CA Technologies Offers Tools, Programs To Cut Mainframe Management Costs

On Tuesday the company unveiled a new release of its CA Mainframe Chorus unified management system, adding new security and storage management capabilities, and launching several new programs to help mainframe customers reduce operational costs by consolidating software from multiple vendors.

Mainframe-related software sales added up to $2.5 billion in CA Technologies' fiscal 2011 (ended March 31), more than half of the company's $4.4 billion total revenue for the year.

Mainframe operators face several challenges today, including pressure to reduce costs, the diminishing number of IT workers with mainframe skills, and figuring out how mainframes fit into the cloud computing paradigm, said Dayton Semerjian, mainframe general manager at CA Technologies, in a press conference.

"The real question is, what is the role of the mainframe in cloud computing and what can be done to cloud-enable the mainframe?" Semerjian said in a press conference.

CA Mainframe Chorus 2.0 adds two "roles" to the original release: CA Mainframe Chorus for Security and Compliance Management, used by security specialists to streamline mainframe security and compliance tasks; and CA Mainframe Chorus for Storage Management for managing mainframe data storage systems.

The first release of CA Mainframe Chorus included the DB2 for z/OS management role and version 2.0 enhances those tools for managing the IBM DB2 database on z/OS mainframes.

CA Mainframe Chorus 2.0 will be available later this month.

CA Technologies also plans to develop a private/hybrid cloud platform that System z mainframe owners can use to build and manage mainframe services.

The new Mainframe Software Rationalization Program helps mainframe owners reduce costs by evaluating and consolidating software from multiple vendors into an integrated management stack, Semerjian said.

"Mainframes have been around for 40 years and we find, frequently, in large mainframe shops and even small mainframe shops, that there's software from multiple vendors that have overlapping features and functionality [and] have redundancy," Semerjian said. "And [IT] hasn't done the clean sweep to rationalize down to a handful of standard vendors and building an integrated stack."

The new Mainframe Value Program is a free on-site evaluation of mainframe customers' CA Technologies' software to determine the best way to maximize the value of that software.

And to address the mainframe skills issue CA technologies is offering an eight-week boot camp education program called the CA Mainframe Academy.