Management Software, Business Growth, and the Genius of the Mainframe

Transcription

1 Thought Leadership white paper Management Software, Business Growth, and the Genius of the Mainframe By Mike Moser, Product Management Director and Program Executive for Mainframe Service Management, BMC Software

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary Businesses Must Adapt Quickly; I.T. Must Lead The Ever-Adaptable Mainframe Managing for Mainframe Optimization The Four Pillars of Mainframe Optimization Performance Availability Productivity Risk Mitigation Adaptable Mainframes Propel Adaptable Business

3 Executive Summary Some technologies can become obsolete in a relatively short period of time. For example, look at how consumer recording tech - nol ogy has evolved. It wasn t too long ago that people were using videotapes to record their favorite movies. That technology was replaced by DVDs, which provided clearer, more reliable images. Rather quickly, the technology moved on to streaming video on demand, which is even more efficient and cost-effective. Other technologies, however, can be considered classic. An example is the mainframe, which has prevailed through generations of computing. It runs most data centers. It s also a fixture in our daily wired lives. If you send text messages, make stock trades, shop online, play multiplayer games, or use an ATM, you re probably touching a mainframe. IBM and software vendors have made continual technology improvements, making the mainframe both more flexible and cheaper to operate. Thanks to these system improvements and to innovation in management software the mainframe today is more practical than ever in helping businesses adapt and stay competitive. This white paper explores how these factors are helping companies to leverage the true genius of the mainframe. 1

4 Businesses Must Adapt Quickly; I.T. Must Lead Businesses are constantly changing, particularly in this economy. They are acquiring new companies, starting new businesses, closing or selling off divisions, consolidating operations, and entering new geographic markets. Through all of this, data growth and transaction volumes are exploding. Business transactions span multiple platforms: from customers smartphones to application servers to the mainframe. More applications are directly accessing data on the mainframe for example, data in DB2 databases creating additional demands on the mainframe infrastructure. Constant business change, data and transaction growth, and increasing application complexity are straining computing capacity, processes, and people and straining IT budgets. Consider a leading telephone company: Its wireless business must process, store, and handle hundreds of millions of text messages every day 1 and keep data as long as seven years to meet compliance requirements. Or consider a bank grappling with exponential data and transaction growth because of 24x7 service and multichannel banking, or a retailer that is close to maxing out its CPU because of an expanding product portfolio, growth in online customer ordering, and geographic expansion. Businesses are deploying new applications to streamline operations and get a competitive edge. To lower their costs and improve their business service levels, they are looking to new, more-flexible IT models, such as cloud computing, web services, and virtualization. They are striving to wring every ounce of business value from their IT investments, at the same time that they are striving to lower costs. Faced with these challenges, IT organizations need to become a lot more adaptable. They need to move more quickly and look beyond the usual solutions to give their businesses that competitive edge. Failure to adapt quickly and decisively can mean that the company can t meet business demands cost-effectively. Operating costs are too high, customer service breakdowns are more likely, and lost business is a continual threat. The Ever-Adaptable Mainframe Today, your best help for business growth may come from your mainframe. To some people, the mainframe conjures up a picture of a monolithic, immobile machine chugging away overnight, processing credit card transactions or other batch work. In reality, mainframes are flexible parts of modern IT infrastructures. Mainframes can and do process all kinds of essential business work, including mixed workloads that incorporate online and batch components. Mainframes function as big servers in enterprise (distributed) computing environments. They host virtualized resources, run web services, and participate in the cloud. As such, they represent a huge and critical element of the organization s business service infrastructure. Many organizations are adopting Business Service Management (BSM) principles as a comprehensive approach and unified platform for running IT, and the mainframe is generally at the heart of the critical work being performed by IT. IBM s new zenterprise computer represents the logical extension of BSM principles to computer hardware. The BSM platform can simplify and automate IT whether its main system is a hybrid computer, like the zenterprise, or a hybrid data center full of physical and virtual servers. BSM solutions make it possible for IT organizations to realize the benefits of a unified BSM management platform for their mainframe, distributed, virtual, and cloud environments. To the IT challenges outlined in this white paper, the mainframe brings its classic features security, reliability, scalability, and flexibility in an ever-more-economical package. When faced with the need to provide ever-expanding services while managing the environment efficiently and reliably, many IT organizations will find that the mainframe has a lot more mileage left. IBM has continuously improved the mainframe with innovations that help the mainframe adapt and remain a vibrant platform for enterprise computing. Two prominent examples are Linux support and specialty engines. The primary engine of innovation has been software specifically, management software that can optimize the mainframe. Properly managed, today s mainframe can often provide cheaper processing power with higher service levels, greater reliability, better business continuity, and faster business responsiveness than distributed computers. 2

