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The role of the IT organization in today’s business world — and the infrastructure it commands — is changing dramatically. This is why IT is becoming more integral to business profitability and is under pressure to align closely with enterprise demands. Because of this heightened recognition of the value technology brings to the business, there is an increased focus on service:
1. Establishing service levels
2. Measuring against those service goals and requirements
3. Uncovering the root cause of service delivery problems
As such, there’s more intense scrutiny on the costs and returns associated with service delivery, and IT shops are embracing SLAs and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) standard to create realistic metrics and pricing in order to effectively manage the associated financial aspects of resource utilization. From the fiscal perspective, key activities include budgeting, IT accounting and cost allocation to business units and departments. From the technology perspective, organizations look to management and analysis tools to ensure that acceptable levels of performance are being delivered (or why they are not.)
With this critical information, IT can:
- Communicate its true value to the overall organization with concrete measurements
- Conduct proactive capacity planning to ensure resources are in place to support new and growing workloads
- Demonstrate that service level commitments are being met
- Help set realistic service level agreements based on historical delivery information
Of course, as this approach and the depth and breadth of its residual information becomes commonplace, both IT and the business begin to view it as the norm and will begin to require it throughout the infrastructure, including mainframe systems and their supporting technologies.
Supporting Service Management on the Mainframe
The mainframe is enjoying somewhat of a rebirth, because enterprises continue to look for the reliability and performance synonymous with these systems to support their business-critical applications. But, the resultant resource utilization data must be rapidly and automatically transformed into actionable information if it is going to serve IT or its business customers in a meaningful way.
Further complicating the situation is the fact that the raw data needs to be aggregated from many mainframe systems, and often from many locations and across many time zones, if it is going to add real value. This aggregation process delays the availability of the data, and also tends to result in creating “just another huge database,” making access time- and resourceconsuming, as well as difficult. And, with only the large database to pool, mainframe administrators spend an inordinate amount of time performing multiple reads of their
To make matters worse, the rich human capital required to execute these and other essential mainframe performance management tasks is retiring in record numbers. And while there has been a recent resurgence in mainframe education programs and students, the demand for qualified candidates far exceeds the supply.
Ready Access to Complete, Accurate Mainframe Resource Utilization Information
IT executives and their business unit counterparts require ready access to accurate and complete enterprise management information for their mainframe systems. And, CA offers an unparalleled integrated solution that gives them what they require — faster, cheaper and better than they ever dreamed possible.
Real Choice in Your Mainframe Enterprise Systems Management Software CA MICS® Resource Management (CA MICS) with CA SMF Director and CA JARS® Resource Accounting (CA JARS RA) with CA SMF Director are fully integrated resource management solutions that offer the utmost in data integrity, availability, access, archiving and reliability — and provide real choice in your enterprise systems management offerings.
CA MICS® RESOURCE MANAGEMENT WITH CA SMF DIRECTOR
With support for the z/OS, VMS, VSE and VM platforms, CA MICS Resource Management captures and organizes your IT resource utilization data from varied sources, including database, messaging and networking subsystems, and maintains that data in a common repository. And, it enables you to comprehensively analyze delivery costs, service levels and acceptable performance levels with its advanced data querying and web reporting facilities. In other words, CA MICS Resource Management simplifies access to the data you need, whether you are a capacity planner, performance analyst, financial analyst or other stakeholder. In this way, CA MICS Resource Management helps you ensure the proper planning of computing resources — which assists in controlling costs and improving service levels.
CA JARS® RESOURCE ACCOUNTING
Supporting the z/OS operating system, CA JARS RA tracks how your IT resources are being used and includes a flexible reporting feature that provides accurate utilization data for accounting and chargeback purposes, as well as to prevent or resolve capacity and performance problems. It can help you manage IT utilization data — and with a small footprint and low administrative overhead. Moreover, CA JARS RA features flexible user-defined report options, versatile rate definition for all requirements and easy exits for input and output manipulation of site requirements.
CA SMF DIRECTOR
Today’s mainframe systems process hundreds of millions of business transactions daily. CA SMF Director effectively manages the massive volume of SMF data generated by these transactions by automatically archiving it, cataloging it and simultaneously dumping it from multiple systems — and providing on-demand data access.
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