Getting in Tune with the Mainframe

The trouble is that the people with the skills needed to tune mainframe application performance are not as readily available as they once were. To address this issue, companies such as CA Technologies in recent years have been focusing on how to make it easier for the average IT administrator to manage mainframe environments. For example, CA Technologies most recently released CA Mainframe Application Tuner, which combines the tuning capabilities of the company’s TRILOGexpert TriTune tools with the automated performance management of TRILOGexpert APC for TriTune.

According to Mark Combs, distinguished senior vice president, mainframes at CA Technologies, the basic idea is combine a set of tools that will prevent application performance issues from cropping up in the first place, thereby insuring that the million-dollar mainframe investments continue to run at peak performance.

But perhaps just as importantly, Joe Clabby, president of the IT research firm Clabby Analytics, says tools such as these from CA Technologies represent a significant effort to reduce the need for dedicated specialists to manage the mainframe environment. In their place will be a new generation of cross-platform IT administrators who will manage multiple systems via a common management console that has an easily accessible graphical user interface.

With mainframe sales rising at a time when the convergence of mainframe and distributed computing models is starting to gain more momentum, the management issues associated with mainframes will soon become a bigger issue. But the challenge isn’t really about training more people on the arcane ways mainframes are managed today, but rather making the mainframe simpler to manage alongside the rest of our IT infrastructure resources.