New Visually Intuitive Insight into Workload Scheduling Helps Enterprises Ensure Performance of Critical Back-End Systems While Controlling Costs

• Enterprises must ensure that critical mainframe batch workloads 1) are completed on time, 2) stay within cost parameters and 3) don’t interfere with real-time processing that supports digital customer engagement.
• Batch management can be jeopardized as mainframe responsibilities are transferred to a new generation of IT staff with far less platform experience, and as mainframe environments become increasingly complex.
• ThruPut Manager and its new web interface address these core operational issues by providing IT staff with intuitive, actionable insight into how batch jobs are being initiated and executed, as well as their impact on cost.

DETROIT, April 03, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Compuware today released a new ThruPut Manager web interface that provides mainframe staff with visually intuitive insight into how batch jobs are being initiated and executed-as well as the impact of those jobs on mainframe software licensing costs.

By implementing ThruPut Manager, enterprises can better safeguard performance of both batch and non-batch applications, while avoiding the significant adverse economic impact of preventable spikes in utilization as measured by Rolling 4-Hour Averages (R4HA), the metric upon which IBM bases its software licensing fees.

Additionally, with ThruPut Manager, enterprises can successfully transfer batch management responsibilities to a new generation of IT staff with far less hands-on platform experience-without exposing themselves to related risks such as missed batch execution deadlines, missed service level agreements and excess costs.

Safeguarding performance, controlling costs and smooth ownership transfers are more critical than ever given the growing importance of mainframe systems. According to a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Compuware, 57 percent of enterprises with a mainframe run more than half of their business-critical workloads on the platform. And that percentage is expected to increase to 64 percent by 2019. The complete Forrester Opportunity Snapshot report, entitled “Modern Mainframe KPIs Are Key To A Successful Digital Strategy,” can be found here.

Batch processing on the mainframe remains critical for many core business functions, such as reconciliation of financial transactions and re-pricing of mutual funds. In many cases, these batch workloads must be completed within a tight time-window. So as the size of a batch workload increases-and as other processing activity consumes an enterprise’s finite platform resources-ops staff must take appropriate action. Those actions can include juggling the prioritization of jobs, assigning jobs to alternative LPARs and addressing data dependencies that may be holding up job initiation.

ThruPut Manager empowers IT staff to achieve these operational objectives by:

• Making it easy to see whether batch jobs are meeting key service metrics-especially how quickly they start executing-and if not, what underlying issues are causing delays or non-initiation.
• Graphically visualizing how it may be constraining less important workloads to minimize a R4HA peak.
• Enabling operators to avoid unnecessary R4HA peaks by adaptively shifting workload priorities while still fulfilling business imperatives-rather than limiting them to inflexible “hard-capping.”
• Empowering mainframe ops teams to configure automation rules for initiating batch jobs based on parameters such as business impact, completion windows and workload size.

ThruPut Manager also helps ops teams avoid having too many batch jobs execute at the same time, commonly referred to as “over-initiating,” which can cause them to compete for scarce CPU cycles-resulting in extended batch elapsed times and missed schedules, as can happen with IBM’s WLM-managed initiators.

“Managing the system utilization and the user’s expectations has been a real challenge for us,” said Christopher Prenatt, who is the Lead Performance Engineer at Verizon. “The new ThruPut Manager GUI will give us the ability to visualize our batch workload for the first time. We can quickly see how long jobs are sitting in the queue and, if there is a problem, rapidly drill down to what the root cause may be. This will be a great addition for our application teams and ultimately help us get maximum value out of our mainframe.”

“As mainframe workloads continue to increase, enterprise IT faces growing challenges in batch execution management,” said Rich Ptak of IT analyst firm Ptak Associates. “Compuware ThruPut Manager provides much needed clarity and insight to fine-tune batch execution for optimal value easing budget stresses-even as less-experienced staff take on more mainframe responsibilities.”

Compuware today also announced zAdviser, an innovative product that uses machine learning to continuously measure and improve an organization’s mainframe DevOps processes and development outcomes. zAdviser measures application quality, development velocity, and the efficiency of a development team-empowering enterprise IT leaders to make evidence-based decisions in support of their continuous improvement efforts.

Today’s announcements mark the 14^th consecutive quarter that Compuware has announced significant innovation in the modernization and mainstreaming of the mainframe. This innovation is of vital importance to large enterprises that must get maximum business value from their mainframe environments-which are doing double-duty as both self-contained core systems of record, and as powerful back-end data and transaction processing systems for front-end customer-facing web and mobile applications.

“Enterprise CIOs have come to realize that high-cost, high-risk attempts to re-platform their supremely valuable mainframe applications make no sense. The less costly, less risky and higher return strategy is to simply adopt better technology for modernizing on platform and mainstreaming mainframe development, operations and security,” said Chris O’Malley, CEO of Compuware. “Compuware is redefining what mainframe modernization means and is committed to delivering what customers need to enable them to adopt the smarter strategy.”