It is not often that a company understates
their product’s features, while actually delivering significantly more. Until
recently, we found that while BMC products expertly leverage underlying
technology, all too frequently, their messaging failed to highlight all
inherent significant benefits and features. Happy to say, those days appear
over as BMC announces new releases for its Digital Enterprise Management[1] (DEM) portfolio. To
optimize mainframes for DEM, BMC is developing new features and improving
products to manage data, infrastructure and costs. BMC teams are
comprehensively cataloging significant features “designed to make digital
business fast, seamless and optimized from mainframe to cloud and beyond.”
Our focus in this paper are monthly
licensing costs (MLC) that alone can account for 30%[2] of total mainframe costs.
Let’s look at BMC Mainframe MLC Cost Management V2.0.
First, existing customers with paid
versions of release 1 will get the release free for those capabilities they
have licensed. Customers who have licensed the v1 components (Cost Analyzer,
Intelligent Capping, Subsystem Optimizer for DB2, Subsystem Optimizer for IMS)
will get the corresponding new V2 features free. After, reviewing the details
of the new release, we think you will agree this represents a real bargain.
Those unfamiliar with BMC’s Mainframe Cost
Management products or considering evaluating them, should first uncover the
true costs of the mainframe. We say this because many companies, wittingly or
not, tend to inflate mainframe costs. They do so
by including an assortment of general IT costs as mainframe costs. It just
doesn’t make sense to assign distributed system air conditioning and staffing to
the mainframe.
With real mainframe costs in
hand, the next step is to determine the MLC charges for various IBM software
products, e.g. z/OS operating system, DB2 databases, etc. This data will help decide
if potential MLC cost management savings justifies an evaluation. NOTE: some
BMC customers report MLC cost[3] reductions of more than
20%!
This review of BMC’s MLC Cost Management,
only hits product highlights[4]. Functions of particular
interest include:
- Cost Analysis – allows active management based on analyzing all system and cost data;
- Intelligent capping – to reduce costs by identifying and tracking system capacity peaks and costs drivers;
- Optimizing sub-system placement – using pre-implementation “What if” testing of changes to quantify their potential cost impact to get the best results.
Let’s
examine these.
First is
the Cost Analyzer which breaks down the MLC charges into separate elements to
identify what drives the peak elements being charged. “What-if” exercises reveal
how changes affect MLC costs. A key new feature performs what-if analysis of
moving batch jobs to a time when they will not impact MLC peak charges. BMC
estimates a potential of 5-10% MLC cost savings from this product. BMC’s
estimates could be conservative as some customers report larger savings.
Second
is the Intelligent Capping, which lowers MLC costs by putting a cap or limit on
the workloads running in a given LPAR. IBM offers very basic capping as a
standard zOS feature – BMC’s technology uses intelligence-driven process automation
to minimize overall costs. You can control how much or little of the
recommended optimization to implement. BMC estimates reductions of between
5-10%. BMC has a patent-pending application for the cost-aware aspect of its intelligent
capping technology.
Third
is the Subsystem Optimizer, which reduces MLC by allowing customers to separate
the running of certain IBM subsystems (like CICS) from other IBM subsystems it
accesses (such as DB2), on to different LPARs. This can reduce billed MSUs for
the subsystems, which can significantly impact MLC costs. It also has the
ability to optimize cross-LPAR access to applications. BMC estimates it can
reduce costs by 10-15%.
However,
that’s not all. BMC Subsystem Optimizer has attractive features not strictly
related to MLC cost, but which we believe will prove valuable. For example, for
certain DB2 failures, it can automatically switch to another copy of DB2. This
considerably increases the resilience of affected services and applications. Further,
for IMS failures, Subsystem Optimizer can reroute IMS transaction requests to
another IMS rather than waiting for the original IMS to restart (the default). It
not only saves money but improves operational reliability by reducing the risk
of an IMS subsystem failure. Both are great bonuses.
BMC began
introducing these solutions about two years ago. They have been well received. We’ve
mentioned a few benefits. By maintaining close contact with users, BMC is able
to provide details on numerous customer experiences demonstrating product
potential for direct cost savings as well as from automation. Watch for case
studies to appear shortly.
[3] This
doesn’t include some potentially significant personnel time savings. Replacing
manual MLC cost management with BMC’s product can free-up the time of highly
skilled, higher paid staff. A business case would include an estimate of such
potential savings.
[4] A
more detailed description requires discussing algorithms used by IBM to
calculate MLC costs which exceeds the scope of this paper.
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