CA Technologies Simplifies DB2 Mainframe Management

According to Shannon Dolan, CA Technologies vice president of product management, CA Technologies is working to increase the number of IT professionals capable of managing mainframe environments by delivering systems management tools that are easier to master. These tools, part of the company's Mainframe 2.0 initiative, will also allow IT professionals to manage these environments at a higher level of abstraction, which means that a new generation of mainframe managers can be more easily trained, she said.

In addition to delivering new tools for managing DB2, CA Technologies is working on tools that will also automate many of the security and compliance tasks associated with managing mainframes. After that, CA Technologies expects to be able to deliver additional tools for automating storage and systems performance management, she said.

Dolan added that CA Technologies is including a knowledge center that captures the best practices of mainframe managers. That knowledge center will also include best practices that have been developed by DB2 user groups, she said.

Longer term, Dolan says that CA Technologies will look to extend the capabilities of Chorus out to other platforms, while simultaneously working to unify the management of mainframe and distributed computing environments.

As IT organizations look to centralize more servers, there has been a resurgence of interest in mainframes. But as the cost of operating these environments is still relatively expensive because of the limited number of people with mainframe management experience, Dolan says the expansion of applications workloads on mainframes is being limited.

By delivering a new generation of mainframe management tools, Dolan says CA Technologies is trying to change mainframe economics by making the platform easier to manage for a new generation of IT professionals.