How many times has a project to reduce costs been thrown on top of your insurmountable stack of other priorities? When you have tried to reduce costs, have you solely focused on application consumption?
The common answer to these frequent questions is “All the time.” Trying to reduce costs can be a laborious and painful process because of several factors often outside of your control:
- Do you have all the internal resources you need?
- you have the right tools for the job?
- Are different teams willing to collaborate?
- Is your business willing to bear the risk of potentially major changes that could directly impact your customers experience?
Since legacy applications are, by definition, in business for a long time, these applications have often been optimized as much as possible over the years, so there may not be any further significant room for improvement in this regard.
But there is a component of mainframe consumption strongly linked to the use of the applications, a component considered a fixed cost that is never questioned, a component very easy to optimize: The Db2 Utilities standard COPY, LOAD, UNLOAD, REORG, RECOVER, RUNSTATS.
Have you ever measured how much basic data management with Db2 utilities is costing your system in a given year? Probably the answer is no, first because it does not often come to mind to do so, second because in reality it is not simple because the real total consumption is given by the consumption that is indicated in the output of the JOB, plus the sum of what is not seen and that is the consumption of the Db2 executed from its Address Spaces, in particular the DBM1.
Standard utilities increase the cost of Db2 every time they try to access an object which can be seen in the number of GETPAGES that Db2 executes. However, it is often impossible to separate the utility cost from the basic cost of Db2 unless system activity is extremely low, which is very unlikely.
For that reason, we benchmarked data management processes using a dedicated Db2 system to verify the real consumption of standard utilities vs high-performance, autonomic utilities like BMC AMI Utilities for Db2®.
Read more and download my whitepaper here.
