Mainframe MLC cost management strategy helps insurance leader cut mainframe costs

At Kemper Corporation, IBM^® Db2^® and IMS™ databases are critical to managing more than four million individual and business policies for home, auto, life, health, rental, and other insurance products. In the past, growing demand for 24x7 access to data from desktops and mobile devices resulted in unpredictable mainframe workloads, making it nearly impossible to accurately forecast performance (MIPS) usage. Without insight into the MIPS consumption of various workloads, IT could not proactively reduce consumption to control and reduce IBM monthly license charge (MLC) costs.

BMC Intelligent Capping for zEnterprise^® enables IT to cap workloads to reduce the peak four-hour rolling average (4HRA) for million service units (MSUs) on which MLC costs are based. Furthermore, BMC Cost Analyzer for zEnterprise^® helps staff identify cost drivers, report on budget impact, and identify tuning opportunities to contain current and future costs.

With the BMC solutions, IT can drill down into the details to discover which workloads are driving MIPS consumption and then tune jobs and tasks so they run more efficiently.

• Dynamic capping has driven the MSU peak down 20%, enabling IT to run workloads reliably without exceeding caps.
• Accurate forecasting and simplified budgeting enabled the staff to avoid true-up costs.
• Flattening peak usage and avoiding true-up costs translated into a payback period of approximately one year.