5 Managing for Mainframe Optimization By deploying the right automated management processes, businesses can continually optimize mainframe costs and business service levels. This means that you can reduce hardware and software utilization, delay upgrades, and lower business-transaction costs. You can also automate more functions so that staff members have more time to focus on strategic projects that help grow your organization. For example, you can use zlinux to consolidate virtualized servers on the mainframe instead of on distributed servers, saving both hardware and management costs. One BMC customer, for example, is running 200 WebSphere application servers on the mainframe under zlinux, which the customer says dramatically simplifies its management. Businesses can also achieve dramatic savings by moving as much work as possible from general-purpose engines to the IBM System z Integrated Information Processor (ziip), because ziip capacity costs a fraction of general-purpose capacity. According to industry calculations, hardware plus software costs for a ziip processor are only $150 to $200 per MIPS, compared with $2,200 to $3,400 per MIPS for a general-purpose processor. 2 By shifting eligible workloads to ziips, you free up the far more expensive general-purpose capacity for new work. As a result, you can introduce new business applications at a low incremental cost without affecting the costs of your legacy workloads. This, more than anything else, gives you a powerful way to respond to the business need to grow at a reasonable cost. A global company that provides financial services and products achieved a significant decrease in usage of scarce general-purpose processor resources plus a reduction in software costs, by moving a part of its systems-monitoring workloads to ziip processors. The IT staff is now able to assign additional workloads to the general-purpose processors, so the business units can get more work done in the same amount of time. Advanced automated workload management software and other tools enable businesses to take advantage of opportunities like this. Conversely, if you try to manage the new adaptable mainframe with traditional management tools, you won t realize the full benefits to the business. What s more, your management costs will most likely increase because you need to add more people to manage more workloads, more transactions, or new applications. With intelligent management software, you can achieve economies of scale. You can offload repetitive management tasks, errorprone multi-step processes, specialized knowledge requirements, and often complex decisions from people to software. What about future costs? The mainframe s centrally managed, highly automated operations environment ensures that you run and evolve your workloads cost-effectively over time. By minimizing the complexities of labor and integration, the right management software can ensure that you sustain your cost advantages over the long haul. 3

6 The Four Pillars of Mainframe Optimization The right management software is intelligent, highly automated software that focuses on the four pillars of mainframe optimization: Performance Availability Productivity Risk Mitigation Performance To lower the cost of maintaining high performance, you need to process business workloads using the fewest MIPS, which are the main determinant of mainframe costs. One frequently overlooked way to improve performance is to shrink the resource consumption of your management workloads. First, look for mainframe management software that is constantly optimized to reduce its consumption of mainframe resources. This strategy will align with your need to reduce the cost of delivering business services. Second, look for mainframe management software that runs natively on the mainframe instead of on a separate distributed server. You ll save on hardware, software, and labor costs, and you ll get better performance from the software. Third, further optimize your mainframe by using software that automatically deploys management workloads on the cheapest possible resource (such as ziip specialty engines), freeing up expensive general-purpose processors for business workloads. Noted independent research firm, Forrester Research, Inc., recently cited BMC as using creative exploitation in the use of ziips. A recent Forrester report stated that, in the second half of 2009, when Forrester s end-customer IT clients were making a sizeable number of z10 hardware and software upgrades, two specific vendors, including BMC Software, used approaches to the creative exploitation of the IBM ziip specialty processor that are telling examples and that other mainframe independent software vendors will most likely follow throughout One business saved significant money by offloading monitoring activities to ziip processors during peak activity periods. Reducing peak-period usage reduces monthly license charges and has enabled the company to postpone capacity upgrades. Today, there s software that is intelligent enough to continually examine system conditions with an eye toward minimizing resource consumption. The software can make decisions and take actions on its own including deciding when not to run. For example, most IT organizations have automated, scheduled routines to copy their databases to ensure they always have the latest version of their data. It s insurance but it s often insurance with a high cost. Databases don t change on a consistent basis, so scheduled backups may not always be necessary. The trick is to know when backups are needed. Today, you can delegate this task to software instead of people. Advanced tuning software can conditionally examine the state of the database tables, determine if they have changed enough to require copying, and then advise the IT staff to cancel unnecessary jobs. You can use this same approach with software that can conditionally manage the need for database reorganizations and run them only when warranted. By eliminating unnecessary database copy or reorganization activities, you free up CPU resources. For example, by implementing a conditional reorganization strategy, a large insurance company reduced by 75 percent the number of MIPS consumed by its DB2 database reorganization activities. Similarly, Austrian retailer Kastner & Öhler AG used advanced DB2 tuning software to defer a potentially expensive CPU upgrade. 4 The IT staff was able to reduce the average CPU time per SQL statement by 45.6 percent, deferring the upgrade and eliminating software upgrade costs while ensuring that business service levels continued to be met. The company s investment in the tuning software paid for itself in a year. 4

7 Availability You need to lower the cost of ensuring that mainframe operations deliver contracted business service levels. It s an ongoing challenge to ensure availability of enough resources to handle spikes in business activity without over-provisioning. Given today s 24x7 business operations, outages are unacceptable to customers. Further, maintenance windows are becoming a thing of the past it s too costly and risky to take applications or databases offline. Again, advanced management software can help. Advanced management software reduces outages by proactively spotting and fixing problems before they affect service. Highspeed, online maintenance utilities reduce or eliminate the need to take the business offline for system maintenance. For example, sophisticated software enables you to perform DB2 database reorganizations online without disrupting business access to the data. With the assurance provided by these tools, you can manage resource availability much more aggressively to reduce costs. How Mainframes Keep Business Services Cruising at FIDUCIA FIDUCIA is the largest IT services provider to Germany s cooperative financial system, providing critical services to 790 cooperative and private banks, as well as to central institutes. Its mainframe data has grown exponentially in the last decade, as services such as multichannel and 24x7 banking have become industry norms. FIDUCIA is using management software from BMC as the linchpin of FIDUCIA s mainframe environment. It is reducing costs by minimizing hardware and software requirements, increasing efficiency, ensuring adherence to application service levels and improving availability by fixing problems faster across the 16.2 billion transactions processed annually. The company has been able to offload 30 percent of its BMC Mainview workload to the ziip environment, reducing general-purpose processor utilization and saving a significant amount of money. Mainframe availability is critical to FIDUCIA s business success, said Thomas Heitlinger, System z product manager at FIDUCIA. We need 100 percent confidence in the monitoring solution, or we risk jeopardizing mainframe availability and performance. BMC MainView has been instrumental in increasing efficiency and lowering operational costs for 10 years. With BMC, we have the efficient and integrated monitoring tools we need to manage the complexity of operating systems and subsystems and we can detect system performance issues before they disrupt the business. 5 Productivity To optimize mainframe costs, you need to make IT staff as efficient as possible. The right software helps staff identify problems earlier and solve them faster and in context. You can manage the mainframe with fewer people and less specialized expertise and with fewer errors. For example, there s software that presents a Single System Image (SSI) of mainframe activity, so technicians don t have to log on to multiple monitors and jump among them to isolate problems. Instead, they see a single monitor. Automated problem alerts flag and prioritize problems, and hyperlinks connect to the underlying systems for prompt problem resolution. Software is vital to making people more productive because, as the mainframe changes and adapts to business services, you simply cannot manage it manually it would be too expensive, inefficient, and risky. The two rules for improving productivity are (1) use software to automate routine manual tasks wherever possible, and (2) use software to automate complex tasks to save time and reduce errors. The very latest mainframe management software empowers a new generation of IT workers by letting them manage mainframe resources through a Web browser or receive alerts via their smartphones or tablets. 5

8 A large telecommunications company used automation to adapt to the significant changes that were happening on its mainframe. By automating manual responses to errors, they were able go from 148,000 manual responses per quarter to 4,800 per quarter. Risk Mitigation You know you need to lower the cost of preventing disruptions that can keep the business from making money. There s software that traces the mainframe s role in business transactions that span the enterprise IT infrastructure, quickly isolating a problem to the sysplex before business service levels are affected. Today s intelligent software understands when there s a problem on the mainframe that s affecting a business service and automatically creates an alert, opens a trouble ticket, automates the response, and closes out the problem. There s also management software that provides two-way integration between mainframe operations and business service models, so IT people even those without mainframe expertise can manage the mainframe from within the context of a business service. For example, a regional bank in the United States used best practices from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL ) to model its business services and map them to the IT infrastructure including the mainframe. The IT staff is now able to manage the entire infrastructure based on defined business service levels captured in the service models. Advanced capacity planning software, with predictive analytics, provides a realistic picture of future capacity requirements by taking a look at past business demands and applying sophisticated algorithms to the data. By using intelligent software instead of the usual spreadsheets to perform this kind of analysis, your capacity planners can stay far ahead of capacity requirements, ensuring business service levels while delaying capacity upgrades. Good management software also prevents unauthorized people from accessing the infrastructure and simplifies compliance and audits by providing access-control data in readily usable form. Innovations in management software will continue to drive down the operating costs of the mainframe, while moving businesses ever closer to Business Service Management. 6

9 Adaptable Mainframes Propel Adaptable Business The mainframe continues to adapt elegantly to IT organizations ongoing needs to do more with less and deliver more value to the business. In achieving this, the mainframe makes businesses more adaptable. Forward-thinking businesses are leveraging the extreme power and reliability of the mainframe to process their ever-expanding workloads, while taking advantage of innovations in mainframe management software to keep their business operations adaptable, profitable, and competitive. That s the true genius of the mainframe. For more information about BMC s mainframe solutions, visit end notes 1 Mobile Marketer, Verizon Wireless Sets Record with SMS Messages over Holidays, January 9, Press release: BMC Software Significantly Reduces Mainframe Costs, Helps Position Customers for Economic Growth, May 24, 2010, 3 Ibid. 4 Case Study: Kastner & Öhler AG, Leading Austrian Retailer Realizes Complete Return on BMC APPTUNE for DB2 Investment in First Year of Use, 5 Press release: CUSTOMER SUCCESS: FIDUCIA and BMC Software Deliver Major Savings to German Financial System, May 24, 2010, 7

10 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 provides a comprehensive and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk, and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended June 30, 2010, BMC revenue was approximately $1.92 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. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. IBM and WebSphere are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. 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 trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. *172023*