It’s fair to say that the mainframe has aged much better than Stewart Alsop’s 1991 prediction that, “the last mainframe will be unplugged on 15 March 1996.” Almost three decades past its predicted demise, the platform is, in fact, the backbone of the modern digital economy.

Looking at the history of the mainframe, one can find several reasons for its longevity, including transactional capability, reliability, and security. But while some may look at the platform as a holdover from the past, the opposite is true—adaptability is a major reason for the mainframe’s long-term success.

A platform that once relied on punch cards and magnetic tape to do batch processing evolved during the 1960s and ’70s to one that supported real-time processing from multiple interfaces, like the IBM^® 3270 “green screen.” In the past 30 years, the increased prevalence of web and mobile transactions has meant a greater reliance on the mainframe’s processing power for real-time and batch processing. Accordingly, the mainframe has become less siloed, integrating with more applications and platforms than ever before, giving rise to hybrid IT environments and more user-friendly graphical interfaces.

That long history of adaptability continues today. With the new IBM^® z16^®, IBM has yet again captured the zeitgeist of modern computing. In bringing the power of its recently developed Telum processor to the system that has sustained enterprise computing for more than 50 years, it has in one stroke delivered what many Autonomous Digital Enterprises (ADEs) need, artificial intelligence (AI) where the data is (don’t forget, 75 percent of large mainframe shops host more than 50 percent of their data on the platform).

As advocates of the mainframe and the value it delivers for over 40 years, BMC has its own history of innovation on the platform. From consistently releasing enhancements to our BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX portfolios to tracking and analyzing industry trends, we can help your organization react quickly to shifting market conditions and make change your competitive advantage.

We have also helped customers leverage the value of AI to make decisions at the speed of business and truly deliver a Transcendent Customer Experience to their own customers and employees. The promise of the most securable and scalable platform combined with the power of AI truly excites us.

With all the work that IBM has done to continue to evolve the IBM Z platform and the work of partners in the ecosystem, such as BMC, to ensure it is included in the wider enterprise computing ecosystem, the mainframe continues to adapt and evolve, making it the system of record for the past, the present, and the future.

Well it is finally here! The thing we have been working on all year, and by that I don’t just mean the end to 2020. I’m talking about the transformation of BMC MainView to BMC AMI Ops!

It’s funny to think back to the days when I started in the mainframe business straight from university.  The first big job I was given as a newly qualified Sysprog was to do a migration from Omegamon to MainView.  Little did I think at the time I would now be here, 20 years later, seeing the next evolution of mainframe management, being involved in it’s development and being so proud of what we have achieved.  I have seen many new and innovative capabilities join the mainframe operations family over the years, from network monitoring, through enhanced Java capabilities monitoring and into the first phases of intelligence with features like automatic loop detection.  But none of those changes are as transformative as the one we are delivering today.

As MainView joins the BMC AMI (Automated Mainframe Intelligence) family, BMC AMI Ops’ new capabilities really do deliver on requests for enhancements from our customers.  From how to manage the changing of the guard, to allowing them to cope with the constantly changing user demands and giving them the observability and actionability they need to become digital enterprises. The fact that this portfolio transformation has come in addition to many individual product enhancements providing additional value for our customers, just takes my breath away.

As transformative as this new release is, it truly is just the tip of the iceberg in how BMC plans to leverage AI and machine learning to further enterprises on their digital journey and in creating a self-managing, self-optimizing and self-healing mainframe.

It’s me again, sharing more of my thoughts about the data we found in this year’s BMC Annual Mainframe survey.  This time I wanted to focus on how workloads have changed and are continuing to change on the platform, and the problems that creates.

A couple of years ago, one of the things that came up in conversations with many customers was that despite them not necessarily changing the sorts of applications they were running on their mainframe, the nature of the use of those apps is fundamentally changing.  The move towards being a digital business has, for many people, meant not only do their workloads grow, but the predictability of those workloads becomes ever harder. Now instead of an app being accessed by a member of staff, during office hours, it is accessed directly by the user, from wherever they are, via a mobile phone or maybe even a watch, and at whatever time they choose, when they wake up, when they get home from the pub, whatever! This year the survey again shows that many people are still seeing an increase in volatility, it appears that being more changeable is the new normal.  But what does this mean for those people that have to manage the system?

Well, we already know today’s systems managers have less experience than ever before, and we see more MIPs being deployed than ever to cope with these additional workloads. This combination means the approach that we have always employed, where the people who manage on a day to day basis ‘know’ what is normal and what is not, where specific alarms have been built based on 20 or 30 years of knowledge, just won’t work anymore.

It is inevitable that in order to keep delivering the exceptional performance and availability that has epitomised the Mainframe for the last 50 years the way we manage the system will have to transform.  The rapidly changing nature of the workload means the tools themselves have to become aware themselves of what is ‘normal’, it is beyond what a human can cope with.  Additionally, embedding expertise in these management tools means that the relevance of all of the metrics can be understood properly, so deviations can be scored in a way that makes sense, helping bring order from the chaos, and turn data into real information!

What do you think, how do you see the way you manage your mainframe evolving as the workloads and users around it change?

