Sterling Software International has announced version 3.0 of its Shrink/MVS data compression and encryption tool. Chief enhancements include a choice of compression ratios, thanks to the introduction of a new run-length compression technique, Shrink/MVS Express. According to Sterling’s UK chief, Alan Harwood, Express is a low-overhead alternative to the traditional, Huffman, compression methods. Harwood believes it will prove particularly valuable to users who have found that the drop in pro-cessor response time, caused by the use of Huffman compression techniques, has offset the savings on disk space. To help the user choose between the two methods, the new version also incorporates a Global Data Analyser. This simulates both techniques by scanning VSAM and ICF catalogues to produce a comparative compression results report. Sterling also claims that Express eliminates the need for external compression tables. In addition, Version 3.0 has a scheduled compression feature, enabling users to specify when a cluster should be compressed, and a VSAM idle release feature, which enables users to release overallocated space on VSAM clusters. The new version can be installed without an IPL Initial Program Load. Overall, Sterling claims that Shrink provides 50% to 80% savings in disk and tape space, together with reductions in teleprocessing, backup/restore, and batch processing times. Version 3.0 of Shrink/MVS is available now, and costs between UKP14,000 and UKP25,000 depending on the size of the MVS host processor on which it is to run. The company also offers a Shrink/IMS version for IBM’s hierarchical database manager, and is also promising a DB2 interface later this month.
