Corigin Experience Report

In my role as a system architect, I was faced with a particularly difficult requirement of extracting essentially our entire multi-terabyte database every couple of days to an external, non-mainframe system. In the process of investigating the options for doing this, I came across a company named Corigin, which provided a unique way of accomplishing this task.

Most of the other companies that offered a data transfer solution were based on traditional data transfer technology. As such, their bandwidth was limited by the Ethernet cabling which connected the mainframes to the open systems. Corigin’s solution was different, in the sense that it worked by connecting an open systems box directly to the DASD controller through FibreChannel (HBA) cards . The Corigin software would connect to the mainframe to authenticate the users through ACF2 or RACF, but from that point on, the mainframe was out of the picture. The Corigin software was written to read the mainframe DASD, and understand the layout of the datasets on the DASD. For example, depending on your need, it could read mainframe flat files, VSAM or DB2. This came about by partnering with IBM and getting access to the various internal file layouts. The benefit of this approach was the ability to do massive amounts of I/O without using any mainframe cycles, and consequently without incurring the outrageously expensive MIPS based third party licensing costs on mainframe software.

Due to various political and financial considerations we did not purchase the Corigin suite. However, we did drive it extensively during a proof of concept, where we extracted about 1.5 terabytes from the mainframe DASD onto an AIX server. The software worked as advertised – we were able to move the data off very quickly, without incurring any mainframe CPU.

	In my role as a system architect, I was faced with a particularly difficult requirement of extracting essentially our entire multi-terabyte database every couple of days to an external, non-mainframe system. In the process of investigating the options for doing this, I came across a company named Corigin, which provided a unique way of accomplishing this task.
	Most of the other companies that offered a data transfer solution were based on traditional data transfer technology. As such, their bandwidth was limited by the Ethernet cabling which connected the mainframes to the open systems. Corigin’s solution was different, in the sense that it worked by connecting an open systems box directly to the DASD controller through FibreChannel (HBA) cards . The Corigin software would connect to the mainframe to authenticate the users through ACF2 or RACF, but from that point on, the mainframe was out of the picture. The Corigin software was written to read the mainframe DASD, and understand the layout of the datasets on the DASD. For example, depending on your need, it could read mainframe flat files, VSAM or DB2. This came about by partnering with IBM and getting access to the various internal file layouts. The benefit of this approach was the ability to do massive amounts of I/O without using any mainframe cycles, and consequently without incurring the outrageously expensive MIPS based third party licensing costs on mainframe software.
	Due to various political and financial considerations we did not purchase the Corigin suite. However, we did drive it extensively during a proof of concept, where we extracted about 1.5 terabytes from the mainframe DASD onto an AIX server. The software worked as advertised – we were able to move the data off very quickly, without incurring any mainframe CPU.