- Mainframe applications at many enterprises drive core business operations and may also support vital customer-facing web and mobile applications.
- These intense application workloads can drive up IBM z Systems ownership costs, much of which are based on sub-capacity licensing and rolling four-hour averages for CPU utilization.
- Performance gains for these applications can also be highly valuable—since they positively impact end-user productivity and, more importantly, customer experience.
- By providing actionable insights into how application code utilizes z Systems resources, Compuware Strobe 5.2 empowers IT teams to substantially reduce CPU consumption (and thereby costs) and dramatically improve application performance (and thereby the end-user experience).
DETROIT, Feb. 17, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Compuware Corporation, the world's leading mainframe-dedicated software company, today released Compuware Strobe 5.2, which provides unmatched insight into how application code—including DB2, COBOL 5.1, IMS and MQ processes—consume resources in IBM z Systems environments.
By providing these insights—and making it easy for multi-discipline mainframe ops teams to collaborate around these insights—Compuware Strobe 5.2 uniquely enables IT to drive down mainframe costs while significantly improving application responsiveness for both internal end-users and customers.
Because of their power, scalability, reliability and security, mainframes remain the application workhorses for many large enterprises. However, with budgets flat and business demand relentlessly driving workload growth, IT organizations are being more aggressive about reducing the rolling four-hour averages (R4HA) for MSUs upon which their IBM software sub-capacity licensing costs are based.
As mainframe-resident applications increasingly play a role in customer-facing web and mobile apps, the performance of those applications can also have a significant impact on customer experience.
Compuware Strobe 5.2 empowers IT to achieve these R4HA reductions and performance improvements in less time and with less effort than any other mainframe diagnostics solution.
Key enhancements to Strobe 5.2 include:
- New R4HA reporting . Using SMF data collected throughout the month, Strobe identifies application processes that drive peak-period utilization, so IT teams can focus their code optimization efforts on the most financially rewarding opportunities and/or intelligently shift workloads to non-peak times wherever it is practical to do so.
- Enhanced DB2/SQL Reporting Metrics. Strobe's already advanced insight for DB2 optimization has been expanded to exploit the new EXPLAIN tables available in DB2 V11 and to provide richer insight into buffer pools—including their sizes, hit ratios and read rates.
- Global IMS Transaction Monitoring. Similar to batch and CICS processing, Strobe 5.2 will now collect vital information on IMS transaction performance including execution counts, elapsed times and CPU times throughout the day, week and month. This is accomplished automatically and with minimal impact. Strobe reports also help teams zero in on specific transactions exhibiting sub-standard performance.
- Useful MQ and COBOL 5.1 Tuning Hints. Strobe 5.2 enables IT staff with relatively little mainframe experience to identify opportunities for performance gains and cost savings with intuitive reports that automatically recommend tuning improvements for the five top MQ calls by CPU usage, as well as exploit the performance improvements of IBM's new COBOL 5.1 compiler through analysis and display of compiler options.
Strobe has also been upgraded with usability enhancements such as role-based report navigation and more extensive column sorting.
"Nowhere is there more of a need for IT to do much, much more with much, much less than on the mainframe," said Compuware CEO Chris O'Malley. "With this latest round of enhancements to Strobe, Compuware is again demonstrating that we are the ideal software partner for IT leaders charged with this extremely challenging mission."
Compuware today also announced a strategic partnership with BMC that will allow mainframe customers to leverage Strobe's capabilities in tandem with BMC's complementary workload management solutions.
Compuware Corporation
Compuware empowers the world's largest companies to excel in the digital economy by fully leveraging their high-value mainframe intellectual property. We do this by delivering highly innovative mainframe application development and performance optimization solutions that uniquely enable IT to drive business value. Learn more at www.compuware.com .
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Press Contacts Mary McCarthy, Public Relations Manager, Compuware, (313) 227-8188 Kristina LeBlanc, The Medialink Group, (508) 930-5636 For Sales and Marketing Information Compuware Corporation, One Campus Martius, Detroit MI 48226, 800-521-9353, www.compuware.com
