Mainframe Management

Print and Output

Many services consist of generating and delivering information in printed or electronic form. Ensuring the right information gets to the right people, with full integrity, requires formal control and management.

Print (physical) and Output (electronic) facilities and services need to be formally managed because:

• They often represent the tangible output of a service. The ability to measure that this output has reached the appropriate destination is therefore very important (e.g. checking whether files with financial transaction data have actually reached a bank through an FTP service)
• Physical and electronic output often contains sensitive or confidential information. It is vital that the appropriate levels of security are applied to both the generation and the delivery of this output.

Many organizations will have centralized bulk printing requirement s which IT Operations must handle.

In addition to the physical loading and re-loading of paper and the operation and care of the printers, other activities may be needed, such as:

• Agreement and setting of pre-notification of large print runs and alert s to prevent excessive printing by rogue print jobs
• Physical control of high-value stationery such as company cheques or certificates, etc.
• Management of the physical and electronic storage required to generate the output. In many cases IT will be expected to provide archives for the printed and electronic materials
• Control of all printed material so as to adhere to data protection legislation and regulation e.g. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the USA, or FSA (Financial Services Authority) in the UK.

Where print and output services are delivered directly to the user s, it is important that the responsibility for maintaining the printers or storage devices is clearly defined. For example, most users assume that cleaning and maintenance of printers must be performed by IT. If this is not the case, this must be clearly stated in the SLA.

Mainframes are still widely in use and have well established and mature practices. Mainframes form the central component of many services and its performance will therefore set a baseline for service performance and user or customer expectations, although they may never know that they are using the mainframe.

The ways in which mainframe management teams are organized are quite diverse. In some organizations Mainframe Management is a single, highly specialized team that manages all aspects from daily operations through to system engineering. In other organizations, the activities are performed by several teams or departments, with engineering and third-level support being provided by one team and daily operations being combined with the rest of IT Operations (and very probably managed through the Operations Bridge).

Typically, the following activities are likely to be undertaken:

• Mainframe operating system maintenance and support
• Third-level support for any mainframe-related incidents/problems
• Writing job scripts
• System programming
• Interfacing to hardware (H/W) support; arranging maintenance, agreeing slots, identifying H/W failure, liaison with H/W engineering.
• Provision of information and assistance to Capacity Management to help achieve optimum throughput, utilization and performance from the mainframe.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23