Capacity Management Maturity, Assessing & Improving - 5 levels of process maturity (3 of 4)

As promised today I'll discuss the 5 levels of Capacity Management Maturity and what they mean.
They are:

Level 1 – Initial

Processes are undocumented and in a state of dynamic and chaotic manner. They tend to be driven in an ad hoc, uncontrolled, and reactive manner. Processes at this level tend to be unstable.

Level 2 – Repeatable

Some processes are repeatable, possibly with consistent results. Discipline is unlikely to be rigorous, but where it exists it may help to ensure existing processes are maintained during stressful periods.

Level 3 – Defined

Sets of defined and documented standard processes are established and subject to some degree of improvement over time.

Level 4 – Managed

Using process metrics, management can effectively control processes and identify ways to adjust and adapt the process to particular projects without losses of quality.

Level 5 – Optimized

The focus is on continual improvement through both incremental and innovative changes / improvements

Don't forget to register for our live webinar 'Capacity Management Maturity - Managed to Optimized' which covers how to get from Level 4 to Level 5 in your process. 

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

The final part of my series is on Tuesday, enjoy your weekend in the meantime.

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

Capacity Management Maturity, Assesssing & Improving - Setting the Landscape (2 of 4)

What is Capacity Management?

A fairly standard definition of Capacity Management is:

An IT process that helps ensure capacity meets current and a future business requirements in a cost-­‐effective manner.

A well-­‐defined Capacity Management process will focus on four subprocesses:

Business Capacity Management – translating business needs and plans into capacity and performance requirements for services and infrastructure.

Service Capacity Management – managing the capacity of live, operational IT services. This includes both proactive and reactive activities to ensure SLAs are met.

Component Capacity Management – managing the performance, utilization, and capacity of IT resources and individual IT components

Capacity Management Reporting – To provide other ITSM processes and management with information related to service and component capacity, utilization, and performance

In order to support the process, specific activities (monitoring, analysis, tuning, modeling, etc.) are undertaken in both proactive and reactive ways.

What is Maturity?

A maturity model is a set of structured levels that describe how well the behaviors, practices, and processes of an organization can reliably produce desired outcomes.

Various models exist. For the purposes of this survey, we’ll focus on the Capability Maturity Model, which consists of five levels of process maturity.

I'll tell you the five levels of process maturity in the Capability Maturity Model on Friday.

Come along to our webinar October 11 'Capacity Management Maturity Series -Managed to Optimized'

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

Capacity Management Maturity - Assessing and Improving the Effectiveness (1 of 4)

Many organizations have a Capacity Management process or function in place, but no practical way to assess the effectiveness or even the strengths and weaknesses of the process or function.

This led to our development and refinement of a Capacity Management Maturity Assessment, consisting of 20 carefully chosen questions that help an organization assess maturity and effectiveness.

Our Capacity Management Maturity Survey is available to complete on line.

https://www.metron-athene.com/_capacity-management-maturity-survey/survey.asp

Once completed, the results will allow the Capacity Manager to better communicate the importance of Capacity Management and create a plan to fill identified gaps going forward.

Applying this assessment to multiple organizations allows comparisons to be made - between organizations and between an organization and others sharing characteristics such as type of business, geographical location and organizational size, among others.

This blog series will discuss the concept of Capacity Management Maturity, how the concept of maturity is defined and what are the building blocks that reflect a mature process or function within an organization.

Don't forget to register for the final part in our series of 'Capacity Management Maturity webinars  'Capacity Management Maturity - 'Managed to Optimized' '
https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer

Capacity Management Maturity Series – Managed to Optimized

The final part in our Capacity Management maturity series takes place on October 11 and explains what is expected from a fully mature capacity management process. 

If you have followed this series from the beginning, then you will have seen how the process has evolved from a chaotic/reactive process to a fully integrated business process providing proactive information to enable quicker and more accurate decision making to take place with associated benefits realised faster. If you haven't followed our series and would like to catch up on demand visit our Resources section to watch the previous 3 webinars 

https://www.metron-athene.com/resources/index.asp

In this webinar, we will cover what it means to be classed as Optimized. More specifically, how IT and Capacity Management can become strategic business partners and how collaboration between CM and the Business enables improvement over all business processes. From being graded as Initial or Repeatable to Defined, Managed or Optimized the overall focus switches from predominately component to service and then business and more specifically what are the potential impacts on revenues. It is at this, the Optimized level, that the embedded automation, process and data sharing integration, and capacity planning contributes most in mitigating service risk/impact and overall IT cost management.

Join us on October 11 to discover what it takes for your CM process to be fully optimized.

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

In the meantime if you'd like to find out where your organization is on the maturity scale then take our survey and get your free 20 page report.

www.metron-athene.com/survey/

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

       

Managing your IBM z System licensing charges - Ways to Manage Cost (5 of 5)

Today I'll take a look at ways to manage cost and provide a summary of my series.

