Mainframe Capacity Optimization

When it’s all about transaction throughput capacity—that’s exactly where DataKinetics Z Performance and Optimization Solutions can help you today.

The Capacity-Cost Dilemma

IT organizations struggle with two seemingly divergent challenges: the need to control spiraling operational costs while also keeping ahead of the capacity curve. Virtually all mainframe IT shops must ensure their systems have the capacity to handle both planned growth and seasonal upswings.

The bad news is that most organizations are faced with the undesirable prospect of addressing only one of these important challenges: either control costs or make sure capacity needs are met.

The good news is that you don’t have to choose! There are solutions for IT organizations that will allow for simultaneously controlling costs while at the same time, managing capacity.

High-performance in-memory technology

DataKinetics Z High-performance in-memory technology solutions are helping some of the biggest financial services companies and insurers to get the most out of their mainframe transaction processing systems.

Taking the pressure off the vicious upgrade cycle

The most common and obvious way to improve your mainframe system capacity is to open the purse strings and pay for a system upgrade. To be fair, it is a completely viable way to improve system capacity, which is why many large IT organizations do it – many as often as once every three years, and some even more often than that. The only problem with system upgrades is that they can be exceedingly costly and often fall under the category of capital expenditures (CapEx) because they won’t fit under the line for most organizations’ operational expense limits. Doing this every two to five years makes the mainframe a highly visible ongoing cost to the business, and garners talk about making IT infrastructure changes. This, despite the fact that a typical large organization might be running 75% of its revenue through the mainframe, while it consumes 15% to 20% of the overall IT budget. DataKinetics Z High-performance in-memory technology can change the entire picture.

Getting more out of what you have now

Using DataKinetics Z High-performance in-memory technology allows organizations to get more out of their high-value mainframe systems by spreading out the vicious upgrade cycle. Instead of updrading every two to five years, an organization might spread that out to an upgrade every four to eight years, depending on transaction processing intensity and overall business growth.

How does high-performance in-memory technology work? High-access data is copied from the DBMS into high-performance in-memory tables, where it is accessed using a simple and tight API 100 times faster than buffered DBMS access. The key to that difference is the shorter code path used by the in-memory technology. What that means is that your mainframe systems will have much more processing capacity – without upgrading, and without changing your database or your application logic.

IT Analytics

IT organizations collect tremendous amounts of data about their own computing resources every day – from mainframe, midrange servers locally, or in third-party datacenters. So much data is collected, that you could call it their own “IT Big Data.” With the right toolsets, this IT data can be used to improve computing capacity on your mainframe, by identifying low-priority candidates to offload for and run on other platforms. IT can then rededicate computing capacity that was consumed by the lower-priority workloads to improve capacity for higher-priority workloads. Again, this is made possible without the need for a system upgrade.

Mainframe Capacity Optimization

These solutions are low-risk and budget-friendly; independently, they provide good computing capacity improvement, but together they provide very significant improvements. They can help to decrease the frequency of your system upgrades, and will make a significant impact on your mainframe computing capacity challenges.

Learn more about the technologies that support mainframe capacity optimization.

tableBASE

tableBASE can lower your costs and mainframe TCO, dramatically reduce batch processing time and optimize your MIPS usage, offering performance benefits and more powerful and efficient applications.

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IT Business Intelligence

IT Business Intelligence collects capacity and performance data from the IT infrastructure and combines these with business information such as costs, which application and organizational unit is using the resources, and for what activities.

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