There are many factors that contribute to the increased usage of MIPS in large organizations. The top three factors that impact MIPS usage on a monthly basis are business growth, poor application performance and recurring application failures. The latter two factors also have implications beyond an excess use of MIPS—they lead to poor end-user response time and failure to meet service level agreements. Identifying the causes of poor application performance and recurring application failures that use excessive CPU is critical to reducing MIPS consumption and overall mainframe costs.

Looking at factors that affect MIPS usage at least quarterly (i.e., combining the monthly and quarterly results), two new significant factors appear: MIPS usage due to new system software releases and new application packages. These are factors that very few people consider, but they have a significant impact on MIPS usage. Acting proactively mitigate the increase in MIPS usage when new software is installed can help to contain costs.

Organizations are at various commitment levels in terms of controlling MIPS. While 79 percent of respondent organizations manage their MIPS consumption to some extent, only 42 percent  continually manage their MIPS consumption, with the largest percentage of respondents
(58 percent) reporting that they are not continually monitoring their MIPS usage.

When asked about their organizations’ effectiveness in managing MIPS, 43 percent responded that they are not effective in managing MIPS. With the expected growth in MIPS consumption, more organizations need to commit to controlling MIPS growth and turn to solutions that will effectively manage MIPS usage.

The survey asked respondents to rate the relative importance of various factors to their organizations. More than 80 percent of respondents rate improving the quality of applications in terms of response and availability, and improving IT productivity as important. Almost 80 percent say that improving end-user response time is important, and almost 70 percent say that delaying or reducing CPU upgrades is important. All of these factors can be positively affected by actively managing MIPS.

There is a significant opportunity for corporations to improve the performance of their IT organizations and to provide better support to their business units by actively managing MIPS.

The results from this survey indicate MIPS consumption is growing faster than both business growth and IT costs. There seems to be a general understanding that actively managing MIPS
can help reduce IT costs (as well as lead to other benefits such as improved application response time and availability), but few companies are actively working on application MIPS management. The average annual growth in MIPS consumption cited by IT leaders makes it clear that IT organizations today need to manage MIPS more actively to effectively decrease IT costs and improve application response and availability for business units and end users.

Is your company’s IT organization committed to controlling MIPS growth? If not, this is something to consider because it can reduce costs substantially. If you are already managing your MIPS, it’s likely that you have opportunities to do this more effectively. Compuware’s Application MIPS Management solution provides a proactive and systemic approach that enables organizations to reduce excessive MIPS. Our Application MIPS Management solution incorporates best-of-breed technology, expertise and proven best practices to identify and reduce application problems and faults that waste valuable MIPS.

What are the underpinnings of Compuware’s Application MIPS Management solution? A tactical and strategic use of products you may already own—Compuware’s Abend-AID Fault Manager and Strobe.

Abend-AID Fault Manager
Using Abend-AID Fault Manager, your company can reduce costly downtime and optimize your resources by automating the monitoring, measuring and controlling of the fault awareness and resolution process. By managing faults proactively, organizations using Fault Manager’s graphical reporting and analysis can detect trends and potential problem areas long before they escalate to costly wide-scale issues.

Strobe
Compuware's mainframe application performance management solution, which consists of Strobe, iStrobe and AutoStrobe, assists IT professionals in delivering efficient, responsive applications that consume minimal resources, meet batch-processing windows, complete online transactions quickly and consistently meet service level agreements.

To review more statistics from the Compuware/Computerworld MIPS usage and management survey and to obtain a copy of the resulting white paper to use as a benchmark for how your peers are addressing this costly MIPS usage challenge, please go to the Compuware.com white paper webpage.

If you would like to start a dialogue with your company’s IT professionals about a MIPS recovery plan, forward this newsletter or contact us at vomail@compuware.com.

Did you know that Compuware offers a free-of-charge analysis of actual system data from SMF records you already keep and provides summary reports of actual usage detailed by LPAR? These reports illustrate computing productivity and resource utilization in specific environments and often clearly show opportunities for savings that can be gained through more effective usage of Compuware tools.