zIIPs. I am sure you have heard about them and how they can save you money.

They can.

But before you jump into the zIIP world, weigh the costs and benefits. Consider whether you can offload MIPS during peak processing times (high return on investment) or during off-peak hours (not so high ROI).

Choose vendor software that can help with offloading work to zIIPs. Be sure that the vendor is providing software that is compliant with IBM standards for specialty engines.

For more information on zIIPs, see this Q&A with Gary Salazar, BMC IMS architect.

Tell us about your experiences with specialty engines.

We have heard a lot of stories about the experienced mainframe workforce shrinking because people are retiring, and we generally think of the retirees as technicians. But what happens when the data center director or CTO retires? A person who did not grow up on the mainframe often gets promoted into that position of authority.

Mainframe novices are often intimidated by the mighty mainframe, and executives are no exception. Making the mainframe friendly to executives with no mainframe background is tricky.

At first glance, the mainframe appears to be costly in terms of floor space, software, and personnel. Perhaps an experienced mainframe DBA gets a higher salary than a less-experienced distributed systems DBA, but the mainframe DBA is likely to be managing terabytes of data – mission critical data that the day-to-day business depends on.

Recently, I heard a director from a large US company lamenting the fact that his executives were anti-mainframe. This attitude exists despite that fact that his environment of 130,000 MIPS which runs most of their business is being maintained and supported by a team of only 60 technicians.

The mainframe may not seem as exciting as a server, but it is definitely faster and more secure. And the sheer amount of transaction processing power is exponentially higher for a mainframe. And the mainframe invented virtualization!

Executives may take the mainframe for granted because the mainframe sits there and does its work without a lot of fanfare. As long as everything goes as planned, the executive may not even think about the mainframe until a software bill is due. In the unlikely event of an outage, the executive sees the impact of the mainframe on the bottom line.

Share your stories of how you have introduced executives to the mainframe. I’m sure you have some good ones!

Guest post from James Davis, Customer Support Representative

Lowering CPU usage and costs are hot ticket items these days. To help reduce CPU usage, vendors and IBM work together to make mainframe processing more efficient. Here is one example.

Shared queue monitoring in WebSphere MQ for z/OS involves communication with DB2, and that the resource cost of this communication can be as high as 15% of total CPU utilization. BMC discovered that a "reset queue statistics" command for a private queue causes a query to be executed against DB2 to satisfy the potential for a generic name.  This happens for both shared and private queues, even though private queues have no relationship to DB2. The cost of the unnecessarily executed SQL can be very high, depending on the number of shared queues defined and queues selected for monitoring.

BMC reported this issue to IBM, who accepted it as an area for improvement and issued a fix. When the APAR is made generally available, users can expect significant savings if shared queues are present in their monitored environment.

By working together, IBM and BMC were able to optimize the interaction between DB2 and WebSphere MQ when resetting queue statistics...and reduce CPU usage for monitoring WebSphere MQ queues by 66%!

Technology changes almost at the speed of light. You have probably attended your fair share of trade shows in cities across your region.

You can now attend a trade show from the comfort of your desk. Join us for the BMC virtual conference Simplify and Automate IT: Improve IT Delivery and Support on Thursday, October 29.

Browse our mainframe offerings, and listen to Bill Miller, President of Mainframe Service Management, discuss how intelligent automation can help you stay competitive in the new IT economy.

Join us on October 29. We’ll see you there!

Guest post from DB2 Damsel

I’ve had a lot of different responsibilities here at BMC.  The first thing I did here was test one of the DB2 utilities. 

I remember trying to explain to my mother-in-law, who at the time was struggling with the concept of a cordless phone, just what in the world a QA person did.  When I had my last job, I gave up trying to explain to her what a DBA was and just left her wondering why I was always getting woken up at 3AM when something “blew up” but nobody ever got hurt.

“I test software.” Three words, short ones too.  I got a quizzical look in response.

“Then what?” she asked.

“Then if I find a problem, somebody fixes it.”

“What’s software?  Sounds dirty.”

“It’s the stuff on the computer that does things.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Ok, basically, I get to complain about stuff that isn’t right and somebody has to listen to me.”

She brightened.  “Oh!  I’ll bet you’re very good at that!”

Well, yeah, I thought I was pretty good at it.  I kept a certain developer busy, littering his desk with notes about this test and that test and dreaming up evil little scenarios for his product.  The day I brought DB2 to a screeching halt was a proud moment indeed.

I don’t test software anymore, but I work with a lot of people who do and while they aren’t our DBAs, they worry about those people who get woken up at 3AM when something blows up but nobody ever gets hurt.  That’s a club I’m proud to have been a part of.

By Jonathan Adams, Vice President of Research and Development

You say you want a revolution? Well, ya know...

We live in interesting times. The world economy has affected virtually every IT organization. We see new technology almost daily: from smart phones -  to televisions that make sports look better than they do in person - to medical advances. But one technology has remained stable and reliable for over 40 years – the IBM mainframe.

The mainframe is changing to meet the challenges of today’s world. Web-enabled applications are a great example of new technology working with legacy data. The professionals who manage mainframes are changing too – as some of our experts retire, we are hiring recent college graduates and teaching them how to maintain the technology that we have invested so much in.

In this blog, we will discuss how the mainframe is changing and how BMC is driving technology changes. We will introduce the minds behind the technology: our architects, QA representatives, customer support representatives, managers, marketing personnel, and more. We hope you find the posts valuable, and we invite you to comment.

I am Jonathan Adams, Vice President of Data and Performance Management, at BMC, and I look forward to hearing from you.