Scoop - BMC Software to Announce Performance Assurance for Mainframes
BMC Software plans to announce tomorrow the latest release of Performance Assurance for Mainframes, intended to help customers assess the financial impact of their mainframe IT decisions. The new release includes capabilities to better align the IT environment with the business environment, and enables customers to more accurately predict the effects of moving workloads from general purpose processors to specialty processors.
A key new capability enables customers to associate business metrics with IT data to predict and model their environments. “We have the ability to allow the capacity planner to use business KPIs alongside of the IT performance metrics in their capacity plan,” John McKenny, vice president of worldwide marketing, Mainframe Service Management, BMC Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. The release "supports our efforts to better align the IT environment with the business environment as part of our business service management strategy," he said. BMC accomplishes this "by utilizing a capacity management database, based on ITIL v.3 principles, that is federated to our BMC Atrium configuration management database," he explained. "This is architected to work seamlessly with our corporate initiative around business service management."
Additionally, said McKenny, BMC's predictive analytic modeling technology "has been extended to provide support for the specialty engines on the z platform - the zIIPs and zAAPs." Capacity planners have to evaluate whether they have workloads that would benefit from the zIIP and zAAP and if so, how much can they move over, and is there any impact to the actual business applications. "We have the modeling capabilities that enable them to answer those kinds of questions," he said.
There is a lot of interest in the specialty engines, Jay Lipovich, senior manager of MAINVIEW Brand management at BMC, acknowledged. However, he said, migrating applications from the general-purpose engine to specialty engines it is not a simple one-for-one swap. "The specialty engines actually run at a higher clock speed than the general-purpose engines, and when you add specialty engines to a configuration, you reduce the total capacity of each of the general-purpose engines," he explained. "There is the potential for negative impact on all the other production work - and the model understands all of those interactions." Using the modeling tool, customers can determine if moving to the specialty engines is a good business decision or not, Lipovich said.
With BMC Performance
Assurance for Mainframes, noted McKenny, the modeling capabilities
are also being extended to handle Linux on System z.
The new release is a significant advancement, said McKenny. "Introducing the business metrics is certainly where capacity planning is going to really help the capacity planners and IT have a better understanding of how what they are doing impacts the business." For more information, go here.
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Breaking News - CA Announces Compliance and Automation Management Solutions
CA today announced eight new and updated solutions to support CA's ongoing Enterprise IT Management (EITM) effort.
The new offerings include products for managing compliance and risk across mainframe and distributed computing environments. CA is also announcing automation-focused products designed to help enable enterprise IT organizations to implement consistent management policies and processes across computing platforms and organizational boundaries, streamline IT operations, and implement best-practice frameworks. Some products are available now and others within the next 30 to 60 days, Don LeClair, senior vice president of CA Technology Strategy, told 5 Minute Briefing.
EITM, CA's strategic vision for changing the way enterprises manage IT, is intended to provide customers with an integrated and modular approach to govern, manage and secure IT environments, while aligning IT to the company's business imperatives.
Five solutions are aimed at improving enterprise-wide risk management by helping organizations comply with both external regulations and internal performance objectives. These products include three updated products - CA GRC Manager r1.5, CA Access Control Premium Edition and CA Identity Manager r12 - as well as two new products, CA Security Compliance Manager and CA Software Compliance Manager.
Developed internally at CA, the focus of CA Security Compliance Manager "is to help people do sustainable, automated detection of security policy or compliance violations and help initiate remediation," said LeClair. The product also streamlines the manual processes around certification and attestation of entitlements, and integrates with CA Identity Manager, CA-ACF2 and CA-Top Secret, CA GRC Manager and CA Service Desk.
CA Software Compliance Manager is focused on giving organizations "continuous process for managing regulatory or license compliance mandates" for the software they are running in the business, said LeClair. CA Software Compliance Manager eases audit processes by integrating software asset data from third-party and CA inventory tools and then normalizing it for proper license management.
Three other CA solutions aimed at improving efficiency through automation and policy-based controls include updated solutions, CA Advanced Systems Management r11.2 and CA OPS/MVS Event Management and Automation r11.6, as well as a new product, CA IT Process Manager.
