I just checked Wikipedia.org, and the disambiguation page for "Overdrive" took me by surprise with the large number of entries, all of which seem to hearken back to the original, automotive concept of a high gear for fuel savings when you're already cruising at full speed (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrive_(mechanics)).

Interestingly, one definition I didn't find would refer to the effect that IBM's zAAP and zIIP specialty engines have on certain mainframe software, and by extension the whole mainframe.

Well, I'm going to use it for a CA software product that, as we're announcing today, is going into overdrive by taking advantage of the zIIP.

As you may recall from my blog entry of January 8, 2008, when IBM introduced their specialty engines, CA immediately announced that we'd be taking advantage of them. And we've certainly kept that promise, with a growing list of products that allow your mainframe, already running at full speed, to give you software economy by running some of our software on specialty engines that don't entail additional software costs. The growing list of such products even includes new ones such as our CA CMDB Connector for z/OS.

And today, we've fulfilled that promise with another important GA announcement: Datacom r12 has just gone GA with zIIP exploitation!

That makes a total of 14 CA mainframe products that now bring value to the zIIP processor (see http://ca.com/mainframe/zIIP).

So, what do I mean by overdrive in this context? Well, suppose your mainframe is running around 100% busy (as mainframes often do), and you add in a zIIP. Suddenly, you're able to get more work done without increasing your billable capacity - a lot like shifting into overdrive at high speed to go further on less fuel.

One of the cool things specific to CA Datacom (and CA IDMS - our other outstanding mainframe database), however, is that by becoming zIIP-enabled, it is bringing a higher level of fulfillment to the original promise of IBM's zIIP: make mainframe database processing more cost-effective. In fact, the case of our databases, you're not limited to new workloads: any kind of work you're already running on CA Datacom (or CA IDMS) can be a candidate for running on the zIIP.

You know, all this talk of overdrive and business value reminds me of something. It's a song by Bachman-Turner Overdrive: Takin' Care of Business. ‘Cause that sure is what we're doing!