The simple fact of modern-day enterprise IT systems is that with all the recent technological advances, about 80% of these IT systems are still running on the legacy platform. The strong corporate desire to replace these legacy systems is offset by real world constraints:

• Massive long-term accumulated investments in the legacy Systems
• Acute shortage of skilled technical staff
• Significant loss of knowledge about the inner workings of these systems

These constraints impede the organization’s ability to replace these systems in a timely and economical fashion. Engineering IT systems, particularly in the M/F environment, for “optimum performance” has thus taken a new significance not only due to tight economic conditions, but also due to proliferation of batch jobs, multiple test environments, sub-systems/shared resources. Performance management is receiving increased attention within IT organizations, because it offers a means to measure infrastructure ands application health.

Even in cases where an application is well tuned, over a period of time as program and file attributes change, even the smallest change could cause a performance problem. Performance “ignorance” reduces application availability, causes an escalation in costs due to extraneous processing and surges in batch processing with excessive CPU utilization and unnecessary job wait time.

Any optimization initiative that uses major design changes (including functional redesign) as a strategy for improvement will have to be critically analyzed for full impact of the changes and very often this strategy is risk prone. On the other hand, the optimization based on the program local changes for structural inefficiencies and validation and optimization of environmental factors, will have minimal impact on the surrounding components and has high degree of success, achieved in a short time-frame.

Typical Pain Areas

The high cost of ownership of these mainframe applications could be due to

• High CPU costs .Some of the reasons could be
  • Inefficient code (Poorly structured code)
  • Inefficient SQL
• High DASD costs. Some of the reasons could be
  • Redundant data
  • Poor Archiving policies
• Batch overruns (Batch processing have limited time windows 8-10 hrs by which time the online network need to brought up. Some of the reasons could be
  • Jobs in the critical path take enormous amount of time
  • Contention of files
  • Excessive IO calls on VSAM

  

A comprehensive solution designed for performance improvement in Applications Management. It is an ideal solution for production involving large-scale batch mode data processing. The primary goals of this solution is:

• Provide “immediate” benefits in terms of ROI, primarily by reducing MIPS & IO usage.
• Crunch the batch processing cycles, giving larger window times
• Free up critical resources (CPU, DASD) for further expansion.
• Defer expensive MIPS upgrades

Depending on a particular site and the problems faced, our team would tune the process to ensure that big savings are achieved with the lowest amount of effort. Many clients have benefited from our services savings them millions of dollars of operational costs year on year.