CA IT Process Manager strengthens CA's Data Center Automation solutions by automating IT processes across the data center, the vendor said. Customers can automate and visualize critical IT processes around key IT initiatives including workload automation, data center automation, disaster recovery, consolidation, ITIL/ITSM, provisioning, security and virtualization management by leveraging integration with over 30 IT management solutions from CA, as well as IBM, BMC, HP and Microsoft. "Any IT organization that is looking to start doing better automation to improve availability and free up staff time - this is a great tool for them," observed LeClair. For more details on the solutions, go here.
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SSH Updates Mainframe File Transfer Tool; Partners with SDS
SSH Communications Security Corp., developer of the Secure Shell protocol, has announced the general availability of SSH Tectia Server 6.0 for IBM z/OS, a new secure file transfer solution for IBM mainframe environments. The solution includes encryption and authentication technologies, enabling enterprises to secure file transfers and other data-in-transit across, and between, z/OS, Windows, Unix, and Linux environments, with no changes to Job Control Language (JCL) tasks or scripts and no modifications to the existing infrastructure or applications.
The new version adds automatic FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) conversion, providing a secure, drop-in replacement for FTP, and also supports transparent FTP tunneling without requiring changes to existing FTP JCL jobs and applications. The new conversion capability in 6.0, George Adams, CEO of SSH Communications Security, Inc., told 5 Minute Briefing, provides IT managers "the ability to automatically detect FTP file transfers, which are of course unsecure, and either replace those automatically with SFTP transfers that are encrypted and secure, or to establish encrypted tunnels that your FTP file transfers can pass through to protect them." The new release also features an enhanced SSHG3 client architecture to deliver improved scalability and performance for SSH Tectia's advanced tunneling capabilities.
The SSH Tectia Server 6.0 for IBM z/OS improves file transfer reliability by providing new checkpoint/restart capabilities that automatically detect and resend all, or a portion, of a file in the event of a transfer interrupt, without requiring that the entire file be resent. Moreover, the new 6.0 release also adds support for new file transfer commands and parameters, including SITE/LOCSITE, ASCII/BINARY with configurable ASCII/EBCDIC conversion, CONDDISP, and SUNIQUE.
"Many corporations with z/OS-based mainframes are under pressure to eliminate FTP file transfers in particular and if they have not already replaced use of Telnet for the secure connection, to replace that as well for securing their data in transit," said Adams. This is being driven by data security standards and regulations that have to be met, including PCI DSS, GLBA, HIPAA and SOX, he said. The assumption had often been that mainframe connectivity was secure, said Adams, "but since mainframes have been connected to TCP/IP networks, they have become as vulnerable as any other server within the environment and needing protection of the data in transit."
Separately, SSH announced a partnership with Software Diversified Services (SDS), a supplier of TCP/IP monitoring and file transfer solutions for IBM z/OS mainframes. With this partnership, SDS will distribute and support a bundled solution combining SSH Tectia Server for IBM z/OS and the SDS FTP Manager (SFM) product to provide a comprehensive encryption and secure FTP automation solution for mainframe-centric file transfers with a wide range of enterprise platforms. Together, the SFM and SSH Tectia products will provide near-effortless, snap-in SSH protocol-based encryption and security for FTP, to and from IBM z/OS mainframes.
For additional information about SSH Communications Security, go here. For more on Software Diversified Services, go here.
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Phoenix Software Announces ODBC Migration Tool
Phoenix Software International, a mainframe software provider, has announced the addition of a new software product, My Data, developed by Jayess Software, to its product line. Phoenix Software entered into the agreement with Jayess to sell and support My Data in the U.S. and its territories last month. The product is now available from Phoenix Software's headquarters in Los Angeles.
My Data is an ODBC all-in-one data migration and synchronization utility. It provides robust functionality to ease data transfer between any two ODBC data sources. ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity and provides a standard software API method for using database management systems (DBMS). My Data can determine the design of any database that is ODBC or provides ODBC drivers. Examples of common supported databases are SQL, Access, text files, CSV, Excel, Pervasive, MySQL, and Oracle.
My Data is the only known product that provides migration from any type of database to any other type of database, according to the vendors. Users are not limited as they are with similar products offering from "any" to "text," or from a "specific data source type" to "any." My Data also differs from other products in its scalability and is appropriate for any size organization. It allows the user to specify unique constraints so it can be used to synchronize data daily, not just for one-time importing processes.
My Data is a 32-bit Windows application. It will run on 64-bit machines in 32-bit mode. The product is built on the .NET 2.0 framework and is licensed per workstation. For more information, go here.
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