BMC Software has released data storage and AI productivity enhancements to its mainframe services.
The January 2025 update to the BMC AMI portfolio “breaks new ground” in enabling what is possible on the mainframe, says BMC, as it puts more meat on the bones of its recently announced Cloud Data Sets (CDS).
BMC bought Model9 in April 2023 and rebranded its software as the AMI Cloud. The patented Cloud Data Sets enables direct access to object storage on-prem or in a hyperscaler without modifying existing processes.
“Today, secondary backup storage and retrieval of mainframe data on tape and virtual tape libraries (VTLs) is costly and time-consuming,” said Priya Doty, vice president, solutions marketing for BMC AMI solutions. “The CDS feature in BMC AMI Cloud Data provides a seamless transition to object storage, which streamlines backup and recovery and offers cost savings over traditional solutions.”
Additionally, with CDS, current users of BMC AMI FDR (fast dump restore) can now redirect their tape backups to object storage without direct-access storage device (DASD), VTL staging, or any changes to code. BMC said this results in faster backups, improved disaster recovery, and the ability to eliminate the cost and infrastructure requirements of physical tape and VTL storage.
Last year, the supplier introduced a new COBOL code explanation feature in BMC AMI DevX Code Insights, powered by BMC AMI Assistant. Driven by generative AI, code explanation empowers developers by providing a short summary of a section of the code’s business logic and details of the code’s logic flow.
With the January update, BMC AMI Assistant now includes the “widest language support in the industry,” including explanations of code written in PL/I, JCL, and Assembler. This helps developers understand, review, extend, and test mainframe code with “unmatched efficiency,” said BMC.
The use of Java on mainframes is increasing, and with it demand for improved application performance. As part of the update, the new BMC AMI Strobe for Java enables “comprehensive” application performance management and analysis in a single tool with a user-friendly web interface. BMC AMI Strobe for Java allows developers to “easily pinpoint” sources of excessive resource demand and shift left to conduct performance tests earlier in the software delivery lifecycle.
In addition, powered by BMC AMI Assistant, new hybrid AI capabilities, which combine AI/ML with GenAI in BMC AMI Ops Insight, simplify root cause analysis, helping to reduce mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR). New interactive dashboards also allow users to create and personalize focused views based on their observability needs.
“By giving systems programmers greater control over the information they see, these customized insights enable faster and smarter decision-making,” claimed BMC.
