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by Joel Klebanoff
Published 07/12/2007
System i is one of the easiest systems to manage and
administer, but it can't do everything on its own. Some administration, tuning,
and clean-up activities are required to maintain peak performance while keeping
processor and storage costs in check.
Just as system developers build
applications that automate many business tasks, system administration and
optimization should also be automated to as high a degree as possible to reduce
labor costs and improve the quality and completeness of that work. That's the
product niche that iTera
Director, from Vision
Solutions, targets.
iTera Director is a highly integrated set of
applications that proactively monitors, manages, and optimizes System i servers,
databases, and application environments.
In addition, Director maintains a
complete object cross-reference; tracks and analyzes file and object growth and
rates of growth; analyzes resource usage and non-usage; analyzes response times;
tracks, monitors, and reports on jobs and users; monitors, tracks, and manages
system inefficiencies; and more.
A rich GUI simplifies navigation through
Director and allows the results of Director's system information gathering and
analysis efforts to be displayed as multicolored graphs where appropriate. This
makes it easier to spot trends and areas of concern, such as the peaks and
valleys of resource usage that occur throughout the day.
In addition to
its graphical displays, Director allows system managers and administrators to
query, sort, filter, and drill down into system data to find important nuggets
of information that allow them to solve problems and optimize System i resource
use.
Director's object and file query, reporting, and graphing features
can help to bring storage costs under better control. The ability to easily find
files or objects that, say, haven't been accessed for years, allows you to
delete and/or archive considerable data that is no longer required. For example,
Vision reports that one customer almost immediately found more than 8,500
unnecessary save files on one server and a temporary file with over 1 billion
deleted records on another. Another customer learned that one of its programmers
was storing several gigabytes of personal music on the IFS. These are specific
instances, but Vision states that customers typically reclaim 15–40
percent of their storage space shortly after implementing iTera
Director.
Director's file and object query, reporting, and analysis
facilities work with all storage accessible through System i, including System i
disks, IFS files, ASPs, and iASPs.
Improving Performance
iTera Director uses the information it gathers on
storage usage and processes to recommend "best courses of action" to enhance
performance, reduce disk usage, and improve CPU utilization. You can accept,
reject, or modify the recommendations in real-time or make decisions and execute
the specific corrective tasks at a later date.
A common recommendation,
database reorganization, can often lead to significant performance enhancements
and storage reclamation. Director performs reorganizations more intelligently
than is the case with traditional tools. You can use Director to schedule
reorganizations for times when system resource usage is usually low. If
necessary, it breaks the reorganization process into smaller chunks that fit
into the specified maintenance periods.
Scheduling is an important aspect
because it allows you to perform "lights-out" tuning. You can specify times,
such as the middle of the night or on weekends, when Director will wake itself
up. During those times, it performs any tasks that administrators have assigned
to it and looks for ways to improve performance. Director can include in its
list of recommended best courses of action any performance enhancement options
it finds, or, depending on the recommended action, Director can undertake it
automatically if the appropriate parameter is set.
Most organizations
initially have more tuning opportunities than can be performed in a single
maintenance period. Consequently, Vision customers report that, because iTera
Director looks for tuning options and performs tuning tasks only during its
wakeup periods, performance tends to improve over time. Nonetheless, Vision
claims that customers generally see performance gains of 15 percent or more
within a short period.
A few specific tasks performed by iTera Director
include the following:
Optimize and Manage Files and
Objects
- Map every object on iSeries servers
- Reorganize all physical data
- Optimize all logical file usage
- Compress, clear, and resize objects
- Generate complete object cross-referencing
- Receive a complete analysis of object growth
Simplify the
Management of System Resources and Objects
- Manage message queues, out queues, and job queues automatically
- Manage spool files, with advanced functionality for saves, restores, and
archiving
- Manage domains using a range of functionality—from the grouping of
libraries at a high level to the granular management of specific objects at the
lowest level
Simplify Activity Management
- Analyze resource usage and non-usage
- Analyze response times
- Track, monitor, and report on jobs and users
Simplify
Database Management and Performance
- Reorganize-in-place to remove unused space and improve
performance
iTera Director's comprehensive functionality can help
system managers and administrators tackle an issue that has gained more
prominence in the past few years: regulatory compliance. SOX regulations insist
on the rigorous logging of all changes to data, yet commands executed through
the command line are not logged. Director solves this problem because most
things that system managers and administrators typically do through the command
line can be done through Director. The difference is that, because Director
maintains a comprehensive audit log, it's SOX-compliant.
One of the
primary selling points of iTera Director is that, by intelligently managing
locks and resources and providing scheduling capabilities, it can perform its
data gathering, system analysis, and tuning tasks without impacting users. If
you currently lock users out of the system while performing some system
administration tasks, doing those tasks while users are active will add many
hours of extra uptime each week.
For more information about iTera
Director, contact Vision Solutions at one of the addresses
below.
Joel
Klebanoff is a consultant, a writer, president of
Klebanoff
Associates, Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based
marketing communications firm, and author of BYTE-ing
Satire. Joel has 25 years experience working in
IT, first as a programmer/analyst and then as a marketer. He holds a Bachelor of
Science in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto.
Contact Joel at joel@klebanoff.com.
Vision
Solutions, Inc.
17911 Von Karman Ave.
Irvine, CA 92614
Tel:
949.253.6500
Fax: 949.253.6501
Web: www.visionsolutions.com
Email: info@visionsolutions.com
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