Is the Coronavirus Affecting IOPS in Mainframe Shops?
It is now evident that the impact of COVID-19 can be measured through I/O activity in z/OS datacenters. The daily graphs provided by EADM have shown customers that I/O numbers have dropped sharply since emergency measures requested large Enterprises to have their personnel work from home.
On March 17 2020, a confinement plan was implemented in France. That day, during Transaction Processing between 10 and 11 AM, I/O activity dropped 50%. meaning employees had problems accessing z/OS resources. Did employees working remotely have adequate network resources and did they have the right authorizations to work from home?
A similar analysis with a weighted average over 8 hours (TP) shows a much lesser impact.
It is therefore critical to analyze I/O performance per specific hour frame in order to observe that employees had issues accessing the Enterprise z/OS.
The impact of COVID-19is much less significant during BATCH because program chains remain the same: Save / Sort / Save.
