Mainframe professionals live in exciting times. While the platform has adapted and modernized over its six decades of existence, today’s marriage of the mainframe’s power, security, and resilience with cutting edge technology is unprecedented. As organizations continue to transform their approaches to mainframe management with DevOps, AIOps, DataOps, and SecOps, integration with the cloud and the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence (AI) offer a new world of potential for the platform.
Our July release of enhancements to the BMC AMI portfolio not only includes features that will advance mainframe transformation today, but also looks toward a future of unlimited possibility.
Leveraging AI and cloud in mainframe transformation
In May 2024, we announced the public beta of Code Explain, a feature of BMC AMI DevX Code Insights that revolutionizes code explanation and documentation by providing developers with a summary of a piece of code’s function as well as business context. BMC also continues to enhance the BMC AMI portfolio with AI. BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise includes AI-based developer productivity metrics and abend, regression, and fallback anomaly detection, as well as a monthly report of AI-generated insights based on BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline usage data.
With a look to the future, BMC has outlined a mainframe strategy that builds upon AI-based tooling and leverages cloud technology to create a seamless, unified experience for the BMC AMI suite of solutions and AI capabilities. Combining cloud flexibility with mainframe simplicity, our new platform will offer a single access point for all BMC AMI solutions while infusing generative AI (GenAI) directly into those solutions. To learn more about this vision for the future, read John McKenny’s blog post, “BMC AMI Platform Statement of Direction: Simplify Mainframe Management with AI and Cloud.”
Regulatory compliance and digital resilience
As organizations around the world look to safeguard their data from cyberthreats and comply with regulatory standards like the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), air-gapped storage of immutable data copies has emerged as an excellent way to strengthen data security and digital resilience.
With BMC AMI Cloud Vault, users can create immutable copies of mainframe data for storage on-premises or in the cloud, send backups to air-gapped object storage, and perform standalone recovery of their data. These features not only enhance data protection, they help bring financial institutions in the E.U., and those that do business with them, into DORA compliance.
Mainframe application transformation
Enhancements to the BMC AMI DevX suite of solutions empower developers to learn from production abends and help optimize continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
A new report section in during testing that were present at the time the error occurred. This ability to recreate abend scenarios while testing shortens mean time to resolution (MTTR) by delivering insight into the nature of errors and enabling developers to ensure that production errors are fixed before deployment.
Developers can also retrace the steps that led to an abend while debugging in BMC AMI DevX Workbench for VS Code. This new feature gives developers a full view of a program’s execution and abend by allowing them to see each step and data input from the beginning.
Users are now able to view component versions and transfer tasks to new releases in BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline, enabling easy organization of scopes of work by project and requirement.
Efficient mainframe data management
New capabilities help BMC AMI Data users reduce costs while increasing efficiency and database performance. New enhancements to BMC AMI Copy for Db2® make it easy to convert from alternative solutions, and reduce CPU usage by up to 94 percent, helping customers improve recovery times with up to 16x more copies than before—at no additional cost.
The new Online Defrag Wizard in BMC AMI Data for IMS™ provides advanced online defragmentation that is managed in a central location while allowing easy access to historical defrag activity data.
Enhanced operational resilience
With a more efficient probable cause engine and enhanced root cause analysis, BMC AMI Ops Insight enables faster diagnosis of issues and reduced mean time to repair (MTTR), leading to greater availability and uptime. These upgraded AI-based problem detection and diagnosis capabilities reduce the number of false positives, improve accuracy, and automate the processing of all detection events.
Cybersecurity risk mitigation
Increase the speed with which ransomware attacks can be detected by BMC AMI Command Center for Security with two new features in BMC AMI Datastream for IBM® z/OS®. New out-of-the-box settings enable security teams to flag binary values outside a normal range, alerting them to file encryptions that could indicate a ransomware attack or system compromise. A second feature brings in out-of-the-box user behavior associations, identifying and alerting about non-standard user behavior that could indicate an intentional or unintentional insider threat.
You’ve never mainframed like this before
These enhancements, part of both the BMC AMI July release and our strategic view of the future, give organizations cutting-edge tools to augment the transformation, management, and security of their mainframe systems while opening the door to new, AI-infused features that make the platform more flexible and easier to use than ever. As we move together into the future, BMC remains committed to taking your mainframe experience to new heights.
Learn about all of the features included in the July release of BMC AMI enhancements on the What’s New in Mainframe Solutions page.
