Achieve the availability, speed and performance you want
This service can help you to save money on your mainframe: drive down running costs while improving performance and availability in the delivery of essential services.
Our performance management and mainframe cost reduction specialists focus on:
- Reducing mainframe running costs where possible
- Increasing efficiency and optimizing service delivery
- Improving performance and removing potential bottlenecks
- Delivering high levels of availability, ensuring capacity is available when needed, and avoiding outages.
The potential is to improve overall ROI from your mainframe environment, and perhaps extend its lifespan to reduce costs even further.
There are numerous situations where it is beneficial to review your WLM policies. IBM specifically recommends a review following any mainframe hardware or configuration change that impacts CPU capacity, so focusing on workloads and performance should be part of every major upgrade, for example from z15 to z16.
Review, improve and optimize your performance
Meeting service requirements in the most cost-effective ways is a constant battle. Performance and capacity issues can strike out of the blue, and resolution can be expensive and disruptive.
IT teams are under pressure to reduce costs and demonstrate best value while also ensuring the highest levels of system performance and availability. With slow-running systems, bottlenecks and high costs unacceptable, we can help you to achieve your operational and performance goals.
How Vertali can help
The running costs of your mainframe environment should not be prohibitively high. Relative hardware costs (processors and storage) have fallen significantly, while it is also possible to control and reduce software costs significantly. We can show you how. The first step is conducting a detailed review of performance, capacity, and mainframe costs.
As IBM itself advises, ‘Before you can get started reducing your mainframe costs, you should understand what drives those costs.’
Each enterprise is different, and our consultants bring experience across a huge variety of organizations, services and delivery platforms. We conduct a detailed assessment of your physical mainframe environment, deploying mainframe profiling software and tried-and-tested modelling techniques.
Our experts take a deep dive into system usage statistics, check and validate configurations, analyse workloads, and then formulate a real-world plan to enable any changes and improvements that are necessary.
‘It is possible to wipe millions off your bottom line while being confident you are delivering high performance and highly available services’
You may be surprised at the improvements and savings we can make possible – in key areas such as reducing software costs, better managing workload peaks, application tuning, Workload Manager Policy, and LPAR configuration. Our objective is to provide you with long-term savings and performance improvements far exceeding any related service costs.
IBM offers several pricing models for z/OS software, including Tailored Fit Pricing. This provides alternatives to the traditional Rolling 4-Hour Average (R4HA) based pricing, aiming for simpler, more predictable, and transparent costs.
With key IBM software products charged on this basis, careful workload management means it’s possible to minimize your software costs. The first step is for Vertali experts to carry out a thorough analysis of workloads and identify those driving consumption. Once we identify candidates for management, we use analysis and modelling to build realistic scenarios and quantify the savings that are possible. Post-implementation analysis is used to confirm the benefit delivered.
Mainframe teams often complain there is little or nothing they can do about third-party software costs. But that is not correct. Third party software is typically based on the size of the LPAR it’s running on. Through expert workload analysis and planning by Vertali performance consultants, it is possible to identify and confirm the LPAR configuration that is most appropriate to minimizing software costs while meeting or exceeding your service requirements.
Another familiar complaint is that workloads keep on growing and all you can do is to add more capacity. The problem is, without regular analysis and tuning, then workloads will tend to grow organically year on year. However, careful investigation and analysis of workloads will identify where savings in resource usage can be made, reducing the cost of running whilst improving quality of service.
A widely held belief is that once set, the mainframe WLM policy never needs reviewing. This would be true if both the workload and mainframe hardware/software configuration remained constant. The reality is that the WLM policy needs to be maintained, updated and optimized to assure quality of service and the efficient consumption of expensive IT resources. An out-of-date policy can drive up the 4HRA and therefore costs.
LPARs have typically been configured to match the way applications are built, or the corporate structure. Opportunities exist to reconfigure your LPARs to take advantage of software charging incentives offered by IBM and third-party vendors. This requires a careful analysis of workload and LPAR configuration to identify changes that may be beneficial – to maintain or improve delivery of services in more cost-effective ways.
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