Worldwide economic uncertainty over the last 12 months has put significant pressure on CIOs to at the very least keep IT costs level with a push for cost reduction across the board. Gone are the days when performance issues were relatively easily handled by adding more hardware and software and such purchases were part of the budget cycle.
Managing performance and cost has become a significantly more difficult job with capacity planners and performance analysts having to defer hardware and software upgrades due to squeezed budgets. Many large IT departments have seen loss of staff due to redundancy and this has put added pressure on maintaining performance profitably.
One of the most effective ways of reducing mainframe costs is through better managing CPU consumption. By slowing down the growth of CPU usage, hardware and software upgrades can be deferred without hindering performance thereby allowing organisations to keep costs down and performance and profitability up.
MIPS Growth in the Mainframe Market
In a recent mainframe market study, IBM reported that the mainframe has seen a 20% compound annual growth rate in MIPS since 2003.
In Ovum’s “The state of the mainframe” research, they found that mainframe MIPS growth is averaging around 20 percent per year and large mainframe-centric enterprises have been consistently averaging 35 percent-plus MIPS growth.
The effects of growing MIPS
Whilst it is good news for businesses to see transactions on the rise, with usage based pricing for z/OS this increase in workload pushes up software costs.
Applications are often simply “coping” with current cpu usage but not performing to their best. This means systems are either upgraded earlier than necessary or organisations are having to cope with underperforming systems.
Can tuning do enough to reduce costs?
By implementing key tuning procedures, ongoing software costs will be reduced and mainframe upgrades can be deferred. In addition, application performance will be enhanced and overall TCO reduced.
zTune
zTune from Triton Consulting helps organisations like yours to ensure that their critical systems are performing at their best whilst keeping costs static.
The first step for zTune is for Triton to identify the major resource users within your system with an emphasis on DB2 and CICS. From this we can measure the CPU baseline costs and determine whether there are any potential savings to be made. A detailed recommendation for tuning is put together.
No savings no fee
The next step is for Triton to agree the tuning proposals and implement the agreed actions. The results and savings are then measured.
Conclusion
We understand that one of your key goals is to reduce the cost of running mainframe applications whilst still providing the best service to your customers. Let Triton’s team of tuning experts help you to save your organisation money whilst improving performance.