BMC Software has announced database management solutions to help customers exploit the cost savings advantages enabled by DB2 10 for z/OS.
Customers are moving more aggressively to DB2 10 than BMC has seen in the past when new versions of DB2 have been released, Robin Reddick, director, MSM Solutions Marketing at BMC Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The primary motivation that BMC is hearing from its customers is that they can achieve cost savings with the new release. Customers understand that they can achieve 5% to 10% cost savings out of the box by moving to DB2 10, and then if they want to work at it, they can get up to 20% on some workloads, says Reddick.
According to Reddick, about 50% of BMC's customers say they will have moved to DB2 10 within 18 months of the release of the latest version, and about 25% say that they are going to skip version 9 and go right from version 8 to version 10. This is the first time that IBM has let customers to skip a level when upgrading their DB2 version, she adds.
To help IT organizations optimize the performance of DB2 database management systems, BMC has announced its largest set of DB2 products in the company's history with more than 20 mainframe service management products now supporting DB2 10 for z/OS.
BMC's solutions for DB2 10 include increased capabilities for customers to take advantage of System z Integrated Information Processors (zIIPs). The new capabilities help offload BMC's DB2 product workload to the zIIP environment thereby reducing general purpose processor utilization. For example, notes Reddick, BMC's tuning and monitoring products have a data collection service that they share and BMC has zIIP-enabled that data collection service. "As a result, customers should expect to see somewhere between 50% and 80% of the work associated with data collection offloaded to a zIIP processor if they have one."
Not only is it important to allow customers to take advantage of the specialty processors for the cost savings but because tuning and performance monitors tend to use a lot of CPU, customers tend to use them sparingly. However, they are very high value products for customers because as they tune, they get additional costs savings because they are using less CPU. By zIIP-enabling the data collection service, it allows customers to save money while running the products, but it will also allow them to run them more frequently. They will get value because they can do more tuning and save CPU, and they can offload some of the work to zIIP engines, Reddick explains.
In addition, says Reddick, because customers understand that in order to get additional cost savings with DB2 10 they must do some tuning to make sure access paths are the best ones, BMC has developed several ways to help customers in this area. "We have our SQL Performance for DB2 solution and it has a Workload Compare feature that customers can use to make sure they maximize the cost savings by looking at their SQL statements to see which ones need to be rebound or modified."
BMC has introduced some new advisors that are going to help with cost savings as well, such as the Index Advisor. Because one of the things that have come out with the new release of DB2 is expanded index capabilities, customers need to make sure they are using the right indexes when accessing information, and that they don't have a lot of extraneous indexes that might take additional overhead on the system, says Reddick. "Our Index Advisory feature helps them make sure that they have the right indexes set up and they are using the right one." There is also a new Exception Advisor that helps with tuning by looking at the SQL statements that are anomalies and could potentially be problems.
More details are available from BMC about products supporting DB2 10 for z/OS.