Some of the ways in which you can look at reducing or managing costs are below and we'll start with zIIP Processors.

zIIP Processors

•        Specialty processors for offloading work

•        Workloads using zIIP Processors do not factor into the License Charges

•        Originally setup for DB2 in 2004

•        Work run on zAPPs can run on zIIPs (i.e. Java)

•        Third party products can use zIIPs with API licensed from IBM

•        Talk to your vendors

Bottom line

•        Lowers cost of computing for eligible workloads

To Cap or not to Cap?

Capping the Environment is a means of Manual or Automatic control of resources to ensure the MLC is stable but optimize the system performance.Modification of the LPARs Defined Capacity (DC) to account for workload behavior and the needs of all the LPARs.

Soft Capping Manually

There are some issues with Soft Capping manually:

•        Personnel constantly monitoring

•        Adjustments may not be made in time

•        Possible errors causing unsuspected results

Soft Capping – Automating the Process

Automating Soft Capping makes the process much easier.

•        The LPARs’ DCs (Defined Capacity) are dynamically modified by taking into account the behavior and needs of all the LPARs.

•        When one LPAR requires capacity to handle an instantaneous workload increase, its  DC can be dynamically increased, temporarily, while other less- busy LPARs can have their DCs reduced  temporarily.

•        When the demand for extra capacity has passed, all of the LPAR DCs are returned to their normal levels, based on the CPC DC aggregate.

•        Software tools are available to assist in the process

Summary

In summary, in order to manage your IBM z System licensing charges you need to:

•        Understand the components of the MLC

•        Understand your negotiated pricing mechanism

Check out our Resources section for some great white papers and on-demand webinars on z Systems  https://www.metron-athene.com/resources/index.asp

Charles Johnson
Principal Consultant

Managing your IBM z System licensing charges - Reporting to manage your monthly license charges(4 of 5)

There are many Reporting Processes but those that are useful in helping you manage your monthly license charges are below:

•        Analyze the Peak Workloads

•        Review workload placement - can workloads be combined onto a single LPAR?

•        zIIP processor usage

Some examples below of the type of reports you can create, these have been produced using our athene® ES/1 product.

athene® ES/1- Rolling 4 Hour Average

athene® ES/1- Rolling 4 Hour Average w/ Service Classes

How to calculate MLC

•        Calculation is made for the period from the 2^nd day of the month to the 1^st day of the next month.

•        MLC is charged based on the maximum value of total R4HA MSU of all LPARs during the calculation period.

•        Charge for each IBM software product is made for the period while the product is running. (Except z/OS)

SCRT – Sub-Capacity Report Tool

athene® ES/1 provides all the information used with the SCRT(Sub Capacity Report Tool).  The information provided is shown from the LPAR and Product perspective.

Shown on the report are the highest and second highest values and the date/time they occurred. 

Sample Charts for IBM MLC

athene® ES/1 product usage

Helping you to correlate software charges and application usage.

Business Transactions vs. CPU Usage – Change chart 

On Wednesday I'll conclude my series with a look at the way you can manage costs, on that day I'll also be broadcasting live with my 'Top 5 z Systems Capacity Issues' - make sure you register for your place. 

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

Managing your IBM z System licensing charges - What is Mobile Workload Pricing and its affect? (3 of 5)

Defining Mobile Workload Pricing

Mobile Workload Pricing was created by IBM in 2014 as mobile applications began to develop within organizations, with more transactions being mobile based, a break is given based on certain criteria.

•       Mobile Workload Reporting Tool(MWRT) was developed to provide the calculations

•        Based upon Rolling 4 Hour Average, then discounts applied

MWRT will calculate the 4-hour rolling average of the reported mobile transaction general purpose processor time consumed by the Mobile Workload Pricing Defining Programs and subtract 60% of those values from the traditional sub-capacity MSUs for all sub-capacity eligible programs running in the same LPAR(s) as the mobile workloads, on an hour-by-hour basis, per LPAR. The program values for the same hour are summed across all of the LPARs (and any z/OS guest systems running under z/VM®) in which the program runs to create an adjusted sub-capacity value for the program, for the given machine, for each hour. MWRT will determine the billable MSU peak for a given program on a machine using the adjusted MSU values.

On Monday I'll be talking about using reporting to manage your monthly license charges. In the meantime don't forget to sign up for my live webinar 'Top 5 z Systems Capacity Issues' on Sept 13  

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

Managing your IBM z System licensing charges - Types of License Charges (2 of 5)

IBM uses a variety of license models and below I've given a brief description of the types of license charges you'll likely come across.

