Fire Extinguisher vs. Fire-Proof House. Why Not Both?
z/OS / Article / Solutions directory / IBM Z
The COVID-19 pandemic reaffirmed the robustness and scalability of the mainframe platform.

By Brian Hoare ,
ZETALY
The COVID-19 pandemic reaffirmed the robustness and scalability of the mainframe platform. Faced with an unprecedented surge in digital workloads, mainframes are invaluable and currently host 80% of all business data and support 30 billion transactions per day without breaking a sweat.
Nonetheless, the mainframe reputation is not at its highest. Part of that is due to skills availability and transparency. In most organizations, data is being solely monitored by real-time agents and reserved for experts only. Their contribution in minimizing the impact of an outage, that can cost $687,000 per hour according to analysts, is undeniable. As Will Cappelli, a Gartner analyst, stated: “IT operations teams should use ITOA platforms to supplement and not replace investments in end-user experience monitoring, application topology discovery and modeling, user-defined transaction profiling, and deep-dive component monitoring.” Not to mention that IT analysts consider that 50% of availability issues are spotted by end users and went unnoticed by monitoring tools.
In short, monitoring is not enough. An outage or a service level deterioration, no matter how small they are, affects costs, reputation and customer loyalty. In most cases, they could have been avoided if their historical data was analyzed to understand trends, peaks and troughs.
That is where operations analytics has a role to play. According to Capgemini, a global leader in IT consulting, manufacturing companies turning to operations analytics can expect to triple their benefits. By reducing operating costs, analytics can also be a powerful competitive advantage. Not to mention its impact on customer satisfaction for increased retention rates.
Likewise, the ability to streamline data into a single place, accessible for everyone involved, contributes to boost efficiency. Monitoring is often conceived in silos while operations analytics offers a holistic view.
Brian Hoare is a Solutions Specialist for Zetaly. Brian has seen the Z platform grow from OS/390 to today’s z/OS. He may speak with a “strange accent” and has introduced new solutions into the USA and worked with several startups. He has presented at local/annual CMG’s, SHARE and other conferences discussing cost reduction (IBM/MLC), performance and is now focused on analytical data on “z”.

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