BMC Software and Compuware Corporation have integrated their respective IBM z Systems management solutions so shared customers can reduce their mainframe software licensing costs by up to 10% or more.
New capabilities offered on the newly debuted IBM z13—including Java-enabled specialty processors—are also likely to attract new workloads. This workload growth drives up the Monthly License Charge (MLC) for IBM mainframe software, which represents a significant portion of mainframe operating budgets and is based on mainframe utilization for applications on each LPAR. To minimize their MLCs, customers must diligently tune each application to minimize its individual consumption of mainframe resources and 2) orchestrate application workloads to minimize the utilization peaks they generate collectively at any given time.
"IBM z Systems transactions and workloads are growing—not shrinking—so enterprises urgently need help avoiding the potential increase in their operating costs," said Pete Harteveld, senior vice president of worldwide and business development for Compuware. "By collaborating, BMC and Compuware are enabling organizations to drive down those costs even as their mainframe transaction and compute workloads increase."
The three products now part of this integrated solution set consists of: BMC Cost Analyzer for zEnterprise, which visually maps the relationships between mainframe workloads and costs over time; BMC MainView, enabling discovery of high-level application performance issues suggest inefficient resource utilization; and Compuware Strobe, intended to deliver granular insight into the behavior of application code, enabling mainframe operations teams to quickly pinpoint and remedy wasteful resource consumption.
The integration between these solutions is intended to help customers to more quickly and easily identify tuning opportunities that will have the greatest impact on their monthly software licensing costs. This is accomplished by applying BMC Cost Analyzer's visual mapping to the detailed batch and transaction information provided by Compuware Strobe. These opportunities can include moving workloads to non-peak periods, running IBM subsystems on fewer LPARs, and capping LPAR utilization.
The integration also makes cost management easier for mainframe operations staff by allowing them to invoke Strobe data collection directly from BMC MainView.
For more information, visit the Compuware or BMC Software sites at www.compuware.com and www.bmc.com.