The mainframe isn’t just the workhorse of modern business, used by about 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies and thousands more businesses around the world for efficient, reliable data access and transaction processing. With IBM IMS®, the only database environment proven capable of running over 117,000 database updating transaction per second, it’s also a racehorse. In an era defined by data, IMS provides availability, resiliency, and agility for the data and insights enterprises depend on.
But today’s mainframe faces greater challenges than ever. Data volumes and transactions are growing fast, and your competition is accelerating. To mine insights and fuel innovation, business users and developers need better performance, less downtime—or none at all—anywhere, anytime access to data. To meet those demands, mainframe teams need to keep pace with rising complexity, analyze vast amounts of system data, anticipate and prevent problems, and plan effectively for future growth.
Managing IMS is hard enough to wear out the most experienced IMS DBAs and systems programmers—but as it happens, there aren’t many of those mainframe vets around anymore anyway. According to Forrester Research, 23 percent of mainframe developers retired between 2013 and 2018, and 63 percent of those positions are still vacant. The 2020 BMC Mainframe Survey found that 43 percent of mainframe professionals have less than five years of experience.
The good news is that an eager new generation of professionals are entering the data center; 60 percent of the youngest mainframe professionals see it as a growing platform. But the complexities of IMS will put their enthusiasm to the test. To help them come up to speed quickly, drive immediate value, and gain satisfaction in their jobs, they need simpler, smarter ways of working.
Enter BMC AMI Data for IMS
In recent months, you’ve seen a series of new BMC AMI products bringing the power of automated intelligence to mainframe operations. Now, BMC AMI Data for IMS continues and culminates our digital mainframe vision.
BMC AMI Data for IMS builds automation and machine learning into data and transaction management to help you ensure 24/7/365 availability, resiliency, and agility for a transcendent customer experience. It’s like having a modern mainframe data scientist at hand to keep your data accurate, organized, and backed up so it’s always available to the right people at the right time. For newer DBAs, it’s the ultimate in mentorship and professional development, helping them add value like seasoned pros right from the start.
Here’s how BMC AMI Data for IMS gets it done:
- Modernizing data management with intelligent analytics and automation
- Enabling seamless DevOps collaboration by letting developers use existing tools to make mainframe database changes the same way as any other platform
- Managing data across the DevOps pipeline from ideation to testing, deployment, and production
- Improving backup and recovery performance to decrease RTO and meet compliance requirements—with simulation, estimation and recovery automation capabilities for added peace of mind
- Automatically optimizing IMS for peak database performance, reliable availability, and more efficient resource consumption
- Making it possible to view and move data without negative impact to application performance
- Allowing dynamic changes to IMS Transaction Manager (IMS TM) definitions and ensuring IMS message queue stability and protection.
It’s also worth mentioning that BMC AMI Data for IMS is a great complement to BMC AMI Data for Db2, giving you a wide variety of ways to manage your IMS transaction and IMS and Db2 data environments.
We’re excited to bring the BMC AMI transformation to IMS, as we continue to deliver more value for our customers who need solutions to help them meet rising digital demands. Even in the fast-paced, continually reinvented world of IT, some things really can get better with time.
