Mainframe Performance & Scalability SME

Mainframe Performance & Scalability SME

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6-Month contract - Inside IR35 - market rate

London based - will consider fully remote

Finance sector

We are looking for a senior Mainframe Performance & Scalability SME to support a short, focused assessment for a major UK financial services client.

This is not a general mainframe systems-programming role. We need someone who can take incomplete production evidence, diagnose where scalability risk genuinely sits, and confidently lead technical conversations with experienced client architects, platform engineers and operations SMEs.

The assignment

The client operates a long-established pension administration platform on IBM mainframe technology. The assessment is looking at how the platform will behave under future business growth and concentrated demand events, and what should be:

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• tuned or optimised;
  

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• archived or cleaned up;
  

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• moved away from the transactional core;
  

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• re-engineered;
  

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• monitored differently; or
  

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• addressed through additional capacity.
  

The work includes a particular focus on Db2, CICS, mainframe capacity, batch processing, workload attribution and observability.

There is also a historic question around a data-centre / IBM Z16 migration, increased TLS processing and an associated increase in general-purpose MSU consumption, which needs to be assessed from evidence rather than assumed causation.

Skills & Experience:

The ideal consultant will have strong hands-on experience in the following areas.

Db2 for z/OS performance and scalability

Deep practical experience investigating:

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• table and index growth;
  

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• index design and access-path performance;
  

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• RUNSTATS, REORG and statistics strategy;
  

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• access-path regression;
  

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• buffer-pool performance;
  

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• GETPAGEs and I/O;
  

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• locking, timeouts and deadlocks;
  

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• high-cost SQL and packages;
  

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• data archival / lifecycle strategies;
  

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• performance behaviour as database volumes grow. xsabvtc
  

We particularly want someone able to look at an established Db2 estate and determine whether there is accumulated performance or data-management debt that should be remediated before simply adding infrastructure.

CICS performance

Strong understanding of:

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• CICS-to-Db2 workload behaviour;
  

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• transaction / program / package correlation;
  

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• threadsafe execution and open...