Addressing the increasing pressure on the budgets of organizations that rely on the mainframe, BMC Software introduced new mainframe cost optimization capabilities to help organizations better manage their mainframe investments. "We are working with our customers to try to reduce the cost of the mainframe. That is what our customers tell us they need help with," Jay Lipovich, director of product management at BMC Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
There are four key areas BMC focuses on in order to help customers achieve this, explains Lipovich. One is reducing BMC's own resource footprint. A second focus is in the area of mainframe modernization, with automation and intelligence in tools to help reduce costs as well as address skills issues. The third area is in helping customers plan their capability and understand when there are opportunities to use new technology, and, if there are bottlenecks, understand tuning opportunities that can help avoid capital expenditures.
zIIP enablement is a fourth key area of BMC's efforts to help customers reduce mainframe costs. "If we can't reduce our footprint, and we can't just not do it, and you are using your capacity at the maximum efficiency, let's move the processing off of the expensive MIPS [Million Instructions Per Second] to the cheap MIPS," says Lipovich, explaining the philosophy behind "moving our work as much as possible" off to zIIP processors. "We have been doing this all along. We have been doing it in accordance with the contractual obligations we have to IBM, using the approved APIs and doing it in an approved way," he emphasizes.
BMC now has enabled many of its DB2 for z/OS solutions to take advantage of IBM System z Integrated Information Processors (zIIPs), enabling customers to move more of their DB2 work to lower-cost processors, thereby reducing their mainframe operational costs. According to BMC, this new zIIP offloading capability, along with previously-introduced BMC MainView zIIP exploitation efforts represent a significant step to reduce the costs of MIPS, the primary cost driver in mainframe environments.
New zIIP capabilities for BMC's DB2 products support the company's efforts to help its customers reduce costs. "We have releases for 11 of our DB2 utility products where we have done zIIP exploitation. We have actually been able to zIIP-enable some of our underlying technology that those utilities use," Lipovich explains. The BMC CMF MONITOR and BMC MainView for z/OS solutions already shift nearly half their work to zIIP processors, allowing IT to return the use of general-purpose capacity back to the business for future growth.
BMC is offering additional DB2 zIIP-enabled capabilities along with tools such as BMC Capacity Management for Mainframes, which helps organizations better understand the potential benefits of these engines by modeling their expected capacity usage. For more information on BMC's solutions for DB2 systems, which offload their workloads to the zIIP engines, go here.