Our vision to give today’s infrastructure teams a clear, concise view of mainframe operations, automate and simplify data maintenance, and secure business-critical data is simple. We align our vision with four high-level themes: Customer Experience, Security and Compliance, Analytics and Automation, and Cost Efficiency. With that in mind, I wanted to update you on the great work the mainframe teams have accomplished this quarter with several new security, productivity, automation, and cost-efficient enhancements to drive our products forward.
To make the mainframe easier to manage, we continue to enhance the customer experience across all product lines. I’ll start with the MainView family of products and talk about the significant accomplishments we’ve made to provide you with more modern user interfaces and intuitive, automated processes. This quarter’s enhancements include updated views and reports, at-a-glance alarms, and enabling Java 11 in MainView to simplify and automate mainframe operations. We have enhanced usability in the Storage Resource Management (SRM) product and added support for IBM’s Real Storage Manager (RSM) changes when running on an IBM z/OS 2.3 subsystem. Furthermore, we have added usability enhancements to the Db2 product line that include enhanced workload monitoring and the ability to product SQL performance batch reports with less overhead and less time. We have also simplified the user experience with Next Generation Technology (NGT) Db2 products.
To broaden and deepen our security and compliance offerings, last month we announced a strategic partnership with CorreLog, the industry leader for real-time mainframe event management. This partnership ensures that your infrastructure teams can control, secure, and ensure the integrity of your organization’s data. We have also made multiple enhancements to MainView Middleware Administrator, an enterprise-wide, platform-agnostic solution for the middleware environment so you can demonstrate compliance to regulators and auditors with a full audit trail of information throughout the enterprise. We have also enhanced the CMF Monitor product by providing support for pervasive encryption to help you protect your company’s business-critical data.
I am also proud to say we released our first product on the journey to a self-managing mainframe this quarter. AMI Data Extractor for IMS captures real-time data for security information and event management (SIEM) applications and analytics engines with no impact to CPU or transaction processing times. You can save the extracted information to an external dataset or send it to an external analytics engine for trending and security analysis. Another example of our commitment to help organizations reinvent enterprise IT with analytics and automation solutions that will accelerate the performance of your mainframe.
We have supported IBM Container Pricing for quite some time and have made further enhancements in CMF Monitor and MainView for z/OS to help improve cost-efficiency. These solutions deliver a real-time and historical view of costs to help you reduce mainframe costs while servicing both traditional and new digital business workloads. They enable you to tune, manage, and automatically take actions before disruptive and highly complex digital business workloads impede the smooth flow of business.
Here’s a quick snapshot of what you can do with this quarter’s new releases:
- Customer Experience
- Take advantage of Real Storage Manager (RSM) in CMF Monitor and MainView for z/OS
- Easily define workload by monitoring exclusion criteria in MainView for Db2
- Enhanced usability in MainView Storage Resource Management (SRM)
- Take advantage of MQ 9.1.0 from IBM for MainView for MQ
- Take advantage of pervasive encryption in CMF Monitor
- Security and Compliance:
- Strengthen security with multi-factor authentication in the MainView Infrastructure (MVI) and view alarm status across the entire MainView environment
- Improve security of middleware objects with MainView Middleware Administrator’s secure and intuitive interface
- Improve the security of Db2 data with support for transparent data set encryption (TDSE)
- Analytics and Automation:
- Capture real-time data for security information and event management (SIEM) applications and analytics engines with AMI Data Extractor for IMS
- Simulate automation with NGT Utility Manager and analyze objects without processing
- Cost Efficiency
- Take advantage of Container Pricing with CMF and MainView for z/OS
If you want to learn more about how you can modernize your infrastructure and identify what’s right for your operations, visit our Mainframe Solutions pages and make sure to register for Proactive Notifications to ensure that you get the most up-to-date release information.
