Compuware Enhances Strobe 4.1 and iStrobe 4.1

February 9, 2010

Compuware has made a series of enhancements to Strobe 4.1 and iStrobe 4.1 that help customers save money by increasing visibility into DB2 applications, often the biggest consumer of expensive CPU cycles. Strobe is the cornerstone of Compuware’s MIPS Management Solution, which makes customers more productive by rapidly finding performance improvement opportunities to reduce costs.

“MIPS consumption by mainframe applications is an ongoing management concern,” said Tim Grieser, Program Vice President, IDC. He continued, “MIPS management is a key to controlling mainframe costs by identifying the source of consumption and then optimizing and preventing recurring problems.”

Strobe 4.1, combined with iStrobe 4.1, strengthens Compuware’s MIPS Management Solution by providing a more comprehensive view into DB2 performance. Strobe provides not only detailed information on where and how DB2 applications are performing, but also provides insightful remediation recommendations, allowing customers to delay or cancel costly hardware upgrades.

Compuware's MIPS Management solution is a proactive approach to controlling IT costs by measuring performance and identifying failures. With Compuware’s MIPS Management solution, IT departments can reduce application inefficiencies that erode performance and use excessive CPU time.

“One of the most overlooked opportunities to reduce mainframe hardware and software costs is for organizations to better manage MIPS consumption,” said Rose Rowe, Vice President, Mainframe Strategy, Compuware. “DB2 is often responsible for unplanned MIPS growth. Strobe 4.1 provides more detailed DB2 information that is necessary to get MIPS usage under control and identify opportunities for savings.”

In addition to providing new support for DB2 stored procedures and triggers, Strobe 4.1 also now provides performance details on run time statistics including the number of GETPAGES, information that is vital for Database Administrators to tune their applications. If DB2 parallelism -- the ability to run one transaction on multiple CPUs -- is utilized, Strobe 4.1 can provide complete multi-thread parallelism execution details. For demanding Distributed Data Facility applications, Strobe now allows performance analysts to filter by user ID, user transaction and/or user workstation, resulting in a more focused review of critical performance data.