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Published date: 11 Feb 2008
The Mainstream -- February 2008 -- Issue 28
Becoming competent within mainframe environments within months, rather than years? It may well be true in the not so distant future. More than a year ago, IBM announced a five-year plan to simplify and streamline mainframe systems and software. The $100 million effort will help greatly reduce the time and expense of getting a new generation of IT professionals up to speed on this demanding computer platform, while also greatly streamlining mainframe operations. Here’s a glimpse of how products will continue to modernize and update in the near term:
Powerful, simplified storage
Other changes in this march toward mainframe simplification will give users a powerful, yet much easier way to manage storage. Introduction of the System z Managed Storage Initiative this year will draw from the Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for Storage management product and use it as a cornerstone of the initiative, which will significantly streamline often disjointed storage efforts across the System z environment. The results will help improve performance and storage efficiency, and help companies save disk space and use fewer people to manage storage.
In addition, the storage initiative will include a number of software tools that give users a deep dive into their storage management operations, while also enabling those tools for use with the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. The Portal is an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that integrates metrics from many System z monitors and products into a single location. By enabling storage management tools to also feed through the Tivoli Enterprise Portal, users interact between multiple products as if they were one, for enhanced productivity. The Portal’s simplicity and ease of use reduces required training because related navigation remains the same for all products around storage, z/OS, CICS, DB2, IMS, networks and other aspects of IT management.
As an example, tools that help simplify hierarchical storage management, Tivoli Advanced Reporting for DFSMShsm, and Tivoli Advanced Audit for DFSMShsm were recently released and enabled for use by the Portal. Now, systems operators can easily navigate between OMEGAMON Monitors and other deep-dive tools as if they were a single product. This approach will provide the ability to link with multiple monitoring tools to help users quickly identify and correct problems.
The ability to use OMEGAMON expert advice and easily customized advice features with these deep-dive tools can help IT staffs – even less experienced members – quickly learn how performance issues can be solved specific to their environment.
Look for additional support in 2008 and 2009 for DASD, tape devices and the databases that reside on them, as well.
Performance and availability monitoring
The trend to simplify mainframe software continues toward increased integration between many System z software products, and creating easier-to-use interfaces for the most demanding computing environments.
Tighter integration will allow IT staffs to navigate seamlessly between numerous products to more quickly find the root of performance and availability problems related to complex applications, networks, storage and other elements of an IT infrastructure.
For example, products that monitor System z subsystems such as CICS and IMS, as well as the z/OS operating system and network functions, will soon integrate with IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager software. The software shows users exactly how transactions traverse complex applications as they cross numerous platforms. This integration will give users a true end-to-end view of performance. When used with Tivoli performance and availability monitors, users can see where transactions spend more time than they should, and thus gain the ability to more quickly pinpoint the location of potential performance problems.
Automation
Automating repetitive every-day tasks lies at the heart of simplifying mainframe computing. Recent advances in Tivoli application, workload and availability management solutions streamline daily operations across multi-tiered applications running on System z and across distributed systems, as well.
Predictive analysis allows automation systems to anticipate when applications or servers may crash, then automatically direct them to failover to other resources – before an outage can affect delivery of business services. For example, an organization may run an SAP application that spans multiple servers on an AIX cluster. If DB2 systems running on z/OS go down, application experts would previously need to force down the SAP application and restart it with DB2 to keep the application and database synchronized. These time consuming, labor- intensive processes can now be automated to help maximize staff productivity and reduce skill sets, since application experts, for example, wouldn’t be needed to restart the applications. In addition, if a physical or natural disaster affects the data center, IBM System Automation can failover key systems to a backup data center.
With added integration between products, Tivoli Workload Scheduler now interacts more efficiently with Systems Automation, as well. When recovering from an application failure, Systems Automation notifies Tivoli Workload Scheduler, so that the scheduler doesn’t submit jobs during that time.
This can greatly reduce the number of lost jobs that must be rerun. It can also reduce the risk of possibly running payroll or other key jobs more than once, which might create costly overpayment errors.
Service management
A return to the service desk space this year by IBM will include the introduction of Tivoli Service Request Manager, which provides full incident and problem management capabilities. It also integrates with the Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB), Asset Management for IT and Enterprise Asset Management. When released in about mid-2008, the software will let users easily log their own service requests for IT and non-IT assets and equipment. It will automatically escalate those requests when necessary, streamline the incident management process and let customers check on the status of their own reported incidents. The software’s full incident and problem management capabilities helps maximize service desk efficiency and effectiveness, reduces disruptions, streamlines operations, improves customer satisfaction and reduces costs.
When used with the CCMDB, users will gain more from the ability to see immediately when a configuration or other IT change within an organization may have caused a reported performance incident or equipment failure.
By also adding Tivoli Service Catalog to the mix, available May 2008, users gain the ability to choose from a list of services, such as setting up new employee passwords, laptop, e-mail service or requesting furniture for an office, then automatically order and manage related fulfillment. The integration of these three products will streamline, simplify, automate and manage many time-consuming manual tasks, while helping users pin down performance issues even more quickly.
Down the road
Beyond 2008, look for further integration of many Tivoli products and many other advances that will streamline and simplify the System z platform. This unparalleled interaction between network and application performance monitoring will eventually allow users to operate applications and systems running on multiple platforms across an enterprise from the System z platform.
For more information:
IBM Systems Automation
IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager
IBM Tivoli CCMDB
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