Trending Articles
Trending Topics
Trending
IBM has released a new tool to help users of its Z series mainframes get better insight into how their infrastructure is being used and how it’s being paid for.
Mainframes may be the workhorses of financial services, healthcare and the public sector, but their role in the business isn’t always thoroughly appreciated by organisations’ decision makers. IBM hopes its newly launched Apptio Mainframe TCO tool will help IT teams give business leaders a greater understanding of how mainframes are being used, and how the costs associated with the machines can be broken down.
Apptio Mainframe TCO aims to provide a “clear, defensible view of Z costs, enabling accurate cost allocation, comprehensive utilization tracking and data-driven decision making”, IBM said.
Apptio Mainframe TCO will give users an overview of mainframes’ total cost of ownership so that the IT department can break down costs by workload, application or environment, so costs can be more appropriately allocated to business units or projects. It can also show exactly where costs are being generated – for example, across software, compute, storage or workforce.
Apptio Mainframe TCO can also offer greater visibility into how GCP and zIIP (general central processor and z integrated information processor, respectively) workloads are used by the business across a month, quarter and year. This allows businesses to identify seasonal trends and other usage changes over time.
IBM is also pitching the tool as a way for organisations to identify potential efficiencies in the way they use their mainframes, by giving businesses a clearer view of what applications and workloads are running on the mainframes, how much capacity is being used, or picking out anomalies in usage and finding out what’s behind them.
Apptio Mainframe TCO can be used with IBM’s Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS, software that analyses the performance of Z mainframes, enabling those anomalies to be linked to changes in usage by the business.
According to Mordor Intelligence, Z series mainframes accounted for around two-thirds of the mainframe market last year. The market is thought to be worth around $5.33 billion this year, the analysts said, kept buoyant by large enterprises that use mainframes for tasks such as real-time payment settlement, regulatory reporting and high-volume batch processing.
