New York -- Corigin, today announced the availability of technology for direct native FICON access to data on mainframe storage disk from heterogeneous Open Systems platforms.

The de facto standard in mainframe environments, the FICON protocol improves access performance by alleviating input/output bottlenecks. Prior to the Corigin announcement, only mainframes had access to data on storage devices utilizing FICON connectivity.

Now for the first time, Corigin technology makes FICON storage connectivity available to low cost heterogeneous Open Systems platforms. As a result, Corigin 's FICON technology enables fast direct access to mainframe data sources from lower cost Open Systems platforms without utilizing costly mainframe resources.

Corigin's architecture can displace the mainframe capabilities required to support many key information initiatives - such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence implemented to assist in sustaining growth, expand in terms of profitability, improve decision making, and remain customer driven and competitive. Essentially, any open system application requiring access to mainframe data could gain immediate benefits in reducing mainframe CPU utilization and load, improving unreliable and costly data transfers and reducing batch window constraints.

By accessing mainframe data directly from production volumes, split mirror copies and disaster recovery volumes from storage controllers shared between the open server and the mainframe, Corigin's core technology emulates mainframe data retrieval for information management initiatives in heterogeneous data centers. It takes full advantage of the storage networks high-speed connectivity. As a result, Corigin customers achieve reduced infrastructure costs for data retrieval and increased input/output (I/O) performance for bulk data movement.

With support for FICON, Corigin interfaces with critical data on IBM storage devices as well as storage devices such as EMC and Hitachi.