology. Creating extract files to transfer data from a z/OS Server to an open systems database is no longer necessary when using PDM. By providing a one stage data transfer, PDM enables mainframe data to be extracted and then directly loaded into the receiving database. This reduces storage requirements on both ends of the transfer. In addition, PDM is disk vendor neutral, allowing it to execute in multi-vendor disk/DASD environments. About Alebra

Alebra Technologies develops and markets information technology solutions to data centers globally.

Alebra Software has development and support centers in Minneapolis, Boston, and Atlanta. Its principal branded offerings are Brixton(TM), Express(TM), Host Monitor Facility(TM), Parallel Data Mover(TM), and z/OpenGate(TM), delivered via direct sales, OEM, and trusted channel partners.

Alebra is privately held with its headquarters in Minneapolis, MN USA. It has appeared on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 list of North American growth companies for 2004 and 2005.

For more information on Parallel Data Mover(TM) and z/OpenGate(TM) and Alebra, visit http://www.alebra.com or call +1 612.436.8200.