CA improves mainframe management wares

For Patrick Barrez, upgrading his current mainframe management software is just an incremental step toward achieving bigger goals. The IS officer of mainframe systems for Fortis Bank in Brussels, Belgium, says a software upgrade will bring him closer to implementing a single management database, using browser-based interfaces and enabling central administration of multiple products.

The software, Computer Associates' Unicenter NetMaster r11 suite, was released last week and includes three mainframe management applications that have been reworked to take advantage of what CA dubs Common Services - which includes incorporating standard code, interfaces and standard databases for use across CA management systems. Typically, each CA product has a unique user interface and isolated data repository, but with the new technology users will be able to maintain similar interfaces among products and have the option to use a shared database or maintain a separate database for each CA application.

"These r11 releases focus on building reliable and robust APIs with CA Common Services. Using those, [future releases] will be able to have a management database, which would become a common container for all CA mainframe products," Barrez says. "The management database would become a central point, where products would store and read their customization data."

With this release, CA enabled the r11 products to integrate with each other and with other Unicenter management software. The applications now are integrated directly with CA's ServiceDesk software, which will let IT managers automate the generation of trouble tickets off the mainframe and track them alongside distributed network services.

Unicenter NetMaster r11 applications run on the mainframe under zOS as a task and feature a built-in Web interface. IT managers assign an IP address, connect the software to it and the software starts monitoring the network stack on the mainframe, much like a sniffer would monitor traffic in a distributed network. CA product pricing is based per measured workload or per million instructions per second (MIPS). The company says customers will be charged based on the number of MIPS consumed. It declined to provide further pricing information.

The added integration among the products will help customers use less staff time to manage mainframes and enable lower-level staff members to manage complex systems. For example, systems administrators familiar with one CA mainframe management application will be able to easily work with another because the software will use the same language to describe events, and present data in the same format and pull data from a shared database.

"These features will certainly decrease the number of involved product administrators and the time to implement a product," Barrez says. "The management database will also provide role-based management. This means that the displays adjust based on your role, which is important for a large organization like ours."