Peak performance, perfect delivery and big savings. BMC solutions cut mainframe costs by eliminating inefficiencies and boosting performance called as mainframe cost optimization (MCO).
How do you make the case for mainframe cost optimization?
It's a tough position: mainframe is critical to the organization, yet it's often the largest item in an expense budget. At the same time, businesses are under pressure to accommodate transformational projects and support business service demands. Consider mainframe cost optimization as an alternative if IT leaders are trying to free budget funds by:
Pressuring ISVs to reduce their costs
Consolidating ISV vendors to optimize spend
Cutting staff and expanding scope of existing technical resources
Evaluating business work to determine what can be moved off the mainframe
What makes BMC solutions the right ones?
There are two ways to cut mainframe costs: reduce what business use (MIPS consumption, MLC costs, peak usage) and get more from what already exists (reduce planned outages and shorten unplanned ones). BMC solutions address both, helping businesses reclaim precious IT dollars without jeopardizing quality of service.
BMC Mainframe Cost Optimization can help businesses:
Start saving money next month by developing an MLC cost management strategy and evaluating changes that can impact next month's bill
Tune and optimize key business applications online and batch to reduce their usage and cost of running the business
Make sure businesses are ready to recover data in the event of local data corruption and provide accurate recovery forecasts to business in event of an outage
Replace inefficient database and system management tools with highly efficient ones, saving a bundle
MLC Software Management
Monthly license costs (MLC) are rising by 7% or more each year, and account for 30% of total mainframe costs. Yet managing MLC costs is an inexact science. Most companies rely on manual efforts of a person or team to find and fix inefficiencies, with little process or governance.
BMC Cost Analyzer for zEnterprise, an easy-to-use solution for reporting, planning, and reducing MLC costs by up to 20% or more, helps businesses overcome complexity of MLC pricing. How By tracking and reporting on system peaks and cost drivers, businesses can identify and implement cost-reducing strategies. Robust graphical reporting is accompanied by predictive at-if planning capabilities and cost impact analysis, allowing businesses to see the impact before making changes.
Relevant data
Insightful reporting lets seeing the ways business can reduce MLC costs.
Critical accuracy
Making changes to reduce costs is fine as long as you don't impact critical business applications. Cost Analyzer accuracy gives business the information required to make cost decisions.
Informed confidence
When business clearly see its way to make cost-reducing changes and accurately know what will happen, then it can act on savings opportunities with confidence.
Application Performance
Many business applications that run on mainframes weren't designed to take advantage of today's mainframe hardware. Result Poor performance and wasted CPU resources. Even modern applications may not be designed for efficiency.
Monitoring and identifying inefficient SQL code
BMC helps businesses flag lines of code that are slowing down the applications, and also extend the concept of monitoring efficiency into monitoring of SQL applications.
Improving efficiency of IMS batch applications
BMC Application Accelerator for IMS automatically and dynamically optimizes IMS batch work, reducing CPU consumption by 10%-50% and reducing the elapsed times for jobs by as much as 80%.
Reducing checkpoints
For older applications with wasteful checkpoints, BMC Application Restart Control provides checkpoint pacing, which reduces number of checkpoints executed and the CPU they consume.
Business availability
Unnecessary downtime for mission critical applications is critically expensive in some industries as much as several million dollars per hour. It's not just unplanned outages, either-planned downtime (like database reorgs, copy, and other maintenance procedures) can be just as expensive. BMC solutions help businesses:
Reduce planned and unplanned outage time
Benchmarks show that BMC utilities for DB2 complete database management functions twice as fast as with IBM tools, and use half the CPU. BMC Advisors correlate data to warn of potential problems that could affect business availability and performance. And with BMC, enterprise's team gets tools to properly implement and manage changes, reducing human error.
Accelerate recovery
Make sure the unplanned downtime doesn't last a minute longer than it needs to. Intelligent tools automate and coordinate actions so recovery is quick and accurate.
Coordinate applications across platforms
Having right data in the right places, synced across platforms, is critical to finding and resolving a problem. BMC solutions follow applications across the enterprise in middleware, application performance management, and job scheduling/workload automation.
Systems and database management
Mainframe software is licensed based on CPU usage (in MIPS and MSUs), which means the top focus is making sure businesses aren't using more than what is needed. BMC helps saving CPU in three key areas:
Run more efficient tools with less overhead
BMC uses common-collector approaches wherever possible, meaning BMC only collect data once but make it available to be used across many processes and applications.
Use more affordable, efficient specialty engines
By offloading up to 80% of their processing to zIIP engines, BMC solutions are able to dramatically decrease MIPS and MSU consumption. How quickly does this add up zIIP engines run at 1/10th to 1/20th the price of general purpose engines.
Reduce or eliminate unnecessary workloads
Many mainframe management tools run automatically, whether they need to or not. To eliminate wasteful (and costly) maintenance procedures, many BMC solutions include built-in intelligence to analyze conditions and decide if running tool is needed.
