CA Technologies has begun shipping object-oriented, role-based workspace tools for mainframe management, based on Web 2.0 technologies. CA Mainframe Chorus and CA Mainframe Chorus for DB2 Database Management are part of the vendor's "Mainframe 2.0" strategy to simplify mainframe management.
The new toolset "introduces net-new innovations, net-new widgets, and net-new gadgetry for mainframe managers to do their jobs," Shannon Dolan, vice president of product management, CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It is taking them out of the 3270 context, the traditional green screen, and it is bringing all of the Web 2.0-type technologies to their daily activities."
Mainframe 2.0 focuses on three core challenges for CA customers - controlling costs, sustaining critical mainframe skills, and helping customers increase the agility of their entire IT staff. "We see Chorus as delivering across all three of those challenges for our customers," Dolan says.
Each CA Mainframe Chorus role leverages functionality from the CA software that supports a key management discipline. CA Mainframe Chorus for DB2 Database Management is the first role bringing together features from seven individual CA tools that support IBM DB2 for z/OS in the unified workspace. The unified workspace will over time introduce additional roles for additional disciplines. "We are looking at future roles around storage, security, workload, and performance. It is a way to get all of the disciplines in the data center to be managing in the same context, with the same interaction, leveraging similar types of tools," Dolan notes.
A key goal with Chorus is to help organizations get new employees up to speed on the mainframe. "As they continue to expand their use of the mainframe, bringing in additional workloads and leveraging it more and more, they need to ensure that they have the right staff to support it, and so one of the key goals with Chorus was to provide that on-ramp," explains Dolan. One of the "marquee features" CA is delivering is around knowledge management and knowledge capture, taking the knowledge from one user and allowing another to benefit from it. "The system is actually going to be capturing the clicks of a user, capturing that workflow that a user does in problem resolutions and allow them to annotate that, and to save it and to share it with others. That is huge benefit from a training perspective, from knowledge share, from a collaboration perspective, that just is not available to mainframe managers today," says Dolan.
In addition, customers can also upload their own documentation such as standard operating procedures which can be indexed into the Knowledge Center of Chorus, and is searchable. The Knowledge Center includes additional information including product information and documentation as well, and also integrates with a Chicago-Soft product called Quick-Ref for easy resolution of error codes, adds Dolan.
For more information on CA Mainframe Chorus and CA Mainframe Chorus for DB2 Database Management, go here.