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Maintaining the Agile Mainframe

Nights and weekends aren’t what they used to be.

By By Ralph Crosby, CTO, BMC Mainframe Business Unit

August 24, 2007 — CIO — Years ago, processing on the mainframe was fairly predictable. All day Monday you ran transactions, which peaked a couple times a day. Then you reconciled everything in big batch runs. The daily cycle repeated itself, and on the weekends, you had ample time to do maintenance.

Whether or not we realized it at the time, it was a relatively simple and orderly world.

But nights and weekends aren’t what they used to be. Today the mainframe staff must be able to perform batch runs, backups and restores, and other maintenance work—in spite of 24/7 transaction processing.

The mainframe must be able to accommodate not only the normal peaks and valleys of the business, but also the not-so-normal peaks and valleys. Largely because of the Web, your customers can respond to world events in near-real time, occasionally swamping your systems with unprecedented transaction volumes.

Because of all this, most large businesses today are interested in increasing the “agility” of their mainframes. The trendy word agility is just a new term for an old idea—the ability to adapt to change. Of course, the truth is that IT has always needed to maintain the adaptability of the mainframe. What is new today is the intensity of the need.

Running IT as a Business
Many companies that have re-engineered their processes on the business side to gain better economies of scale and higher levels of productivity are beginning to recognize that they’ve neglected the IT side.

In fact, with IT budgets holding steady, solely relying on increases in hardware, software and staff isn’t always an option. To meet economies of scale and realize higher productivity, IT teams need to instead focus their efforts on improving IT processes.

Well, you may say, productivity was the reason for creating IT in the first place—IT provides automation that makes other departments more productive.

Just proving that your mainframe saves money for the company is not enough anymore. You also must prove that IT is helping to bring in new revenue. Now is the time to look at IT itself as a business and run it as a business, to meet constantly changing demands. It is time to make IT more productive, more scalable and ultimately, more adaptable.

And when it comes to this issue, the mainframe is more critical than ever. Today, your mainframe must support new applications, including new types of applications that don’t look or behave like traditional mainframe applications.

 

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