Our economy is shaky. Wasting time is the last thing anybody should do. But as you read this, there is a lot of time wasted that could be used to, say, come up with smart things that will help your company get out of this crisis stronger, leaner and meaner – like taking advantage of the costs savings of running the latest version of DB2 for z/OS, and making sure you have the right management tools to do it quickly and efficiently.
As an executive, you probably have people who help you find areas for improvement so people don’t waste time. But as an IT professional, I realize that one area is often forgotten. A lot of time is currently wasted in your IT environment. Not just the time of your people, but also the costly time your mainframe spends running business applications that are not set-up to be processed as efficiently as possible.
In the past 5 years, we have worked hard to make IT more effective. Staff reduction was one of the components where we could easily find savings and the effect of having less staff was hardly noticeable. But, you can’t keep reducing staff and maintain reliable, high service quality service. It has also become clear that there are limits to the things that smaller teams can do because we simply don’t have the time. In the past years, we at CA Technologies have discovered that most mainframe environments are not as efficient as they used to be. In many cases, IT adds expensive MIPS to reduce wait times so they are less visible ─ something we call “waiting faster” because it wastes money by and doesn’t fully address the problem. Sometimes inefficiencies are simply ignored due to the high volume of workloads that must be managed.
But this waiting and unnecessary processing costs money, a lot of money. And much of this spending can easily be prevented. The cost of “doing nothing” is a lot higher than most people know.
Fact #1: With end-of-support dates set for earlier versions of DB2 for z/OS, an estimated 75 percent of current DB2 customers need to upgrade in the next 20 months to DB2 10 for z/OS while 80% are still on DB2 8 and need to move now.
Fact #2: DB2 10 for z/OS is 5-10% more efficient than the DB2 database you run today ─ a database that consumes the largest portion of your expensive MIPS.
Apart from solutions that can help your IT staff prevent performance problems or solve them quickly when they occur, there is one simple step you can tell your people to make; install the latest versions of the software you use. Contrary to your distributed environment, where new applications are often more resource hungry than older versions, mainframe vendors have made their solutions more efficient with every new release in recent years. DB2 V10 and the solutions supporting it are good examples where installing a new version will immediately give you a lot of benefits, both from a performance perspective as well as a management perspective.
Ranked by Gartner as the market leader in Mainframe DBMS Management with 45.5 % of the market (based on 2011 revenues), CA Technologies is ready to help you reap the benefits of all the good things DB2 V10 offers. In fact, today we are announcing the availability of new releases of our DB2 database management solutions and our award-winning CA Mainframe Chorus role-based workspace to address this need. With our enhanced, one-of-a-kind solution, we are helping customers realize rapid time-to-value as they upgrade to the latest release of the widely installed IBM® DB2® for z/OS.
It is now time to stop wasting time. We have waited long enough…