IBM System Storage DS8000 series is a high-performance, high-capacity series of enterprise disk storage systems that support continuous operations. IBM DS8000 systems are used for mission-critical applications that require the highest availability and system reliability possible.
IBM DS8000 Performance Management
The IBM DS8000 storage family offers superior performance and promises continuous access to data and applications, with 24×7 availability. Companies choose enterprise storage like the DS8000 for their performance, reliability and advanced management functions. However, the complexity of these enterprise storage systems makes performance management a challenging task. What’s more, application availability is not just dependent on the availability of the entire system. You may regularly experience hard-to-detect performance and configuration issues in your DS8000 storage environment that may hurt individual applications just like a real outage would, forcing you to spend a lot of time on fire-fighting.
IntelliMagic Vision for SAN offers a unique solution to manage the performance of the DS8000 in a way that matches the goals of great performance and continuous availability. It is designed to show risks and issues early, before disruptions actually occur, such that you can resolve underlying root causes before issues have an impact on production. This is much more valuable than dealing with a problem after it has impacted applications. At the same time, the product also greatly reduces the time required to investigate and resolve any problems that could not be predicted.
Tip! Read this white paper: Storage Performance Analysis for IBM DS8000
– This white paper will explain what to focus on when analyzing IBM DS8000 performance. It discusses the I/O path from the server to the storage, the IBM DS8000 storage architecture, and key measurements for the IBM DS8000 storage systems.
Uncover Hidden Risks
IntelliMagic Vision for SAN analyzes and rates DS8000 performance metrics and configuration data to detect hidden risks and potential bottlenecks and by highlighting configuration errors and imbalance. The results are shown in intelligent dashboards that condense thousands of metrics into an easy-to-read rated visualization. Every single underlying metric is also available for detailed root cause analysis through click-through custom navigation as well as pre-defined report sets.
The dashboards show the entire storage environment in a single pane of glass, regardless of whether the data center contains only IBM DS8000 arrays, or a combination of storage platforms from different vendors. The underlying data is presented in platform-specific report sets for the DS8000 family that show all the data specific to DS8000 arrays and terminology. The data is interpreted by the software using embedded expert knowledge about the DS8000 architecture, behavior and performance expectations.
Customer Experiences
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Finanz Informatik
Finanz Informatik, one of the largest banking IT service providers in Europe, relies on IntelliMagic Vision’s DASD performance monitoring capabilities, as a fundamental component of their storage performance management processes. This has enabled service level agreements at Finanz Informatik to be successfully and efficiently enforced during the previous years.
IntelliMagic plays a central role in creating automated, advanced storage management processes to deal with the rapid workload growth.
– Andreas Reimann, head of the DASD mainframe department
Read more about how IntelliMagic Vision benefits Finanz Informatik
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Metro
Metro uses IntelliMagic Vision to ensure its IT storage infrastructure is as “healthy and sustainable” as the fresh produce sold in its stores. The Metro SAN environment consists of multiple storage devices from both IBM and EMC and a Brocade Fabric.
Overall IntelliMagic Vision fulfills all our expectations and more. The service is fast and friendly. IntelliMagic continues to develop its products and I can trust the data collection. Now, I can support more storage units than before, as I receive reporting every morning, and at the beginning of each week and month.
- Réal Campeau, Storage Network Administrator
Video
A practical guide to z/OS storage and replication performance analytics
Technical Information on IntelliMagic Vision for SAN
Learn more on IntelliMagic Vision for IBM DS8000
Understanding and Analyzing IBM Spectrum Virtualize Replication
For most SAN performance analysts, there seems to be a bit of a mystery in how replication works. In this webinar we'll cover the IBM Spectrum Virtualize replication options and examples of analyzing replication performance issues.
Availability Intelligence for End-to-End SAN Performance & Capacity
Transform unpredictable outages into predictable ones by creating Availability Intelligence from the storage performance and configuration data.
Noisy Neighbors: Identifying Root Cause of Performance Issues for SVC
We demonstrate how some extremely busy volumes created problems for an entire SVC/Spectrum Virtualize cluster, and how IntelliMagic Vision helped identify them.