IT Survey Results: Mainframe Is an Engine of Business Growth and a Reason for Optimism

Transcription

1 Thought Leadership white paper IT Survey Results: Mainframe Is an Engine of Business Growth and a Reason for Optimism By Mike Moser, Product Management Director and Program Executive, BMC Software

2 Table OF CONTENTS executive Summary Survey Overview MIPS Optimization: Delivering Big Outcomes from Small Changes Capacity Planning and Automated Monitoring: Keeping Ahead of the Business Disaster Recovery: Being Consistent in a Time of Change Conclusion: Essentials for Retooling and Recharging Mainframe I.T

3 Executive Summary Changing economic conditions have caused many IT organizations to refocus their priorities. They have generally slowed investments in new applications and general purpose mainframe capacity. Many organizations are now focusing on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their current mainframe installations to leverage the platform as a consolidation platform and, most importantly, to position their companies for future growth. These results were the overarching conclusion of the 2009 BMC Software Mainframe Survey, which involved responses from 1,546 people worldwide who are familiar with their organization s mainframe environment and have a role in decision making related to mainframe management or operation. Respondents named application modernization, disaster recovery, and efficiency projects as their top priorities. Efficiency projects included MIPS reduction, server virtualization, and data center consolidation. All of these efforts were done with the objective of reducing operating costs and improving availability. Executives who use the right IT management practices to address these priorities can achieve significant gains. IT organizations require a management strategy that saves money while preparing the business for future growth. This paper discusses some best practices for achieving this goal and the results some businesses have achieved by using these practices. 1

4 Survey Overview The survey results indicate that the mainframe is holding its own, in spite of the challenging economy. The research included responses from people worldwide who participated in online surveys conducted in April and May Respondents were a mix of BMC customers and people who responded to a survey in zjournal. Respondents cited the following top priorities: application modernization, disaster recovery, and efficiency projects. Efficiency projects included MIPS reduction, server virtualization, and data center consolidation. Other highlights from the survey findings included the following:»» Mainframe capacity growth is stable, with z/vm and z/linux penetration increasing as a production environment.»» z/linux was valued by larger organizations for consolidation, energy reduction, and labor reduction; it is valued by smaller organizations for deploying new workloads.»» IT organizations that are growing continue to value the mainframe for its availability, security, and data centralization.»» Half of respondents said that the mainframe could help them reduce energy costs and deliver a stronger Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for full-spectrum workload environments; 42% said it could lower labor costs for a given workload.»» 62% of those surveyed were optimistic about the future growth and expansion of the platform.»» Respondents saw money-saving potential in automated management techniques. This included database management (for reduction of peak-load CPU consumption) and batch/operations management (for reducing the time to identify and resolve delays due to batch problems and the risk of batch errors due to erroneous changes). Top-Line Observations from the I.T. Survey Availability, security, and centralization of data continue to be the driving factors for mainframe preference. The top IT priorities are application modernization, disaster recovery, and efficiency projects (virtualization, MIPS reduction, and data center consolidation). z/vm and z/linux are growing in use, with an eye toward consolidation and capture of management efficiencies. The current economic climate appears to be a mixed bag: Most respondents cite no impact on their operations, and the remaining are split between positive and negative reactions. Staff concerns appear to be back on the rise. When choosing products, end-users focus on cost and managers on ROI. GUI/staff productivity improvements seem less valuable than real tangible benefits. Top candidates for savings include event automation, automatic batch optimization, faster utilities, delaying upgrades, reducing MIPS, and eliminating errors. Pure GUI/efficiency items rated well below these when not coupled with a tangible benefit. The survey results suggest that mainframe IT executives and their teams see the platform as a powerful ally in helping them navigate their businesses through a challenging economy. To fully exploit this opportunity, however, they will need creative ways to increase the efficiency of their current environments while positioning their organizations for future business growth. The right IT management practices can give IT organizations the approach they need: a way to deliver immediate savings and take the business further. They can achieve significant outcomes, even in challenging economic times. The following sections look at three important areas of potential savings and competitive advantage. 2

