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Tag: z/OS

  • BMC Modernizes the Mainframe with Automated Mainframe Intelligence

    BMC AMI places machine learning, predictive analytics, domain expertise, and intelligent automation at the core to help enterprises achieve self-managing mainframes

    HOUSTON – October 18, 2018 – BMC, a global leader in IT solutions for the digital enterprise, today announced BMC AMI, automated mainframe intelligence solutions that will deliver higher performing, self-managing mainframe environments to meet the growing demands created by digital business growth. Extending BMC’s leadership in mainframe innovation, BMC AMI solutions combine built-in domain expertise, machine learning, intelligent automation, and predictive analytics to help enterprises automatically manage, diagnose, heal, secure, and optimize mainframe processes.

    “Enterprise IT teams are experiencing complexity at an accelerating rate, and data and transaction volumes are exploding – all while trying to manage a changing workforce, close the skills gap, and optimize costs,” said Bill Miller, President of ZSolutions at BMC. “With AMI, we are freeing up IT staff to work on high-value initiatives by removing manual processes through intelligent automation. BMC AMI will automatically analyze dozens of KPIs and millions of metrics a day, and proactively identify, predict, and fix problems before they become an issue.”

    According to Gartner, by 2020, thirty percent of data centers that fail to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning effectively in support of enterprise business will cease to be operationally and economically viable.1 The BMC AMI solutions enhance mainframe systems through intelligent automation by predicting outages before they occur, solving performance degradations, and mitigating cost increases.

    With BMC AMI, customers benefit from BMC’s expertise in collecting deep and broad z/OS® operational metrics from a variety of industry data sources, built-in world-class domain expertise, and multivariate analysis. The new offerings include:

    • BMC AMI Autonomous Solutions
    • enable IT operations to automatically anticipate and repair performance degradations and disruptive outages before they occur, without manual intervention. This
    • set of intelligent, integrated solutions extends to BMC AMI for Security Management, BMC AMI for DevOps, BMC AMI for Performance and Availability Management, and BMC AMI Cost and Capacity Management.
    • BMC AMI Enterprise Connectors
    • connect business-critical data from the mainframe to the entire enterprise and simplify the enterprise-wide management of business applications. These offer a truly
    • holistic view of enterprise data by streaming
    • mainframe metrics and related information in real-time to a variety of data receivers, including leading Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions
    • such as Splunk, IBM® QRadar®, ArcSight, LogRhythm, McAfee Enterprise Security Manager, and others. The BMC AMI Data Extractor
    • for IMS solution is available now, and additional solutions will
    • be available early in 2019.

    “BMC has been instrumental in helping us grow our business, deliver innovative solutions, and increase customer satisfaction, all while ensuring costs are kept at optimal levels,” said Gregg Kimbrough, Senior Manager Hosting Services, Thrivent Financial. “We look forward to seeing how AMI will help us move closer to achieving a self-managing mainframe so that we can continue to keep up with the demands of today’s digital business.”

    Earlier this month, BMC announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire assets of CorreLog, Inc., which provides real-time security management to mainframe customers.  The announcement furthers BMC’s commitment to the security space, expanding the data connectors that are available to clients and accelerating BMC AMI for security offerings.

    To learn more about BMC AMI solutions, visit www.bmc.com/ami

    To register for a webinar on the self-managing mainframe using BMC AMI on October 24, visit https://event.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1209255&tp_key=ec7b8500cb

    To learn more about BMC’s mainframe solutions, visit http://www.bmc.com/it-solutions/mainframe.html

    1 Gartner Report: The IT Implications of the 2018 CIO Survey for I&O Leaders by Dave Russell, Hank Marquis Published : 8 March 2018

  • Separate but Equal: Not Equal and Not the Right Way

    Separate but Equal: Not Equal and Not the Right Way

    The DevOps Enterprise Summit in London provided another opportunity to speak to many clients about their organizations’ DevOps transformations. The key message is, “It’s all about people and culture,” but how do you make those changes? In session after session it was clear the source code manager (SCM) is central to this transformation. All clients included the SCM as a key part of the solution. SCM’s key value is as a common place to version all the artifacts from the source code to the system configuration. As such, it must provide visibility to all to allow for sharing and collaboration.

    So how can z/OS participate in this transformation if its source code is locked away in some host-based SCM? The answer is, It doesn’t. In my interview with devopsy.kinsta.cloud editor Alan Shimel, we discussed this issue and he related it to the idea of separate but equal, which we all know does not work. What’s worse is separate but equal was really never equal, and the same is true for the host-based SCM to which the z/OS source code is relegated. I have asked many companies if they would move their distributed source to those host-based SCMs, and the answer is always, “Of course not; it does not provide what the distributed teams need.” How can it provide what the host teams need? It doesn’t.

    Separate but equal does not work; it’s never equal and it isolates people. That’s not the way we should be looking at our z/OS source code. It’s critical to the business and should have the best support and capabilities, not the least. Now is the time to move to modern tools and processes and stop isolating the z/OS environment from the rest of the development environment.

