Assume you’ve been given a directive by IT management to “tune” things. What strategies are available and how do you judge which ones are best? Considering the current economic climate, can any be implemented on a shoestring budget? Can any of these tasks be assigned to resources with basic DBA skills and still be productively accomplished?…

The quantity of new enterprise application workloads being placed on the mainframe is growing, and the new IBM System z10 is playing a key role. In the choice between using a mainframe or distributed servers, the mainframe has many advantages, especially in today’s tough economy where cost-savings are critical…

Indecision reigns in IT departments. Do I implement shared workloads on the mainframe or virtualized images on distributed systems? How do I evaluate the relative value of governance vs. ease of development as core issues? How do I reduce run-time costs from 80 percent of the IT budget to 30 percent? Can I move to capacity planning that supports the ability to make good choices about how to use the appropriate platform for a specific job?…