Advanced Workload License Charges (AWLC), including Integrated Workload Pricing (IWP), when appropriate

When you elect AWLC for a particular operating system on a CPC, all of that operating system family's sub-capacity eligible MLC products are licensed under AWLC on that CPC. Non-sub-capacity eligible MLC products are considered FWLC products and their pricing is a fixed, monthly charge unrelated to the capacity of the CPC on which they run. Sub-capacity AWLC pricing applies to eligible z/OS® and z/TPF software products and their associated middleware products when running on a zEnterprise® EC12 (zEC12) or zEnterprise 196 (z196) CPC. Sub-capacity AWLC pricing also applies when running on a zEnterprise BC12 (zBC12) or zEnterprise 114 (z114) CPC, but only if that CPC is in an actively coupled Parallel Sysplex® that consists only of zEnterprise CPCs. 

More information about AWLC pricing is available at www.ibm.com/systems/z/swprice/mlc/awlc.html. For details about IWP, see the SCRT user's guide, Using the Sub-Capacity Reporting Tool.

Integrated Workload Pricing (IWP) is an enhancement to AWLC that enables qualifying z/OS customers to add a selected set of workloads to an existing LPAR without increasing the sub-capacity value of other products already running in that LPAR.

Entry Workload License Charges (EWLC)

When you elect EWLC pricing for a particular operating system on a CPC, all of that operating system family's MLC products that are sub-capacity eligible are licensed under EWLC on that CPC. The MLC products for that operating system on that CPC that are not sub-capacity eligible are charged a capacity-based price using the zELC pricing metric (for z800 CPCs) or the Tiered EWLC pricing metric (for z10™ BC, z9® BC, and z890 CPCs).

More information about EWLC pricing is available at www.ibm.com/systems/z/swprice/mlc/ewlc.html.

Advanced Entry Workload License Charges (AEWLC)

When you elect AEWLC for a particular operating system on a CPC, all of that operating system family's sub-capacity eligible MLC products are licensed under AEWLC on that CPC. The MLC products for that operating system on that CPC that are not sub-capacity eligible are charged a capacity-based price using the Tiered EWLC pricing metric. Sub-capacity AEWLC pricing applies to eligible z/OS, z/TPF, and z/VSE® software products and their associated middleware products when running on a zBC12 or z114 CPC.

Integrated Workload Pricing (IWP) is an enhancement to AEWLC that enables qualifying z/OS customers to add a selected set of workloads to an existing LPAR without increasing the sub-capacity value of other products already running in that LPAR.

More information about AEWLC pricing is available at www.ibm.com/systems/z/swprice/mlc/aewlc.htmlmlc/aewlc.html. For details about IWP, see the SCRT user's guide, Using the Sub-Capacity Reporting Tool.

Midrange Workload License Charges (MWLC)

When you elect MWLC pricing for the z/VSE operating system on a CPC, those z/VSE MLC products that are sub-capacity eligible are licensed under MWLC on that CPC. MWLC pricing applies only to the z/VSE (Version 4 or higher) operating system and certain z/VSE middleware programs. On System z10® BC or System z9® BC CPCs, all other z/VSE programs will be priced according to Tiered Entry Workload License Charges (TWLC). On zEnterprise EC12, zEnterprise 196, System z10 EC, or System z9 EC CPCs, all other z/VSE programs will be priced according to either Flat Workload License Charges, Graduated Monthly License Charges, or Extended License Charges.

More information about MWLC pricing is available at www.ibm.com/systems/z/swprice/mlc/mwlc.html.

System z New Application License Charges (zNALC)

zNALC is a monthly license charge pricing metric available on IBM® z/Architecture® servers running z/OS and offers a reduced price for z/OS on LPARs where qualified applications are running. zNALC pricing applies to the z/OS base feature and z/OS priced features (with the exception of HCM and HLASM Toolkit, which have flat pricing). zNALC is available for z/OS on LPARs dedicated to qualified applications, among other requirements. Similar to Workload License Charges and Entry Workload License Charges, customers may implement zNALC in either full capacity or sub-capacity mode.

Any logical partition (LPAR) that is designated as a zNALC LPAR must follow the naming convention ZNALxxxx where xxxx is any letters or numbers. Alternatively, customers who prefer not to change LPAR names to qualify for zNALC pricing (and are running z/OS V1.6 or later) can specify the LICENSE=ZNALC IPL parameter in the active IEASYSxx PARMLIB member to indicate a zNALC system. The LICENSE=ZNALC IPL parameter will be available through APAR OA20314. However, the complete zNALC solution for the SMF data collected from a z/OS system initialized in this manner requires SCRT V14.1.0 or higher.

More information about zNALC pricing is available in More about zNALC pricing and at www.ibm.com/systems/z/swprice/mlc/znalc.html.

Select Application License Charges (SALC)

SALC pricing is available solely for WebSphere® MQ for System z and only on CPCs with one of the sub-capacity MLC pricing metrics. It is designed to allow customers to license MQ under product utilization rather than the sub-capacity MLC pricing metrics. SCRT still reports MSU values for these products but the reported values are not used to calculate the license charges.

On Friday I'll be looking at Mobile Workload Pricing and it's affect.

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant