Storage Resource Management for the Enterprise Server

Summary

MAINVIEW® provides users with the most comprehensive systems performance solution that is available for enterprise server environments. MAINVIEW encompasses automated operations for OS/390 and supports key subsystems such as IMS, CICS, and DB2. Now, the integration of the Storage Resource Manager (SRM) into the MAINVIEW architecture allows customers to include storage in their MAINVIEW management solution.

Storage is possibly the largest contributor to application response time because of the mechanical nature of disk I/O. In addition, and despite declining storage hardware costs, storage expenses have continued to rise. By conservative estimates, management costs exceed initial acquisition costs by a factor of 3 to 1. Indeed, industry experts are unanimous in their assessment of the dominant role of management costs in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for storage, only differing on the magnitude of the management multiplier. As a result, storage represents the largest single IT expense. With MAINVIEW Storage Resource Manager (SRM), users can manage storage expenses more effectively while ensuring optimum storage performance.

MAINVIEW customers can increase the productivity of their IT staff by implementing MAINVIEW SRM. The integrated architecture and common facilities of the MAINVIEW products maximize staff efficiencies across the board, from installation, customization, and maintenance to daily operational use. With dramatically increasing storage capacity and the continuing decline in technical staff, MAINVIEW SRM is an essential part of enterprise server management.

Why Manage Storage Resources?

Because storage hardware costs have declined to all-time lows, it is tempting to assume that adding new capacity is the easy and inexpensive way to address storage performance, availability, and capacity problems. However, the benefits often fade as the environment becomes larger and more complex.

The initial cost of fully configured and installed capacity accounts for a relatively small portion of the total storage ownership costs. Industry analysts agree that management expense is a multiple of the initial acquisition cost. The estimates of storage management costs range from three to ten times the cost per megabyte. So, committing capital to new storage capacity--that is, "throwing hardware" at a performance or space problem--does not solve the problem, but actually adds to your storage cost.

Client/server storage is often cited as the source of these runaway management costs. However, most Enterprise Server (OS/390) installations have also experienced large increases in installed storage capacity. Futher, IT organizations are faced with flat or reduced head count and a shortage of experienced storage administrators to manage the increased storage resources. When an OS/390 system provides the back-end processing for a rapidly growing business, IT must solve similar problems for client/server and mainframe environments, even though the technology differs.

In today's demanding economy, the requirement for business justification of IT investments has returned. At the same time, your business success requires optimum performance and guaranteed availability. To meet these requirements, you need the ability to increase utilization as well as manage storage availability from an application-centric perspective. MAINVIEW SRM enables you to meet these requirements.

What Are the Key Functions of a MAINVIEW SRM Solution?

A complete MAINVIEW SRM solution reduces both hard dollar and soft dollar expenses while improving performance. To achieve these objectives in an enterprise server environment, the solution must provide a drill-down capability into the storage subsystem to

With storage expertise and head count declining, an effective storage solution should provide

With MAINVIEW SRM, capital costs for acquisitions of new storage can be deferred or reduced through the recovery of current storage capacity. Analysts estimate that over 50% of storage resources are ineffectively used and unavailable for new allocations. Conservative estimates indicate that by identifying wasted space and data sets that are unmanageable by processes such as DFSMShsm, you can recover more than 15% of current capacity. Reclaiming this space and deleting obsolete data sets impacts all of the systems that access and protect the data housed on this storage in terms of improved performance and reduced costs. Once reclaimed, users can drive utilization higher without jeopardizing throughput because of the MAINVIEW SRM facilities that ensure space availability and eliminate space related abends.

Now, for the first time, users can manage their storage in context by correlating the storage subsystem with the other elements in a workload or job. The comprehensive approach offered by MAINVIEVW SRM allows users to manage the infrastructure based upon response time goals that align with business priorities.

With the integration of SRM into the MAINVIEW (MVI) architecture, you can easily add storage-specific monitoring and management to your MAINVIEW systems management solution. The result: MAINVIEW SRM provides increased system and staff efficiencies through the integrated MAINVIEW architecture. Examples include

The Power of the MVI Architecture

The MAINVIEW family of products is based on a tightly integrated architecture. Called MVI, this architecture enables comprehensive systems management with the ability to manage application performance across the infrastructure, including SYSPLEX implementations. The MVI architecture provides common installation, customization, and maintenance facilities for all MAINVIEW products. MVI features a built-in separation of the data, application, and end-use aspects of systems management for maximum flexibility and extensibility. MVI communications, data collection, and end-user terminal sessions (TSs) execute in three distinct address spaces for



- Figure 1 - The MAINVIEW architecture supports cross-product integration across multiple systems through the use of Coordinating Address Spaces (CAS) that coordinate all of the Product Address Spaces (PAS) across multiple systems and LPARS. From a common Terminal Session (TS), users can use hyperlinks to navigate among the MAINVIEW products, accessing multiple active windows from a single pane of glass via ISPF or a Web browser.

This multiple address space structure provides a consistent, scalable, and flexible environment for managing hundreds of OS/390 systems. This allows users to

MAINVIEW products share a common ISPF as well as a browser-based interface. Both are fully customizable so that users can easily establish specific views and share them at will. Both numeric and graphical displays can include color-coding to reflect user-defined thresholds. When using the browser interface, users need only download a Java applet and exercise existing security to connect to and manage their systems, achieving remote access without an emulator or the requirement for an operating system. With either the ISPF or the browser interface, users can customize and simultaneously display as many views (windows) as desired. MVI active windowing allows users to combine views from multiple products to achieve immediate access to critical information.



- Figure 2 - The browser-based interface, MAINVIEW Explorer, enables remote administration that is platform independent. Using MAINVIEW Explorer, you can quickly pinpoint problems that impact performance and space availability.

MVI architecture also provides industry leading automation facilities across the family with MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR. With the Alarm Manager facility that is included with all MAINVIEW products, users can elevate alerts to PATROL Enterprise Manager for enterprise-wide event management.

Extending the MAINVIEW Solution with SRM

DFSMS and Performance

MAINVIEW provides a comprehensive overview of DFSMS storage group activity, including performance by storage group. The MAINVIEW Single System Image (SSI) displays storage group usage across multiple images and/or LPARS, simplifying the management of shared storage and providing a complete picture of the impact of various workloads on storage performance and capacity use.

MAINVIEW SRM provides a drill-down capability into storage-specific information. Administrators can view trends and identify patterns or peaks so that hot spots can be relieved. These trends also lay the foundation for threshold-based automation. Using MAINVIEW SRM data set level reports and views of the storage behind the storage groups, administrators can quickly identify which data sets or jobs are using the most storage and determine what should be done to relieve the problem. For example:

The MAINVIEW SRM daily summary for a storage group includes information about total usage and free space for VSAM, partitioned, and sequential data sets. This information is useful in determining daily tasks that administrators need to execute, schedule or address in their automation routines.

Data Set Performance and Device-Specific Support

MAINVIEW SRM offers real time and historical analyses, providing data set I/O and response time metrics. MAINVIEW SRM can provide a view of data sets from a job perspective, analyzing how the data set I/O performance impacts job processing (through-put).

MAINVIEW SRM also approaches performance from a DASD perspective, allowing analysis for all the jobs that utilize a particular data set for specific time periods and circumstances. The ability of MAINVIEW SRM to sort and filter based on a wide range of data set characteristics makes it easy to narrow the search to specific time frames, volumes, and data sets. Rule and filter lists allow actions to be applied selectively and without JCL changes. Filter and rule lists can be saved for reuse, making them extremely effective for policy-based or application-centric management.

MAINVIEW SRM provides performance data that identifies historical trends, including response time, queue, and cache analyses. Additionally, it provides visibility for volume and storage group conflicts so that the causes and remedies for disk I/O problems are more easily accessible. Device-specific support allows you to understand the logical to physical mapping within RAID implementations, as well as the status and impact of specific data availability functions of these devices. Currently, MAINVIEW SRM delivers this type of analyses for EMC, IBM®, and STK disk arrays.

Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)

MAINVIEW SRM provides a comprehensive view of DFSMShsm (HSM) activity across the mainframe enterprise, identifying delays and the task involved. MAINVIEW SRM complements this functionality by initiating HSM actions for data sets and jobs as needed rather than waiting for the daily space management process. This approach ensures that important applications have the space required to run successfully the first time.

MAINVIEW SRM provides historical information on the tape and the backup and migration catalog data sets, allowing analysis of HSM activity trends and control of backup and migration activity. This capability improves efficiencies while ensuring that HSM activities are successful without impacting business processes.

MAINVIEW SRM provides a key facility that eliminates a major cause of CPU thrashing and unproductive HSM processing: the workday calendar. The workday calendar allows you to set aggressive migration policies without the risk of migrating frequently used data sets over a holiday. A typical policy is to migrate data sets that are used daily after two days without access. This policy would result in the migration of these data sets every time there was a three day weekend, and their immediate recall the following morning. The calendar function takes the holidays into account, preventing the unnecessary migration of the data sets.

A wide variety of predefined reports provided by MAINVIEW SRM gives HSM administrators the information they need to effectively manage processes, clean up errors, and reduce costs.

Automated Applications Management

MAINVIEW VistaPoint is the only application management tool for the enterprise server. Because storage performance and availability are key to meeting any service level, MAINVIEW SRM complements VistaPoint by

Event Management

MAINVIEW Alarm Manager provides monitoring of alarm conditions based on established thresholds, or thresholds set up by the user. The inclusion of Storage Resource Management in the MAINVIEW family extends these capabilities to storage-specific events, including thresholds and device messages.

The Alarm Manager display includes critical, major, minor, and warning alarms, as well as color-coded informational messages. Hyperlinking allows users to move directly from an alarm message to relevant reports and views for rapid problem analysis. In many cases, you can resolve the problem by issuing a command from the report. For more complex actions, you can use the MAINVIEW SRM Enterprise Storage Automation option to call utilities or execute a series of actions.

Comprehensive Automation

The MAINVIEW SRM solution includes rule and filter lists to provide dynamic automation in the areas of allocation control, pooling, construct development, abend prevention and recovery, and reporting. Using these filters and rules in combination with the accurate, real-time measures of peak utilization provided by MAINVIEW SRM, you can manage storage use by business priority using application-relevant groupings. You can even deny lower priority allocations to ensure that critical jobs run successfully.

MAINVIEW SRM automation is based on use and fragmentation thresholds and can initiate a sequence of self-monitored actions. After each step in the remedy, the product checks against success criteria, discontinuing further actions if the goals are met.

Enterprise Storage Automation extends the MAINVIEW SRM threshold automation with powerful rule-based actions that can be deployed as storage-specific solutions or as part of a comprehensive automation strategy. With online administration from an operator workstation, MAINVIW SRM ESA provides statistics online and in printed reports so that you have immediate access to information on the results of you automation strategies. Storage benefits from a well-developed automation engine that extends from two-way event management with an enterprise console (PATROL Enterprise Manager) to Continuous State Monitoring (CSM) for the SYSPLEX.

MAINVIEW SRM: A Look at Some of the Bits and Bytes

Following are some of the popular features of MAINVIEW SRM:

Professional Services for Storage Resource Management

BMC Software provides both packaged and customized professional services offerings for MAINVIEW SRM. These offerings include site assessments, product migration, implementation, customization services, and "knowledge transfer" to the customer's staff.

Migration services are provided for a broad range of storage products and are not limited to BMC Software offerings. Migrations performed are comprehensive and can be from product to product or platform to platform. From evaluation and planning through execution, testing, and knowledge transfer, migration projects cover all the requirements for a smooth transaction.

Popular packaged offerings include

Conclusion: SRM Provides a Quick Payback

The integration of storage resource management solutions with MAINVIEW combines the best of both worlds:

With MAINVIEW SRM, you can leverage your investment in MAINVIEW to amplify your investment returns by recovering space, optimizing I/O performance, and reducing management costs.