CA has announced new capabilities for managing mainframe operations, hoping to cash in on the resurgent popularity of the technology among IT departments.

CA’s new Mainframe Suites will include functionality to manage performance, security, tape utilisation, compliance, resources, database performance and storage optimisation.

Marcel den Hartog, CA mainframe and security marketing director, said a number of factors are causing people to re-consider using the mainframe.

A mainframe environment is seen as a greener alternative to a distributed server environment because it can handle a number of workloads at once and has a higher utilisation rate, he argued. Also, IBM has re-developed the mainframe to increase its performance and is selling it at a lower cost, firms have found that building new data servers is too expensive, and others have realised the mainframe is not that old fashioned; it can run new applications and databases.

Den Hartog said the suites work to decrease the complexity of the IT environments by giving organisations new management tools, as well as providing automation and integration capabilities. “As the people who used to work on mainframes are retiring, there is now a lack of knowledge on how to operate mainframes,” den Hartog said.

Den Hartog also spoke of CA’s new consulting program that will help eligible customers optimise their use of existing software resources. “Lots of organisations do not even know the value of the software they are using and the people that installed it left a long time ago.”