Our client is an IT services consulting firm and leading provider of solutions that enable companies to maximize their use of advanced technology. The firm assisted a government agency in selecting software and overseeing their ability to process information more quickly and easily, increasing operational efficiencies.

The consulting firm turned to PKZIP for zSeries® Enterprise Edition to compress data before distributing it to the various data marts. The agency’s update application now takes the data written to the tape cartridges and compresses them with PKZIP before transmission. Ultimately, the consulting firm chose PKZIP because of the outstanding results it delivered when used in other projects.

The agency also incorporates critical information from third party providers. An update from a provider frequently includes as many as 160 files compressed and contained in a single ZIP archive each month. This is then written to CD and sent to the consulting firm. There, the ZIP archive is transferred to the mainframe where PKZIP automatically translates the data format from ASCII to EBCDIC during the decompression and extraction process.

“PKZIP compresses the data at least 75% and frequently as high as 90-95%,” according to an Operations Analyst. “Consequently, data mart updates that may have been as large as 80 gigabytes are compressed to as little as 4 gigabytes. We wouldn’t be able to complete transmissions within the operational window without the use of PKZIP. It works with the original ASCII-oriented file names and renames them to a DSN (Data Set Name) appropriate for the mainframe during extraction—it has good flexibility.”