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Myth: A mainframe installation needs a CPM team? 

By Frank Tidemand, Capacity & Performance Consultant at SMT Data

What does a CPM team do?

Capacity and performance management (CPM) is an IT Service Management practice that ensures services achieve agreed-upon performance levels and satisfy current and future demand in a cost-effective way. It focuses on optimizing the utilization of IT infrastructure and resources to prevent both under-provisioning (leading to slow performance, outages) and over-provisioning (wasted resources and excessive costs).  

Key Objectives

• Business Alignment: Ensuring IT services consistently meet business needs and agreed-upon service levels. 

• Proactive Planning: Forecasting future resource requirements, both short-term and long-term, based on business expansion, seasonal patterns, and new initiatives. 

• Cost Control: Optimizing resource use to avoid unnecessary expenditure on infrastructure and services, especially in cloud environments. 

• Risk Mitigation: Identifying potential capacity and performance bottlenecks before they cause service disruptions or failures. 

• Improved Service Quality: Ensuring consistent and reliable service performance, leading to higher user satisfaction.  

Core Activities and Sub-processes

According to frameworks like ITIL 4, capacity and performance management involves several interconnected activities and can be broken down into three main areas:  

• Business Capacity Management: Translates business plans and strategies into IT service requirements. This strategic process involves “what-if” analyses to determine the impact of potential changes (e.g., a new product launch, business merger) on capacity needs. 

• Service Capacity Management: Focuses on managing the end-to-end performance of operational IT services to meet Service Level Agreement (SLA) targets. This involves monitoring live services and identifying trends. 

• Component Capacity Management: Manages the performance and utilization of individual IT components such as CPU, memory, storage, and network bandwidth. The goal is to monitor and control each element to prevent it from becoming a bottleneck.  

Best Practices

Effective capacity and performance management relies on the following best practices:  

• Baselining and Trending: Consistently monitor and analyze current capacity and performance data to understand usage patterns and future upgrade requirements. 

• Demand Management: Predict future resource requirements caused by business growth or seasonal changes. 

• Performance Testing: Use simulations (such as load testing) to observe how new or existing services operate under projected workload scenarios. 

• Leverage Centralized Tools: Utilize capacity planning software, cloud management tools, and ITSM platforms to provide a holistic view of capacity and resources, enabling real-time tracking and reporting. 

So; Does a mainframe installation need a capacity and performance team?

Yes, a mainframe installation absolutely needs a capacity and performance management function or help from external services to fulfill that role. Mainframes run mission-critical applications for enterprises where consistent high performance and availability are essential for business operations.  

Why a Dedicated Team/Role is Crucial for Mainframes

• Cost Management: Mainframe software licensing costs are often calculated based on peak usage metrics (like the Rolling 4-Hour Average for MLC), making optimization essential to avoid substantial unnecessary expenses. A dedicated team can use strategies like workload capping and off-peak batch processing to control these costs. 

• Preventing Downtime/Bottlenecks: Mainframes handle vast transaction volumes. A performance bottleneck can have a disastrous impact on business operations. A specialized team proactively identifies and addresses potential issues before they cause service disruptions. 

• Proactive Planning: Capacity planners use historical data, seasonal trends, and business forecasts to predict future resource needs. This allows for planned upgrades and resource adjustments, avoiding expensive, ad-hoc requests for capacity on short notice. 

• Optimizing Resources: Mainframe capacity planning involves making the best use of existing specialized hardware (like zIIP processors) and software configurations to maximize efficiency. 

• Specialized Expertise: Mainframe environments have unique architectures, operating systems (like z/OS), and performance monitoring tools that may require specialized knowledge. The CPM team should possess the skills necessary to effectively manage this complex environment. 

• Business Alignment: The team ensures that IT capacity aligns with business goals and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), managing performance expectations for both online and batch processing.  

Options for Sourcing the Expertise

Regardless of the structure, the function of capacity and performance management is a vital, ongoing requirement for any organization relying on a mainframe infrastructure.  

Organizations can acquire this capability in several ways: 

• In-house dedicated team: Employing specialized mainframe capacity planners and performance analysts. This will allow focus on the company needs with the resources available. 

• Outsourcing: Engaging a managed service provider (MSP) that has the critical mass of specialized skills to manage the mainframe environment. A company must be aware of the conflict of an outsourcer charging IT usage and optimizing IT usage. 

• Consulting services: Using third-party consultants for periodic assessments, planning, and optimization projects. This should be an independent provider that will focus on IT optimizations to benefit the company whilst also bringing experienced resources. 

 

Having access to the right performance and capacity data and having the skills and tools to understand this data is essential for a successful CPM team. SMT Data offers the ITBI tools for capacity and performance insights as well as consultancy services to support the use of the ITBI products. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you want to hear more about how we can help.