Monitor Logical Workloads & Physical Disk Hardware
IntelliMagic Vision provides the Intelligence needed to understand how logical workloads behave on your physical hardware.
Prevent risks, save time, and optimally configure your environment.
Automatically Map the Logical to Physical Transfer
As storage technology has moved forward and capacities have increased, the one-to-one relationship between volumes and disk drives has broken down. If you find elevated response time on a logical volume, how do you know which physical drives may be causing it?
IntelliMagic Vision provides insight into the relationships between the physical and logical resources as well as the necessary performance measurements so that users can understand imbalances between the Volumes, Pools and supporting drives or RAID groups.
Get full transparency to physical resources supporting the logical entities, such that root causes are easily found.
With this solution, you will be able to:
- Easily map logical volumes to physical drive pools
- Detect imbalances that may be affecting performance
- Verify that valuable flash storage resources are being properly exploited
Additionally, health and performance ratings based on IBM best practices automatically detect risks in your Disk environment and direct you to important issues that may warrant your attention.
IntelliMagic Vision offers you the out-of-the-box visibility and seamless navigation to manage every component of your z/OS infrastructure under a single solution.
Logical Volume Mapping
Storage systems map many logical volumes to other logical constructs that may be referred to as extent pools or disk groups or policies. The pools are composed of extents which are formatted chunks of space spread across many disks or RAID groups as shown in the picture below.
In these types of implementations, the data for each logical volume is typically spread over many or all physical disks in the pool. Each pool is based on multiple physical disks and may consist of multiple RAID arrays. This means that a single logical disk should not cause a single physical disk to become very busy. Because physical disks can be very large, very many logical volumes are mapped to one group.
The resulting I/O density for the underlying physical disks may cause problems, especially with bad cache locality (data bases) or with high write data rates (batch workloads).
Avoid Disk Imbalances
To avoid such problems, it is very important to balance the workload equally over all the disks in a disk system. Without this balance, you will not be able to exploit all the potential that the hardware offers, and performance bottlenecks may occur.
IntelliMagic Vision provides insight into the relationships between the physical and logical resources as well as the necessary performance measurement so that users can understand imbalances between the volumes, pools and supporting drives or RAID groups.
The chart below is an example of an IntelliMagic Vision balance chart. It shows that one RAID array in this storage pool is imbalanced in terms of read response time. This could indicate a physical problem with a disk drive in the array or more likely that this RAID array is overloaded.
Manage Auto-Tiering
More recently, storage vendors have incorporated auto-tiering into their design. This means that extent pools have become even more complex as they now may consist of multiple tiers of disk or flash storage. Each extent will typically be tied to a particular tier but a logical volume may include extents that reside on various storage tiers.
IntelliMagic Vision can give you a view of how logical volumes are using the various storage tiers in an auto-tiering environment. This can help you assure that your flash capacity is being used as effectively as possible. The chart below illustrates how IntelliMagic Vision can tell you how much volume activity is distributed to the flash devices on a storage system.
Flexible Deployment and Monitoring
On Premise
Install the software on premise and use it offline
In the Cloud
The Cloud based deployment can be accessed from everywhere in the world and is easy to share with colleagues,
Add On Services
Get help with the deployment and the management of the software
Areas Supported by IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS
Systems, Processors, & MLC
Continual visibility into how the z/OS systems infrastructure is handling your workloads helps you improve performance and protect availability.
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Top Features
Db2, CICS, WebSphere, TCP/IP, & MQ
Unprecedented visibility into the extensive metrics provided by critical z/OS subsystems to enhance availability and analyze performance.
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Disk, Tape, & Virtual Tape
Industry-leading visibility and expertise to analyze and proactively identify potential I/O issues in your disk and virtual tape and replication architectures.
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