Deploying the right platform and systems management tools will help organizations lower costs, reduce complexity and enable breakthrough business agility

Among the most important trends driving systems management today are managing costs, reducing complexity and enabling agility. Why these three in particular?

• Managing costs: As IT becomes more and more integral to all business operations the potential exists for costs to spiral out of control. Companies are conducting more transactions than ever, creating more data, communicating with more bandwidth. You would expect that they would need more servers, storage capacity and network equipment to handle such staggering growth. But IT budgets are also under pressure. That is why we’ve seen the push towards virtualization, cloud computing, shared resources and converged infrastructure, among other technology trends.

• Reducing complexity: In many organizations, the proliferation of distributed environments has created huge systems management headaches. As servers and databases have sprawled across enterprises, they have created silos of information, business processes and applications that have operated separately from one another – often to the detriment of the organization as a whole. IT must reduce the complexity of these environments in order to reap the benefits of integrated applications and to take advantage of the enterprise-wide initiatives that are driving next-generation businesses, such as mobility, Big Data analytics and social networking.


• Enabling agility: Technology deployed properly can be a huge enabler of businesses being far more agile and efficient in responding to the real-time needs of customers, employees and partners. Forrester Research has called business agility “the central business issue of our times.” IT must deploy systems management tools that enable agility, simplify scalability and optimize the utilization of the underlying technology infrastructure.

These key trends driving systems management are leading many savvy IT managers to consider – or in some cases reconsider – the significant value and benefits that mainframes can deliver in today’s computing environments. This “back-to-the-future” shift has been accelerated by some of the innovative systems management tools IBM has introduced in recent years to make the mainframe far more open and simple to manage, even for IT staff that didn’t grow up in the mainframe environment.

Why the mainframe as the answer to today’s systems management challenges? Many reasons:

• The IBM System z is by far the most reliable and best performing solution in providing compute resources and access to data.


• Approximately 70 to 80 percent of the world’s business data already resides on System z mainframes – moving that data for any purposes can be a drain on costs and performance.


• The mainframe was born to share resources; it was designed to handle diverse and concurrent workloads; virtualization was invented on the mainframe; it is the most secure computing environment in the world.


• Mainframes can run fully utilized at all times. Compare that to distributed platforms, where 40% utilization is considered a Herculean feat.

Some organizations have mistakenly created an effect we call the “Mainframe Quarantine,” which has isolated the mainframe from business intelligence and analytics programs. The IBM zEnterprise is optimized for all critical data and resolves the “Mainframe Quarantine” from a business, technical and financial perspective.

The other important myth that needs to be dispelled about mainframes is that the people with the skills to manage them are becoming harder to find. In reality, mainframes are becoming more open and much simpler to manage. Tools such as the IBM WAVE software enable individuals without specific z/VM skills to manage a virtual environment, usually Linux running on top of z/VM. On the z/OS side, tools such as the z/OS Management Facility simplifies management through the use of a Web-browser-based console to simplify management and operations.

All of the trends in systems management are pointing in one direction: Toward the IBM System z.