I've exiting news to share today. We have just released a new IBM Redbooks publication with the title "Simplify mainframe operations".

So, why would you care? Maybe you are the head of mainframe and challenged about the always growing complexity. Looking jealously over the fence to your peer on the distributed side and seeing how modern and "how simple" to manage that platform is, you ask yourself why it has to be so different on the mainframe side? Maybe your team has lost experienced skills due to demographics and you now wonder how you can continue providing the service levels that your lines of business require?

Or perhaps you work in IT operations and are overwhelmed by the many signals and events that you see and that you have to handle day by day. You wonder why it has to be like that and whether all these events are really necessary? Isn't there a more productive way that avoids such events at all or that at least could guide your next steps when the events can't be avoided in the first place?

Well, in both of these examples, we hope that we can give at least some answers to such questions in this new Redpaper. What motivated us to write this Redpaper is that we are often asked what a software stack for operations looks like ideally on the mainframe? What components are needed and for what? How is component X related to component Y? And where do you use AI in your products? These and many other questions are showing us that mainframe operations is indeed perceived as a non-trivial topic and that clarity is needed.

Content

The Redpaper starts with some thoughts borrowed from Lean Thinking and maps them to the domain of mainframe operations: The focus on identifying waste and strain in any process and removing them. Artificial intelligence adopted in mainframe operations can significantly improve efficiency and effectiveness by reducing waste and strain. The Redpaper describes the role and importance of the IBM Z platform and the driving forces for modernizing it. However, all these modernization efforts also have an impact on the way the mainframe is operated. Therefore, the Redpaper also summarizes the typical challenges that mainframe clients see: The overwhelming amount of data and at the same time, the lack of insights, lack of observability, managing performance and availability, managing compliance and the always present vulnerability threads, the push for cutting costs while delivering more services faster, and how to maintain a solid mainframe skill basis.

In subsequent chapters, IT operations and the necessary capabilities are introduced. The Redpaper dives into observability, what it is and why it matters so much for getting insights within a hybrid IT-landscape. It discusses performance and capacity management, takes a look at different automation capabilities, and eventually describes the role of artificial intelligence and how it can help to improve operations.

After describing AIOps and its capabilities, the Redpaper focuses on the IBM Z software offerings for IT operations and their efforts to simplify mainframe operations by:

• Providing a review of IBM Concert for Z as a single point of control for IT operations.
• Illustrating how observability is realized on IBM Z by adopting OpenTelemetry.
• Discussing where and for what AI capabilities are provided and latest developments in generative AI.
• Introducing the power of IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS for performance and availability management.
• Highlighting the strengths of IBM offerings on z/OS and their relevance for disaster recovery and cyber resiliency.

The Redpaper provides advise on how to adopt these capabilities, what is considered essential and what additional steps you could consider for further improvement. And last but not least, because this question is also often asked by our customers, it shows how the IBM Z software offerings are integrated within the spectrum of IBM enterprise software offerings, such as IBM Instana and IBM Apptio.

Reader's comments

After reading the Redpaper, some of our early readers provided the following great feedback:

• Lynda Gernon, Mainframe Performance Specialist at Bank of America, wrote: "Simplifying the Mainframe is an excellent reference for both mainframe leaders and technical analysts. It identifies needs, offers solutions (and, for the most part, including solutions from non-IBM vendors), and includes a roadmap to help most, if not all, organizations begin. Finally, it suggests how to integrate your chosen solution with the other (non-mainframe) solutions in the enterprise, enabling an enterprise-wide perspective. I recommend this publication for anyone interesting in simplifying their mainframe."
• Jon Ulrich, a Health Insurance Industry IT Engineer commented: "The Simplify Mainframe Operations Redbook provides an excellent overview of the critical subjects management, senior IT staff members, and those who are just starting their career journeys need to know in the contemporary state of performance and capacity management for businesses running on IBM’s z-Series platform. This Redbook condenses years of lessons learned in z-Series performance and capacity resource management into a single comprehensive guide that’s easy to understand and implement."
• Erik Weyler, a Solution Architect at SEB, is motivated saying "At SEB, we are constantly looking for ways to automate, visualize, and simplify operations to the benefit of our developers, system programmers, and database administrators. It is now time for us to make the best possible use of our metrics and utilize AI in our continuing efforts in simplifying the maintenance of our mainframe platform, even as it evolves and carries new types of workloads."
• Rebecca Levesque, 21CS says “The Redpaper is a good tool for IT Operations Managers to have in their arsenal. It highlights that IZBR, IBM Z Backup Resiliency, is the data resiliency management tool that provides the answers you need for auditors, mitigates skill by automating recovery processes, and improves resiliency by assuring real-time data is given when ‘things’ happen”.
• The Director of Mainframe Innovation at a large Canadian Financial Institution wrote: "Whether you are well on your way with your Observability journey, or just starting out, this Redbook has something for you. The way that events and traces are described along with the methodology of integrating everything together, serves up an easy to follow recipe for what ever is coming next in your Observability journey."
• Another leader at a North American Financial Services company wrote: "This was a good read to understand IBM’s direction and plans for integration with AIOPS”.

So, with this feedback, we hope and we are optimistic that this Redpaper is helpful and valuable for many roles. Whether you are a decision maker, monitoring or performance expert, automation specialist or operator, reading this Redpaper should help you to familiarize yourself with mainframe operations even in those areas that are not part of your day job. We hope that it can inspire you to try out some capabilities you haven't been aware of or just haven't had time to exploit to further improve the operations environment in your company.

I hope you enjoy reading the Redpaper and would be very glad if you leave us comments or feedback and suggestions for improvement.