Capping challenged on your mainframe? Why BMC MainView customers have it easy

What do hundreds of mainframe sites who use BMC MainView systems management have that makes capping effective and efficient?  The answer is – MainView itself.

While the old adage goes “familiarity breeds contempt,” familiarity more often breeds comfort.  Familiarity – whether in IT systems management or in personal relationships – delivers striking benefits, including the following.  (Go ahead and apply these to personal relationships and see if you agree the benefits are the same.)

• Faster recognition of problems
• Quicker responses to problems
• Automatic responses to common issues
• Better reaction to dynamic changes
• Increased productivity and sense of well-being
• More effective knowledge sharing/transfer

For many IT shops, using capping (defined capacity) is a challenge fraught with risk.  It is not an easy job and it comes with four perceived barriers:

1. Capping mistakes can stop the business
2. Caps are static but workloads are not
3. There is never enough time to do the work of capping
4. It takes special knowledge

The Blog, Five Myths of Mainframe Capping, discusses some perceived capping barriers in more detail.

The “carrot” to the capping “stick” is this:  effective capping can reduce mainframe monthly license charge (MLC) costs by up to 20% or more!

So what do MainView users have that others don’t have when it comes to capping?

• Familiarity (with the benefits posed above)
• Access to a dynamic, automatic, workload importance-aware and cost-aware capping solution which is integrated with MainView

BMC Intelligent Capping (iCap) dynamically and automatically adjusts caps, governed by a user-set policy.  It evaluates workload importance and relative MLC costs on LPARs, and makes capacity available for high importance work while reducing unused capacity and capacity used by low importance work.  The result is low risk to critical work and reduced MLC costs. You can read about one site’s capping savings here.

iCap is built on the MainView architecture which delivers:

• A mainframe based customizable interface (browser-based and/or 3270),common navigation, and common installation
• Smart alarm management and proactive intelligent automation that provide responses to any capping issues
• A centralized architecture with all MainView data from all LPARS ( including iCap) in a single view  from which you can go anywhere and do anything
• Reduced overhead and lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

MainView users are already poised to overcome capping barriers and realize the benefits of effective capping:

• Reduce MSU consumption and MLC costs
• Mitigate risk to critical work
• Reduce manual effort and potential errors
• Respond rapidly to capping issues

For more discussion of capping with iCap and MainView, read “Lower Mainframe Costs by up to 20% with Intelligent Capping”.

To learn more about how iCap is the answer to capping challenges, watch this short video.