VIEW POINT

Shrinking Mainframe Operating Costs A

Holistic Approach

Abstract
Mainframe systems have been widely used to run enterprise line of business as well as to
store the business data. Operating a mainframe environment consumes nearly 10% to 40%
of companys IT budget, depending on the size of the mainframe landscape. Today tighter
operating margins, increased competition and rapidly evolving business environment
makes it a business necessity to reduce mainframe operating costs while simultaneously
investing in innovation and growth to gain competitive edge. As part of mainframe cost
reduction exercise, most organizations focus on MIPS (Million Instructions per Second)
optimization as this is a low cost and low risk approach. However, we have seen that several
other techniques can also result in huge savings (Refer Fig. 1). While they may be slightly
expensive as compared to MIPS optimization but should not be ignored. This point of
view, in addition to MIPS optimization, will describe three other techniques/strategies that
organizations could potentially use to reduce their mainframe operating cost.

Reduction
Did you know that MIPS optimization is just one of the many techniques to reduce mainframe
operating cost?
Need for Mainframe Cost
Reducing mainframe operating expenses
is one of the top agendas for any CIO. The
need for reducing mainframe cost depends
on a number of parameters like criticality,
risk, performance, investment, reliability-
availability-scalability etc.
Two approaches that can be adopted to
reduce the mainframe operating expense
are explained below:
1. Modernize the mainframe applications
into a cost effective, equally capable
distributed environment.
2. Optimize the current mainframe
landscape to achieve cost benefits.
The issues related to mainframe systems
such as aging of technology and
platforms, high operational cost and
complex integration issues are some of
the key driving factors to modernize the
mainframe applications. Modernizing
applications provide significant cost
savings, increased business agility, and
improved scalability.
The second approach of optimizing
the current mainframe landscape will
quickly and relatively painlessly minimize
organizations mainframe operating costs.
Organizations that have large mainframe
systems could adopt a mixed strategy
depending on the nature of applications
and its functions in the organization.
Strategies for Mainframe Cost
Reduction
One technique that most organizations
adopt for reducing mainframe operating
costs is to optimize MIPS (Million
Instructions per Second).
In this section, in addition to MIPS
optimization, we will explore three other
1. Reduce Licensing Cost
Hardware Licensing Cost It includes
strategies that organizations could use.
all costs associated with acquiring and
They are: maintaining hardware servers and other
1. Reduce licensing cost infrastructure components necessary
to deploy, maintain, and manage the
2. Offload workloads from mainframe
mainframe landscape. The licensing cost of
3. Reduce/Optimize storage cost
mainframe hardware contributes to nearly
and
20% of the total mainframe cost. Reducing
4. Reduce/Optimize MIPS utilization hardware licensing cost can help reduce
overall IT infrastructure capital expense
and operating expense.
Cost Benefit Analysis for the four
Mainframe Cost Reduction Strategies Software Licensing Cost It includes
the cost paid to different vendors for their
High
software, tools, utilities, and products
that run on the mainframe infrastructure.
Mainframe software licenses often costs
Medium
more than the hardware licenses and
it contributes to nearly 42% of total
mainframe costs. To reduce software
Small
licensing cost organizations could identify
and eliminate unused, under-utilized
and out-dated software/tools. Reviewing
Offload Optimize Reduce Reduce
workloads MIPS Licensing Storage licenses of different software periodically
Cost Cost
and replacing them with comparatively
less expensive versions provides another
Reduction in Implementation
Mainframe Cost lever for reducing software cost.t.
Operating Cost
Figure 1: Source Infosys previous project
experiences
Did you know that
mainframe operating cost
could also be reduced by
offloading workloads,
optimizing storage and
managing licensing cost ?
 i. Reduce Hardware Cost
Ooad workload to specialty engines
Defer hardware upgrades
ii. Reduce Software Cost
Eliminate unused/duplicate software
Replace expensive software
Replace old hardware
Right-size under-utilized resources
Minimize the need for Direct Access
Storage Device (DASD)
Store compressed data
2. Offload Workloads from
Mainframe
Mainframe CPU resources are expensive
when compared to distributed platforms.
Offloading high MIPS consuming
workloads from mainframe to distributed
platforms can reduce MIPS consumption
there by reducing the mainframe
operating cost. While offloading workloads,
organization could also explore the
possibility of utilizing Cloud to reduce
infrastructure cost and open source
software such as Hadoop for moving
batch workloads. Given below are some
commonly used approaches for offloading
workloads out of mainframe.
Re-hosting high MIPS consuming
workloads -Re-hosting is a low-cost option
as it reuses the original business logic and
other assets from the original mainframe
system. It can increase flexibility and
reduce the systems total cost of ownership.
Re-hosting offers the opportunity to retain
the valuable business logic in existing
applications and data while leveraging the
advantages of a much lower cost platform
running on Unix, Linux or Microsoft
Windows.
Re-engineering high MIPS consuming
workloads - Re-engineering is the process
of gathering requirements from the legacy
Reduce
Offload
Licensing
Workloads
Cost
Mainframe
Cost
Reduction
Strategy
Optimize
Optimize
Storage
MIPS
Cost
application, blending them with new
requirements and then redeveloping the
application on newer platforms using
newer technologies. Reengineering is a
preferred approach for organizations that
want to add more functionality to their
existing systems and move to modern
technologies and platforms.
Offloading test and development
workloads to distributed platforms
-Several products are available in the
market that provide scalable options
of moving the test and development
platforms to Windows, thereby enabling
development and testing to take place on
more cost-effective platforms. This helps
an organization free-up the MIPS spend on
development and testing effort.
3. Reduce/Optimize Storage
Cost
A good storage management technique
helps reduce storage cost by efficiently
using the existing storage capacity. It
would also help to allocate resources based
on business priorities and thereby saving
processing time and storage space.
To reduce storage cost, organizations
could minimize usage of expensive DASD
(Direct Access Storage Device) and instead
supplement their primary storage with
Re-host high MIPS consuming
workloads
Re-engineer high MIPS consuming
workloads
O-load test and development
workloads to distributed platforms
Batch workload optimization
Online workload optimization
Database optimization
Schedule optimization
tape or relatively inexpensive Open System
Disks. Moving huge and less frequently
used datasets and test region data sets to
tape can also help control storage cost.
4. Reduce/Optimize MIPS
Utilization
Buying MIPS is costly and takes up a
significant portion of the mainframe cost,
so reducing MIPS can be a great technique
to reduce mainframe operating cost. This
low-risk approach help organisations
cut costs, reduce the batch window and
improve responsiveness while requiring
minimal investment to locate MIPS
reduction opportunities. By lowering MIPS
consumption, organizations can delay
costly processor upgrades and reduce
monthly software license fees. It also allows
organizations to increase response time,
increase throughput and reduce batch
window. To optimize MIPS, organizations
can look at ways to optimize batch
workloads, online workloads, databases &
schedules. Infosys through its white paper
named Mainframe Batch Optimization A
five phase approach has described how
batch workloads could be optimized by
changing system configuration, reducing
application failures, modifying batch
schedules and implementing the data in
memory techniques.