5 MIPS Optimization: Delivering Big Outcomes from Small Changes One identified priority, MIPS growth reduction, offers huge potential for both saving money and positioning businesses for future growth. The term MIPS growth reduction is a bit of a misnomer. Technically, to reduce MIPS, you would need to reduce workloads, but workloads are what generate revenues for the business. Instead, the goal should be to optimize the use of MIPS so you can consume fewer MIPS while handling the same or more workloads, and reduce the overall capacity growth rate to correlate to the real value of those workloads. For most businesses, the number-one goal is to reduce MIPS consumption during peak times, so you can avoid having to overprovision (load up on MIPS) to accommodate peaks in transaction activity. Compounding the challenge is that predicting peak times is becoming more difficult, as the Internet and Web applications give customers the ability to transact business 24x7. Inefficiencies in customer transactions could cause excessive MIPS consumption, a problem during off-peak hours but one that s certainly magnified during peak hours. Ever-expanding peak windows make MIPS optimization one of the highest-value practices you can implement. Using automated IT management technologies, mainframe IT teams can identify, prioritize, and fix the sources of inefficiency in customer transactions. For example, a common source of inefficiency is application code that may have been written years ago in a different era of computing. The code wasn t inefficient then, but it sure is now. And it doesn t have to be a big piece of code to create big inefficiencies. It may be a small piece of code that runs many times. Consider a large financial services firm that handles stock market trades over the Web for its customers. Financial news from Europe often creates a flurry of trading activity when the US stock market opens, resulting in a deluge of trading transactions. This is good for the business, but it is overly demanding on mainframe MIPS and the IT staff. Using modern IT management tools, the IT staff could identify MIPS-consumption sinkholes, such as a small piece of SQL code that queries a back-end DB2 database as part of every customer transaction. By identifying and optimizing this small piece of code, the firm could likely reduce its MIPS consumption substantially. By tuning obscure but business-critical technology, many IT organizations can significantly reduce their MIPS consumption. Here are just two examples. Example: A large financial services firm processes 32 million SQL statements per hour in an aggressively tuned environment, providing excellent performance with high availability. By undertaking an aggressive approach to MIPS reduction, the firm identified a number of places where a DB2 SQL code rewrite could reduce MIPS utilization. The analysis revealed that by changing three SQL statements, the company could make a nominal (30%) improvement that would save 60 MIPS per hour, while improving system performance. Example: A telecommunications provider had a similar MIPS sinkhole: an IMS routine that checked for data availability, known as check pointing. The routine was written decades ago, and more recently was consuming far too many CPU cycles. Using automated database management tools, the company was able to identify the code. Once identified, the company used additional tools to change the level of check pointing, thereby lowering CPU utilization without requiring a rewriting of application code. Once you ve identified and fixed inefficiencies, it s important to be vigilant in making sure that your tuning is working. Modern IT management tools enable you to put in place automated monitoring and tuning practices for continuous MIPS optimization. Example: Another telecommunications provider was struggling to hold its costs level while accommodating new transaction growth. The company identified workloads that could be run concurrently to maximize MIPS utilization while still meeting service level agreements (SLAs). The company also monitors usage patterns of critical resources and watches for performance degradation, so it can adjust dispatching priorities, control status, and automate parameter changes for their DB2 database. By managing MIPS optimization aggressively and strategically, you can squeeze more work out of fewer MIPS, including accommodating new applications to support business growth. You can delay the need for MIPS upgrades and their high costs in terms of software, energy, and people. 3

6 MIPS Optimization: More Mileage from Less Fuel In a recent analysis of MIPS for a large financial services firm, BMC s field analysts found substantial savings hidden in its DB2 installation. BMC first identified the top five DB2 applications, top five DB2 plans, and top five DB2 programs based on CPU utilization, as well as DB2 objects. In general, the company received high marks for most of its SQL statements. But the analysis did reveal a few areas that were consuming too many CPU cycles:»» A DB2 system package (SYSSTAT) associated with stored procedure activity, which was the highest consumer of CPU time (Database administrators usually view SYSSTAT as the cost of using stored procedures, which are used extensively at the company.)»» One SQL statement for a simple existence check»» A table (object) with a high GETPAGE count (1.8 million/hour) but 0% usage of any indexes and the SQL statement that was the likely root cause»» Several suspicious statements that should be monitored, including a FETCH statement that executes only 100 times per hour but eats a lot of CPU By using SQL tuning (or sometimes a code rewrite) on the three biggest problems, the company could save substantial money for a relatively small investment. Extrapolating MIPS usage across the customer s three LPARs, the analysts projected that the company would save 60 MIPS per hour from only a nominal (30%) improvement in the three problem areas. Capacity Planning and Automated Monitoring: Keeping Ahead of the Business To improve data center efficiencies, many businesses are choosing to move their enterprise applications from distributed servers to the mainframe, consolidating them in virtualized environments running on Linux on System Z. This creates a challenge. Distributed- IT technicians are now responsible for managing applications and Linux instances on a new platform, the mainframe. Mainframe technicians are now responsible for ensuring performance across environments that include Linux objects in addition to the traditional LPARs and subsystems. The right management technologies can accelerate efficiencies by preventing people and skills from becoming an obstacle. Look for a solution that enables you to tie Linux into your existing mainframe environment smoothly so that all IT staff can be immediately productive. The solution should provide a common data model and monitoring infrastructure across the consolidated environment, which IT staff can access using their preferred interfaces. It should provide a consistent monitoring, alert, and event management platform that can speed deployment of consolidation projects and reduce operating costs. Good capacity management can also improve the success of consolidation and virtualization projects. Modern capacity management tools have predictive analytics, modeling, and other sophisticated features that make it much easier to right-size the mainframe to changing business requirements. These tools can help ensure that mainframe performance is optimized for any changes being made to the environment, such as deploying virtualized applications or adding specialty workload-processing engines (IFLs). If MIPS optimization tells you how many MIPS you can save, good capacity management can project what those savings will mean for the business. Exactly when will you need to upgrade? And exactly what will you need to buy to serve the business effectively for the lowest possible cost? Disaster Recovery: Being Consistent in a Time of Change Disaster recovery is always important, but its high ranking as a priority in the survey suggests that preventing data loss is even more critical in a tough economy. Perhaps the costs of data loss in time, money, reputation, and lost business are even harder to bear when operating budgets are so tight. The spate of business mergers and acquisitions also may be creating pressure. Absorbing another company s IT infrastructure, applications, and customer databases is a huge challenge even in the best of times. Disaster recovery becomes even more complex. 4