Phew, what a year!! With all that has gone on in the world and certainly within the world of BMC, it doesn’t feel like my feet have touched the floor this year.  Now that one of the biggest pieces of work I am involved in has finished for this year, BMC’s Annual Mainframe survey, I finally managed to get a chance to just sit down and breathe!  As I reflected on the year to date, I started to think about the things we discovered in this year’s survey and how they will affect me in my day job of being a product manager.

What stood out for me this year was the change in the experience profile respondents.  The percentage of people with over 20 years’ worth of experienced halved!  I’ll say that again, it HALVED. That is a massive change for just one year.  We have been tracking the age and experience profile in the survey for a few years now, as having people to support the mainframe into the future has been a massive concern for executives around the world.  In speaking with many of those customers,  I have been cheered over in recent years that so many of them have been adopting training programs and rising to the challenge, but I have to say, this year’s survey really did leave me stunned.

It appears from the responses, now more than ever, customers are starting to live with that new workforce running their mainframe.  In one way this is truly exciting. With all the data we have collected in the survey, the new workforce is highly positive on the mainframe and its future.  This new wave of talent approaches it as a platform to integrate and see it as something to mainstream, not just be a big box hidden in the corner.  In that sense, I think it can only cement the place of the mainframe at the core of autonomous digital enterprises around the world.

Looking at this through the eyes of a ZSO product manager though, it also means we must look again at the way our solutions evolve to meet your changing needs.  Tools that worked for a highly experienced workforce do not always translate well to the challenges we now face. The need now is for evermore intelligent tooling, solutions that combine embedded industry expertise with the latest AI capabilities that are becoming the future of mainframe management, as they are on other platforms.

What do you think? How do you see the way you manage your mainframe evolving as the people and processes around it change?

As modern IT environments grow more complex, that complexity is also extending to the mainframe. Systems of engagement and systems of record are working more closely together, which can complicate the delivery of 24 x 7 availability to internal and external customers.

Always on isn’t optional

Getting ahead of issues before they become problems is now a make-or-break determinant for business success, so it’s fantastic timing that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are making inroads into IT operations management (ITOM) with AIOps, a blended artificial intelligence for operations approach that combines applied data science, domain expertise, and multivariate analysis into one comprehensive solution that:

• Reduces noise and false positives
• Detects performance degradations and service disruptions
• Delivers actionable insights that accelerate troubleshooting and guide resolution
• Allows mainframe teams—at any level of expertise—to identify and solve emerging problems even before they impact customers

And that “before” is key—you don’t want to be the cautionary tale who only finds out your systems are hiccupping after unhappy customers start lighting up social media with screengrabs of timeout errors. If your teams could proactively head issues off at the pass, they could instead focus on more strategic projects like planning for the future.

BMC AMI Ops Insight

You can put advanced ML technology to work for your mainframe with BMC AMI Ops Insight. The solution predicts issues before they become problems that degrade systems and trigger outages. Actionable insights speed up mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) with faster troubleshooting, resolution, and restoration by providing granular details about the issue and its severity, location, point of origin, and current state. The mainframe team yields value on two fronts—actual problems are identified with less noise and fewer false positives, and staff at all levels are empowered to confidently make business-critical decisions by understanding which metrics to watch and how they correlate.

Conclusion

In a business climate where time is money, and downtime can dent your profits and reputation, every moment counts. By applying AI and ML to ITOM, issues can be identified before they become those very expensive problems—and you keep your employees and customers happy across the board. To learn more about using these technologies to deliver more strategic value to your business, see our whitepaper, Making Machine Learning Work for Your Mainframe.

Mainframe organizations continue to embrace the next-gen staff during this mass exodus of experienced workers. BMC’s 2019 Mainframe Survey showed that nearly a third of the current workforce has less than 5 years’ experience. Whilst this new talent embraces the platform, they also recognize the need to embrace new methodologies that foster agile development, data recovery and integrating AIOps implementations in an effort to modernize the mainframe. However, with new talent comes new challenges.

How do IT organizations balance the mix of integrating new staff with the existing workforce, foster collaboration and knowledge sharing while staying focused on successfully managing and advancing the mainframe in this digital world?

BMC AMI Capacity Management v2.1

One area where the problem is most acute is capacity planning. At the end of 2019, BMC launched the next generation of mainframe capacity tooling, BMC AMI Capacity Management. Designed with a modern UI, this revolutionary tool was specifically designed to address the loss of skills at customer sites by embedding expertise directly into the tool.

• Embedded workflows provide the ability for new staff to quickly and easily analyze systems and their performance.
• Intelligent dashboards and analytics ensure that capacity management is capable of meeting the digital age.
• Extensive knowledge sharing fosters collaborative work streams across multiple sites and geographies.

Added Capacity Planning Benefits

In this month’s new release, version 2.1, BMC has expanded on the first set of workflows by providing an expanded set of KPIs and have introduced new workflows representing a best practice approach to automatically assessing the health of the mainframe. This invaluable tool represents decades, if not a centuries, of BMCs capacity and performing experience.

With a focus on user experience, this new system offers the addition of category definition text-based search and even simpler ways to define and manage workflows. Not only that, it has tripled the number of defined workflow templates, expanding to cover Db2, CICS, XCF, Workload Manager and various areas of the disk subsystem, and has further enhanced the intelligent alerting for anomalous conditions.

Organizations now have more capabilities than ever before when defining their own capacity management workflows, capturing the expertise and knowledge of their experienced staff and sharing that wealth with their new hires.