    The key is to focus on collaborative management solutions that do not separate, but bring teams together by providing one environment that all teams can use together for cross-platform collaboration. Various solutions include all the capabilities companies need to provide the modern agile development environment including z/OS.  No separation—the z/OS code is in the same repository as all the rest. In these tools, the modern dependency-based build provided for z artifacts is based on Ant technology, so it can be extended just like existing build tools. With this tooling you can use your existing continuous integration pipeline and plug z into it.

    It’s time we move z/OS development into the 21 century.

    Read the thought leadership paper on DevOps for Enterprise System POV to know more on the essential tools and process that can enable disruptive technologies and an innovation at the speed the business requires.

    About the Author / Rosalind Radcliffe

    Rosalind
    Rosalind is a Distinguished Engineer within the IBM Rational organization. She is Chief Architect for CLM and DevOps. She is responsible for driving the DevOps for multi-platform architecture. This includes System z and Power system. In addition, she is responsible for the architecture for the Collaborative Management capability for Enterprise solutions. This includes UrbanCode Deploy and Rational Team Concert’s support for standard Mainframe development activities. She is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a Master Inventor. Prior to Rational, she was in Tivoli responsible for the SOA Management Strategy for IBM. Connect with Rosalind on LinkedIn / Twitter.

  • DevOps: As critical for the Systems of Record as for the Systems of Engagement

    DevOps: As critical for the Systems of Record as for the Systems of Engagement

    There is a lot of talk about DevOps, and how it improves the process of delivering business value. Much of the discussion of DevOps has been focused on web based companies such as Facebook, or the mobile and distributed development teams. But DevOps principles apply just as well to the traditional Systems of Record, z/OS applications.   Many of these applications have been around for a long time and have very mature development and deployment processes. These processes include the requirements for separation of duties and audit tracking. Over the years these processes have developed into lengthy procedures, to be comprehensive, the net effect of this has been to reduce the number and frequency of the deployments to reduce risk. However, there is a better way.

    In the recent blog posting by Ashok Reddy he talked about the 8 critical DevOps Practices: innovate, deliver, repeat. All of these are as applicable to z/OS applications as any other, for this blog I want to focus on just a few of the practices, Loosely Coupled Architecture, Automate Testing using APIs, Transparency and Minimize hand-offs, Maximize flow.

    DevOps is about bringing the entire organization together, including Development and Operations, to more efficiently deliver the business value. The practices of “Transparency” and “Minimize hand-off, Maximize flow” go to the core concepts of the people aspects of DevOps i.e., integrating the organization.   By breaking down the barriers between the organizations, people can work together to accomplish the business goals more quickly. This does not necessarily mean actually changing the organizational structure, but it does mean having the organizational structures work together as cross functional teams.

    One example would be the monitoring and optimization practices. These are generally done by Operations after the applications are deployed into production. However, if instead Operations and Development worked together in the early part of development cycle to monitor and optimize the application using the same capabilities that will be used in production any issues can be addressed much earlier in the cycle. This also helps both teams learn what is required to monitor and manage the application long before it is ever deployed to production. In many z/OS environments today, the same infrastructure is already available in the test environments, but it is seldom used.

    A second example is to have Operations define the deployment automation such that it can be done by Development in early stages and turned over in later stages. This ensures continued testing of the deployment capability and a validation that by the time the deployment is done in production; the deployment process itself will be well tested. Through this integration of Development and Operations you remove the hand off that currently happens only at the final stage just before production deployment.

    The practice of loosely coupled architecture is key when building multi-platform applications. Having clear interface definitions between the different parts of the application is essential of a loosely coupled architecture. It is easier to allow the capability to build independently, tested at the interface level and then brought together when the parts are ready. By defining clear interfaces between application components and properly handling forward and backward compatibility, there is less of a requirement for coordinated simultaneous deployments. This allows teams to be less dependent on other parts of the application during the development process, and allows for easier automated testing.

    The practice of Automate testing is critical to any DevOps transformation. It provides the capability to improve the speed of delivery while reducing risk. Moving to agile development practices while still requiring people to perform manual tests, will not allow the quick iteration on the capability. Even for existing applications you can generate interface tests to begin to build up automated regression test cases. Automated tests can be generated based on interface definitions such as a JSON schema or a COBOL copybook for new development. The increased focus on testing the interfaces early helps reduce the integration problems generally found late in the development cycle.

    These are just a few of the key practices of DevOps but hopefully they have started to demonstrate how DevOps is as applicable to the Systems of Record on z/OS as it is to Systems of Engagement.   To learn more read the best practices for a DevOps approach with IBM System z whitepaper or watch the replay of the November 20, IBM DevOps Symposium webcast.

     

    About the Author:

    RosalindRosalind Radcliffe is a Distinguished Engineer within the IBM Rational organization. She is Chief Architect for CLM and DevOps.  She is responsible for driving the DevOps for multi-platform architecture.  This includes System z and Power system.  In addition she is responsible for the architecture for the Collaborative Management capability for Enterprise solutions. This includes UrbanCode Deploy and Rational Team Concert’s support for standard Mainframe development activities.

    She is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a Master Inventor.  Prior to Rational, she was in Tivoli responsible for the SOA Management Strategy for IBM.