In Respondents to BMC Softwares Sixth Annual Worldwide Mainframe survey showed the mainframes importance in driving business applications and services and that the mainframe continues to be a critical platform for the evolving hybrid data center.
Top-level results from the survey include:
* 93 percent of respondents at large companies expect capacity to grow or remain steady;
* 62 percent, compared to 56 percent last year, expect to grow overall capacity;
* 47 percent of respondents said new workloads and new business applications are contributing to their capacity growth; and
* 60 percent of respondents said the top IT priority is keeping costs down.
In todays enterprise, the need for IT flexibility is more crucial than ever as companies are using mainframes, distributed systems, cloud environments and more to run their IT operations. These survey results show that companies are still heavily committed to the mainframe and continue to look for new ways to integrate the mainframe into their future data centers.
Miami-Dade County prides itself on meeting stringent service level agreements so that we can serve our constituents in the best way possible, said Adrienne DiPrima, manager of Strategic Technologies Support for the Information Technology Department. As the countys population and services grow and the countys budget shrinks, we are constantly looking for ways to provide more with less, and in many cases that means planning for new workloads on the mainframe. The mainframe is the backbone to many of the services we provide. Although we maintain a very diverse infrastructure, we are planning a very pro-active strategy to reinforce that the mainframe plays a key role in todays evolving data center.
The Future of The Mainframe
The BMC mainframe survey has showcased the continued need for the mainframe in todays business, yet, as with the rest of the IT world, the mainframe is not immune to the changing nature of IT.
The mainframes continuing growth demonstrates that the platform remains the first and best choice for secure, reliable, high volume computing, said Rich Ptak, principal analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates. However, its the ability to smoothly integrate mainframe reliability, security, capacity and proven business value into a hybrid data center or companys cloud strategy that will make it the key differentiator for IT organizations in the future.
We continue to see an increased demand for capacity, workload and availability in our mainframe environment as the need for data and business applications continues to grow in our business, said Ing. Gerald Bhm, Group Leader System Engineering Competence Centre Linz at Drei Banken EDV, a leading Austrian bank. As the mainframe demand continues to expand we are also seeing the platform play a more dominant role in our hybrid data center to help aid in delivering the business services that our customers and company expects.
In this years mainframe industry survey, respondents indicated that they are starting to take notice of important IT trends, such as cloud and mobile computing.
When asked about important concepts to the future of data centers and the mainframe, 55 percent said private cloud support was an important concept to understand for the future of the data center and then 60 percent of those respondents said it was important to the mainframe. As well, 31 percent of respondents noted that mobile device support (smartphone or tablet) was an important expectation for accessing the mainframe.
These results show that mainframe users understand the importance of keeping the mainframe involved in the active IT discussion about the future data center. BMC continues to support these evolving customer needs with solutions like Control-M Workload Automation Cloud Extensions and Control-M Self Service mobile app.
High IT Costs Still A Concern
With IT organizations expecting growth in their capacity and mainframe processing in the coming year, the need to keep IT costs down continues to be an area of focus. BMC provides customers the solutions that reduce mainframe consumption through intelligent automation, resource-conserving performance technologies, capacity management and exploiting specialty engines.
IT organizations continue to look at specialty engines, to reduce the mainframe usage cost. zIIPs were used by 57 percent of the respondents in the survey with 55 percent of respondents having installed one or more zIIP engines in the last year.
Its always impressive to see that year-over-year the mainframe continues to be an important platform that businesses are using to run and grow their operations, said Bill Miller, president of Mainframe Service Management at BMC. Its even more impressive to see the future growth of the mainframe in the hybrid data center. And even with the diversification of platforms, BMC Software is there with solutions that help organizations manage and optimise their mainframe within the hybrid environment to keep costs low and performance high.
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