This blog was written in partnership with our friends at BMC
Pundits confirm that more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day, a number that won’t be slowing down any time soon. With so much data created daily, IT leaders often find themselves pulled between two critical, yet competing demands: Managing this ceaseless flood of information and serving it up fast enough to meet customers’ rising performance expectations.
As business leaders see answering—and exceeding—these demands as a key enabler of growth, the pressure to handle more data and transactions will only increase. The trouble is, there’s no simple, single answer to both demands. Changing an application or index structure won’t eliminate the bind. Adding hardware may help mitigate outages, but the costs can quickly spiral out of control. Of course, it’s always possible to meet demanding SLAs by skipping important data quality and integrity steps or creating unsustainable workarounds—but that just means more problems in the future.
In fact, adding more people, hardware and infrastructure into the mix only serves to increase risk and similarly, costs will continue to rise. An IT environment that continually grows in size and complexity eventually buckles under its own weight, leading to more downtime and more dissatisfied customers. And all the while, the data onslaught rolls on unabated.
To get out ahead of rapidly rising data volumes—as well as exacting customer expectations—companies must make data and applications available around the clock, without neglecting maintenance schedules. And they must protect and secure that data, while making sure it can be quickly and completely recovered following an incident.
That’s why companies are turning to Advanced and BMC. Our intelligent automation and efficient processing empowers organisations to liberate their legacy data and tap into capabilities and power that reside in Db2, so they can deliver maximum performance and lasting availability—without adding resources or increasing complexity.
GO RELATIONAL
Today, many companies are facing increasing difficulty trying to find skilled employees to manage their pre-relational databases such as IDMS or Adabas and the applications that drive them. This gap is causing organisations to incur huge expenses related to closing that talent gap. Expertise in these legacy technologies is drying up quickly as most employees well versed on these technologies are sunsetting their careers into retirement, and new developers and database administrators (DBAs) coming up early in their careers aren’t being trained or taught the skills necessary to effectively manage these legacy systems. As such, company leaders have come to recognise that transitioning to a more widely embraced relational database such as Db2, and more standard languages such as COBOL – represent the golden ticket to having access to a much larger pool of skilled resources and a broader array of tools to maintain and ready their databases and applications for the future.
Luckily we at Advanced have the solutions and the expertise to address this issue. We are the market leading experts in automated pre-relational database modernisation. Our approach and offerings supercharge IDMS, Adabas, and other migrations by harnessing fully automated conversion capabilities. We work closely with our customers to plan the migration from, and automate the migration to IDMS and Db2. By generating a new Db2 database to replace the functionality, set relationships, indexes, and data structures that make up the IDMS network database that’s already in place, we empower organisations to remove the risk and expense of finding relevant resources to maintain their business critical systems shackled by the constraints of legacy.
ONGOING DATA MANAGEMENT
On the other side of automated conversion, companies can take advantage of features that were previously unavailable to them via their legacy databases. Take BMC’s Next Generation Technology, for example, which was designed for modern, complex Db2 environments with the goal of enabling DBAs to proactively manage Db2 for optimised costs and peak performing applications. With a centralised architecture that provides intelligent policy-driven automation, combined with innovative processing methods, DBAs can easily manage increasing amounts of data with zero downtime and high integrity. Taking advantage of these features ultimately helps organisations fuel their much needed digital transformation demands. Customers can also reduce CPU and elapsed time reduction, eliminate downtime, lower DASD, and simplify complex data management processes.
When Charles Bachman and his team of pioneering minds developed what would later become IDMS at General Electric back in the 1960s, they could never have imagined that more than 50 years later, some of the world’s most prominent organisations would still be totally reliant on their invention to run their business critical operations. Nor could they have ever predicted that in 2019, most of those organisations would face such a dearth of skilled employees to manage those systems.
Fortunately, for companies in need of a modernisation strategy and automated conversion from IDMS to Db2, Advanced and BMC have teamed up to provide robust solutions to meet this growing need.
To learn more about how real-world customers have leveraged IDMS to Db2 modernisations read these case studies:
Be sure to check out BMC’s Database Management for Db2 on z/OS® page to learn how you can reduce your data management costs by up to 65 percent.