mainframe capacity management

BMC aims to claim it can cut your mainframe MIPS

Mainframe MIPS are like the stock market circa 2006, right? They never go down.

But while one going down leads to a nationwide financial crisis, the other going down might lead to a companywide standing ovation. Cutting mainframe MIPS means money that went toward exorbitant software licensing costs can now go into company coffers.

Next month, BMC Software will release the results of a MIPS reduction study it performed with mainframe users. Though an admittedly small sample consisting of 20 members of BMC’s user advisory board, the software vendor hopes the results could be a blueprint for how users out there can actually reduce mainframe MIPS.

“We go into their shop and try to cut peak MIPS load,” said Mike Moser, product management director for BMC mainframe service management, at the Share mainframe user group conference in Austin last week. “We’re trying to put a quantification on how much capacity we can give you back on various things.”

Moser cited SQL tuning and capacity management as two of the areas where BMC can help users save money. As an example, he said capacity management is crucial to keeping costs under control.

“You don’t want to overbuy, because that’s wasted capacity,” he said. “But you don’t want to underbuy either, because then you run into emergency situations where you don’t have room to negotiate, and that could be costly. People can get fired over stuff like that.”

The study will obviously (read: hopefully) have to balance the cost savings in MIPS reduction with the cost of bringing a BMC rep in to find the savings in the first place. Once the study comes out, we’ll report on it here with more details.