Regardless of your job title, job level, or job responsibilities, the COST of doing business is always critical. This has been a focus on Open Systems for many years, with practices currently in place to improve storage efficiencies. On the Mainframe, the attitude has always been "Oh, SMS will take care it", or "isn't that what HSM is for"? Unfortunately, this is no longer true. Upon further study, we're finding significant waste in most mainframe data centers. You might ask, "why is that so?"
When System Managed Storage was first shipped, typical storage capacities were measured in the low GB range. Now we're well into the TB and PB range, an increase of up to 1,000,000x. When SMS was first shipped, DASD media costs were in the $10-$15/MB range. Yes, that's per MB.
We've come a long way, and the capacities and complexities we're having to manage is explosive and will continue to be so. And we've gotten sloppy. ACS routines aren't necessarily optimized and oftentimes haven't been overhauled in years. JCL and REXX execs? Same thing. Necessary skills have retired, and although we've done a great job educating the younger cadre, we've not necessarily transferred the required experience and application knowledge. Who is going to tackle restructuring these massively complicated ACS and JCL routines?