IntelliMagic Direction for z/OS

IntelliMagic Direction provides in-depth knowledge of how your specific workloads will perform as a result of growth and/or hardware configuration scenarios. IntelliMagic Direction shows current and expected response times, component utilization levels, and throughput limits for your storage environment.

For most organizations budgets are tight and there is more pressure than ever on storage management to contain the spiraling storage growth within a steady or decreasing budget. Compounding this challenge, enterprise disk storage becomes increasingly complex every year as more and more options that influence performance and throughput emerge. When it comes to storage configurations, IntelliMagic Direction gives you the power to determine the best configuration for your workload so you can purchase with confidence.

During large storage migration projects project managers and architects struggle to ensure that required activities such as server preparation, data migration and capacity planning are completed on time and on budget. Performance planning and performance management are those kind of activities that are often forgotten until there is a crisis. One of the primary reasons for this reality is the lack of tools for predicting and planning performance impacts. IntelliMagic Direction addresses this challenge by providing a way to model existing workloads and combine new workloads on any major hardware platform. Take the guesswork out of the migrations and use IntelliMagic Direction to help you avoid running out of performance capacity.

Do you ever wish there was a way to see into the future? If your job requires you to maintain peak performance from your systems it sure would be nice to predict when your current storage environment will run out of steam. With IntelliMagic Direction you can create as many future scenarios as you want to try to better understand how future workload changes or hardware changes will impact your storage environment. IntelliMagic Direction can provide a long term predictive view of your storage environment's growth and behavior.

IntelliMagic Direction models copy services allowing you to see the impact on response times and storage component utilizations.

Supported z/OS Storage Systems

IntelliMagic Direction for z/OS is a storage vendor-independent modeling software product that supports a wide variety of storage systems attached to z/OS. IntelliMagic Direction is also available for SAN environments.

IntelliMagic Direction for z/OS gets its input from data files that are created automatically by IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS, or can use RMF measurement data directly.

IntelliMagic is continually adding support for new storage systems and features based on customer requirements. If you have a need for a platform that you do not see listed, please contact us to discuss.

Vendor	z/OS attached Storage Model	Supported?
Dell EMC	DMX Family	✔
Dell EMC	VMAX 20K, 40K, 100K, 200K, 400K, 450F, 850F	✔
Dell EMC	PowerMax 8000	✔
Dell EMC	VMAX 950F	in development
Hitachi	USP Family	✔
Hitachi	VSP Family	✔
Hitachi	VSP G1000	✔
HPE	XP 12000, XP 20000, XP 24000	✔
HPE	XP P9500	✔
HPE	XP7	✔
IBM	DS8700, DS8800, DS8870, DS8884, DS8884F, DS8886, DS8886F, DS8888, DS8888F	✔

Note: Disk Magic for IBM only supports IBM Storage Systems. If you are familiar with Disk Magic through IBM or as an IBM Business Partner, and are interested in receiving more information about the end-user version called IntelliMagic Direction, please contact us.

Features

Broad Platform Support

IntelliMagic Direction supports z/OS-attached storage systems from all major vendors. There is a also a version that supports SAN storage. See Supported Hardware for storage system support.
Interactive scenario modeling

IntelliMagic Direction runs interactively on a Microsoft Windows PC. No connection to the actual storage system or mainframe is needed. Results are presented in the graphical user interface and in text reports or Excel charts. See Sample Results for some examples of the GUI output.
Automated Input
IntelliMagic Direction gets its input from data files that are created automatically by IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS, or can use RMF measurement data directly.
- Evaluate the effect on response times of moving workloads to different tiers of storage
- Understand and track the utilization levels of Disk Subsystem processors, channels, host adapters, and RAID ranks
- Assess the performance impact of moving from Fibre to FATA disk drives
- Compare bandwidth requirements and response time impact of various copy services solutions
- Assess the result of consolidating multiple older disk storage systems in one new storage system
- Analyze if critical applications run better on alternative configurations, for example RAID-10 or RAID-5
- Predict the performance benefit gained from increasing cache size, adding channels, etc.
- Assess whether energy efficient high capacity drives will support service levels demanded by business needs
Scenario Modeling
After loading the workload and configuration data, IntelliMagic Direction creates a base model of the current situation. Once this base is created it is very easy to model the impacts of proposed changes to the hardware and/or workload. The following list contains some specific examples of scenarios you might want to run:
- Determine if your workload runs smoothly on less expensive large capacity drives
- Evaluate the effect on response times of moving workloads to tiered storage
- Understand and track the utilization levels of FICON channels, FICON front-end adapters, disk drives, storage system processors, etc.
- Assess the performance impact or benefit of replacing a subset of the Fibre drives with SATA or Flash drives
- Compare bandwidth requirements and response time impact of various copy services solutions
- Assess the result of consolidating multiple older storage systems into one new storage system
- Analyze if critical applications run better on alternative configurations, for example RAID-10 or RAID-5
- Predict the performance benefit gained from increasing cache size, adding FICON channels, etc.
- Assess whether different drive tiers will support service levels demanded by business needs

Sample Results

With IntelliMagic Direction you can easily assess the impact of workload or hardware changes and quickly generate dozens of charts for presentation of findings to management or technical audiences. The following samples represent just a few of the options available within IntelliMagic Direction for z/OS.

Evaluate Impact of Increased Workload

With IntelliMagic Direction you can accurately predict the I/O service times and utilizations for a new or existing configuration, based on either a description of your workload or measurements from an existing configuration. The following chart demonstrates the service time impact for a z/OS workload with storage on an HDS USP-V storage system. The workload was incrementally increased by 1,000 I/Os.

Evaluate the Impact of Changing from RAID10 to RAID5

With IntelliMagic Direction you can decide if your workload will perform adequately on different RAID configurations such as RAID 5. The following graph depicts the impact of incrementally increasing the z/OS I/O workload by 1,000 I/Os/sec on an EMC VMAX storage system. The scenario is modeled using RAID5 and RAID10. For this particular workload the response time drastically increases when using RAID5 verus RAID10.