Transitioning to Business-Centric Management

Once you've decided on the right platform to power your business, you can set about optimizing management of the data center to derive maximum business value from those resources. Perhaps the most important factor in deriving value from your optimized data center is transitioning from a technically oriented, platform-based and siloed management approach to a horizontal, business-oriented approach.

BSM solutions provide a number of important features that can facilitate this transition. With respect to mainframe management, a comprehensive BSM solution portfolio provides two important capabilities that permit you to leverage the unique capabilities of the mainframe to deliver maximum business value:

• It supports individual management and instrumentation of the mainframe with such features as comprehensive monitoring and alert management, event management, optimization, batch environment management and control, and business-oriented capacity planning.
• It weaves the mainframe into the fabric of the IT infrastructure and seamlessly integrates management of the mainframe into the overall management fabric of the distributed data center environment.

Look for BSM solutions that provide a unified, holistic view of the IT infrastructure and the relationships between IT resources and the business services and processes that the resources support. The solutions should provide a process-oriented approach that is based on best-practice IT processes and should automate, wherever possible, processes that the IT staff has previously had to perform manually.

With the right BSM approach, you can manage the data center as a unified whole, across all platform types—Windows, UNIX, Linux and mainframes. This maximizes the efficiency of IT staff and permits you to realize maximum value from all your data center resources, including mainframes.

Reaping the Benefits

By leveraging BSM solutions to right-platform and manage your data center, you can avoid the costly mistakes made by the hypothetical fleet manager. You'll not only justify the cost of the mainframe and maximize its value to the business, but in the process, you'll also drive up the value of the other resources in your data center in several key areas:

Whether you are managing a fleet of vehicles or a data center, it's important to keep in mind that each vehicle or platform has unique strengths that make it the optimum choice for certain jobs. Simply transferring jobs en masse to lower-cost platforms isn't the best formula for success. You need to balance cost with business value. A comprehensive BSM solution can help you balance cost and value in a way that is strategic and informed and that maximizes the results your data center delivers to the bottom line.

Ralph Crosby is the CTO for the Mainframe Service Management Business Unit at BMC Software. He's responsible for setting the strategic technology direction for the entire portfolio of IBM mainframe products. Prior to joining BMC, he worked as a database administrator, applications architect and systems programmer in a variety of environments centered on the IBM mainframe but also including Windows and Unix platforms.

Editor's note: Caveat columns are written by vendors knowledgeable about the topic presented. However, the vendors often have a stake in the technologies used to solve the problems discussed. Caveat emptor!