Factors contributing to organisations’ MIPS usage

There are many factors that contribute to the increased usage of MIPS in large organisations. The top three factors impacting MIPS usage on a monthly basis are business growth, poor application performance and recurring application failures. The latter two 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 acting proactively to mitigate the increase in MIPS usage when new software is installed can help to contain costs.

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Over half of IT organisations do not continually monitor MIPS growth, a major factor in soaring IT costs

Organisations are at various commitment levels in terms of controlling MIPS. While 79 percent of respondent organisations 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 organisations’ effectiveness in managing MIPS, 43 percent responded that they are not effective in managing MIPS. With the expected growth in MIPS consumption, more organisations need to commit to controlling MIPS growth and turn to solutions that will effectively manage MIPS usage.

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Other business objectives important to organisations

The survey asked respondents to rate the relative importance of various factors to their organisations. More than 80 percent of respondents rate as important improving the quality of applications in terms of response and availability, and improving IT productivity. 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.

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Does your company manage MIPS consumption?

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 organisations today need to manage MIPS more actively to effectively decrease IT costs and improve application response and availability for business units and end users.

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Compuware’s Application MIPS Management solution

Is your company’s IT organisation 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 organisations 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.

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Abend-AID Fault Manager

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

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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.

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