Luminex Software, Inc. is a developer and provider of

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

connectivity, storage and data protection solutions, including virtual tape and

data integration Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (such as when two similar companies ...

products.

History

Luminex was founded in 1994 by Brian Hawley,

Michael Saunders Michael Edward Brett Saunders (born November 19, 1986) is a Canadian former professional baseball outfielder. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Seattle Mariners, Toronto Blue Jays, and Philadelphia Phillies. He was nickname ...

and Arthur Tolsma. In 2000, Luminex acquired and merged the Data, WARE product line and technical staff. Then in 2002, Luminex acquired and merged the Polaris product line and technical staff. In 2007, Luminex and

Data Domain In data management and database analysis, a data domain is the collection of values that a data element may contain. The rule for determining the domain boundary may be as simple as a data type with an enumeration, enumerated list of values. For ...

announced a partnership to provide virtual tape library solutions with

deduplication The term deduplication refers generally to eliminating duplicate or redundant information. *Data deduplication, in computer storage, refers to the elimination of redundant data *Record linkage Record linkage (also known as data matching, data l ...

for mainframes.

Products

Channel Gateway (CGX) is mainframe virtual tape controller software and hardware (together, an "MVT controller") that provides mainframe access to disk-based open systems storage by acting as tape control units and presenting the storage as "virtual"

tape drive A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability. ...

s (emulating IBM 3490/ 3590) via

FICON FICON (Fibre Connection) is the IBM proprietary name for the ANSI ''FC-SB-3 Single-Byte Command Code Sets-3 Mapping Protocol'' for Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. It is a FC layer 4 protocol used to map both IBM's antecedent (either ESCON or para ...

ESCON ESCON (Enterprise Systems Connection) is a data connection created by IBM, and is commonly used to connect their mainframe computers to peripheral devices such as disk storage, tape drives and IBM 3270 display controllers. ESCON is an optical ...

channels Channel, channels, channeling, etc., may refer to: Geography * Channel (geography), in physical geography, a landform consisting of the outline (banks) of the path of a narrow body of water. Australia * Channel Country, region of outback Austral ...

. As tape controllers, CGX require access to a storage target(s) for virtual tape storage. Configurations include either NFS or

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data cen ...

connectivity to open systems storage systems. Mainframe Virtual Tape (MVT) is a family of products that are composed of one or more MVT controllers as well as internal SAS (MVTi) or Fibre Channel attached (MVTe) storage. The number of controllers in an MVT configuration is a dependent on the users' availability and throughput requirements. MVT supports

System Z IBM Z is a family name used by IBM for all of its z/Architecture mainframe computers. In July 2017, with another generation of products, the official family was changed to IBM Z from IBM z Systems; the IBM Z family now includes the newest mode ...

Z/VM z/VM is the current version in IBM's VM family of virtual machine operating systems. z/VM was first released in October 2000 and remains in active use and development . It is directly based on technology and concepts dating back to the 1960s, wi ...

and VSE. Mainframe Data Integration (MDI) is a family of products that provide mainframe data movement, sharing and co-processing with distributed systems. MDI solutions consist of core MDI software that resides on a dedicated appliance ("MDI Platform") or an MVT controller, host software and optional "Profiles" that provide specific functionality. The MDI/MVT hardware resides between the mainframe, connected via FICON, and distributed systems, connected via 1 or 10 GbE, providing

DMZ A demilitarized zone (DMZ or DZ) is an area in which treaties or agreements between nations, military powers or contending groups forbid military installations, activities, or personnel. A DZ often lies along an established frontier or bounda ...

, data translation/conversion, and protocol negotiation duties. MDI Profiles include SecureTransfer (

managed file transfer Managed file transfer (MFT) refers to a technology that provides the secure transfer of data in an efficient and reliable manner. MFT software is marketed to companies as a more secure alternative to using insecure protocols like FTP (file transfe ...

), BigData Transfer (webHDFS connectivity), Cross-Platform Data Sharing (NFS connectivity, data and workload sharing), zKonnect (

Kafka Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typ ...

publishing/subscribing) and SAS Language Processor (off-host

SAS language The SAS language is a computer programming language used for statistical analysis, created by Anthony James Barr at North Carolina State University.Barr & Goodnight, et al. 1976:"The SAS Staff". Attribution of contributions to SAS 72 and SAS 76. It ...

processing, including MXG). MDI supports System Z. DataStream Intelligence, a feature of CGX, separates virtual tape data and

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

inline, achieving higher compression rates. Deduplication rates, when written to storage with deduplication capabilities, such as IBM ProtecTIER, HP StorOnce, Quantum DXi and EMC Data Domain systems, achieve

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

rates upwards of 20:1 versus traditional tape hardware compression of 3:1. For CloudTAPE users, DataStream Intelligence also collects VOLSER metadata, such as creation/replication dates, tape size and tape label (DSN), and adds it to the stored object’s metadata, enabling it to be leveraged by cloud-based applications. Data, WARE is a family of products that provide

optical Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviole ...

-based

nearline Nearline storage (a portmanteau of "near" and "online storage") is a term used in computer science to describe an intermediate type of data storage that represents a compromise between online storage (supporting frequent, very rapid access to data ...

data access, distribution, publishing and archiving for mainframe and

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

environments.

Operations

In February, 2008, Luminex Software partnered with Terasystem S.p.A., the largest data storage system integrator in Italy, as its full service channel partner for its ground breaking Channel Gateway products in Italy, Spain and Portugal.

References

{{Reflist Software companies based in California Software companies of the United States