Conclusion
MIPS optimization, while a well-known Re-hosting over 9 million lines of mainframe code, 9.5TB of
method in the industry, is not the only
technique which organizations could
use to reduce mainframe operating cost.
Recently, for a leading CPG company
data files and 2 TB of DB2 data to distributed platform gave
our client a saving of 25-35 MUSD over 5 years and increase
in application performance by over 30%.

based in US, Infosys implemented a
comprehensive mainframe cost reduction
solution by re-hosting over 9 million
lines of mainframe code, 9.5TB of data
files and 2 TB of DB2 data to distributed
platform. This gave our client a saving of
25-35 MUSD over 5 years and increase
in application performance by over
About the Authors
30%. In another instance, through MIPS
optimization and storage optimizations,
Infosys helped a leading retailer in UK to Kiran Muraleedharan is a Technology Lead with diverse experience in
reduce their mainframe operating cost by mainframe technologies and Aswathy Babu is a Technology Analyst, both in

8%. the Technology Modernization practice of Retail, CPG, Logistics and Life Sciences
Unit of Infosys.
Choosing your own cost reduction path
depends on several factors including Infosys has a dedicated Technology Modernization practice with over 1000+

current licensing model, mainframe resources experienced in executing large scale mainframe cost reduction

technology landscape, system parameters projects. It also has Centre of Excellence for Mainframe Technologies, Testing,

and the organizations infrastructure Cloud and Mobility.

roadmap. We believe the success of Infosys also has vast experience in providing end-to-end optimization solutions
a mainframe cost reduction exercise including portfolio and business case analysis, solution implementation, and
depends largely on using a holistic deployment.
approach of selecting and then prioritizing
multiple strategies and techniques, beyond
just MIPS optimization.

About Infosys
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