7 Disaster recovery, of course, includes tactics such as having remote data centers, so businesses can switch over in the event of major disasters such as what occurred in the United States during the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 or during Hurricane Katrina, which happened in It s critical to have a high degree of confidence that disaster-recovery programs will work. Example: In today s heavily regulated climate, in which companies must document that they have taken all necessary steps to avoid risk, many businesses use capacity-planning models from BMC Software to test their disaster recovery plans. They model the transfer of all critical production work to the disaster recovery systems and model how well they run. If there is not enough capacity, the model shows the extent of the problems that will be created. The model can evaluate the risk, understand what the risk is, and plan enough capacity for handling disaster recovery properly. But equally important are robust practices for preventing small problems from becoming business disasters. For example, a common source of failures is a bad SQL change made by a database administrator. The outage may be localized, but it can still result in loss of business-critical data. Using modern data recovery tools, mainframe IT staffs can quickly isolate the source of the problem and initiate automated procedures for data recovery based on business rules. Such tools can speed mean-time-torecovery (MTTR) and manipulate forward-recover points to reduce the amount of processing data that needs to be recreated. Conclusion: Essentials for Retooling and Recharging Mainframe I.T. Automated management technologies can help IT organizations optimize the operations of the mainframe while preparing the business for future growth. In selecting tools, businesses should look for the following capabilities:»» Application tuning: The biggest opportunity lies in making applications perform more efficiently on the mainframe. Many of these applications were written in an earlier computing era and by programmers who are no longer with their companies. Look for tools that can automatically identify and analyze application code that accesses mainframe databases and uses mainframe CPU cycles, ideally without requiring a software rewrite.»» Predictive intelligence: Modern mainframe IT management tools can see into the future by analyzing past history and current usage patterns. You can create sophisticated automated capacity planning models that replace spreadsheet-juggling and give you more precision in planning for future investments. You can measure the results.»» Intelligent automation: The right kinds of tools can automate critical management tasks so that they require little or no intervention by technicians. You can use business rules to establish automated processes, and then walk away: The software is smart enough to adjust to most deviations from the rules and automatically correct them without human intervention. Intelligent automation lets you continuously monitor and fine-tune your mainframe environment, without relying on special skills or a lot of people. It also reduces errors, optimizes the use of system resources, and lets you handle more workloads without necessarily adding staff or MIPS. BMC Software was recognized as a leader in innovation and leadership in virtually every category of mainframe IT management. These categories included products for the following:»» Automation»» DB2 and IMS management»» Batch scheduling»» Monitoring»» Capacity management»» Application tuning»» Business Service Management Like everyone else in business today, mainframe IT staffs are under tremendous pressure to save money. Fortunately, they are sitting on a terrific engine for both savings and growth: the mainframe. This survey suggests that mainframe IT executives and their teams are well aware of these opportunities and optimistic about the prospects. For information about how BMC Software can help IT organizations address the issues discussed in this paper, visit 5

8 Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software. Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster, and stronger. That s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk, and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended June 30, 2009, BMC revenue was approximately $1.88 billion. Visit for more information. About the Author Mike Moser, a product management director and program executive within BMC Software s Mainframe Service Management business unit, focuses on issues related to reducing costs while improving IT efficiency and service delivery. Moser s more than 20-year career has spanned a wide variety of engineering, IT management, technology consulting, and product management positions across both technology vendor and IT end-user organizations. BMC, BMC Software, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc., are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. ITIL is a registered trademark, and a registered community trademark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and is used here by BMC Software, Inc., under license from and with the permission of OGC. IT Infrastructure Library is a registered trademark of the Office of Government Commerce and is used here by BMC Software, Inc., under license from and with the permission of OGC. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. * *