What is your Approach to Storage Performance? Historical or Hysterical?

Is your storage performance management a streamlined process that uses historical facts and that enables you to pro-actively avoid problems? Or is it reactive, with a stream of urgent issues requiring a fire-fighting “tiger team” that engages in endless conference calls, long nights, and even weekends?

Let’s face the truth: no matter how well-intentioned we all are, we never seem to have enough time to do what we need to do. As soon as one task is completed, there are three new items on our plate. The time demands of increasingly complex technology are a continual challenge, just like our personal lives seem to suffer from increasingly busy schedules. Between multiple kids engaging in sports and extra-curricular activities, coaching, and my own sport activities, it sometimes seems as if it is more difficult to manage my evenings and weekends than it is to manage my working day. In no way though, do I have a corner on the “busyness.”

If you aspire to manage work (and life) with the least amount of stress, it is important to spend time and energy being pro-active – a fancy word for planning. We often get so occupied with “emergencies” that the planning goes out the window and pro-active tasks get lost in the storm. Of course this only leads us into a deeper mess. I set some time apart each week to think about the future with my work team as well as with my family “team”, discussing what lies ahead and planning for upcoming events. This doesn’t prevent 100% of the surprises, but it sure helps to avoid a lot of unexpected situations.

Pro-active storage performance management refers to the planning activities aimed at ensuring sufficient storage resources will be present to satisfy demand without impacting service. While most organizations have some handle on storage capacity planning, very few have a well-defined method for taking the storage performance aspects into account. Often this is the result of lack of time, tools and skills. But in the long run, avoiding problems is always more cost effective than fixing them. An ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure!

In order to manage your storage performance effectively you need to know both your workloads and your hardware inside out. Only by comparing your specific workloads to the capabilities of all the components within your storage infrastructure can you have a proper understanding of the performance capacity of your environment. Combining this information with your measured historical workload growth will allow you to accurately plan for future performance requirements. Without this you can only wait for performance incidents such as high response times to happen. These are symptoms of an internal component running out of performance capacity that can be prevented with a deeper ‘vision’.

Fortunately, IntelliMagic Vision is there to facilitate proactive performance management of:

• Disk storage systems (z/OS and Open)
• Fabric (z/OS and Open)
• z/OS I/O subsystem, replication, coupling facility, LPAR, jobstream, dataset, Processor reporting
• z/OS Tape (Physical and Virtual)

If you lack the time or specific skills, we even provide this platform as a service offering. With IntelliMagic Vision as a Service you get access to world-class storage performance experts to augment your team. IntelliMagic Vision as a Service can be customized to suit the specific needs of your organization.

If you would like to avoid hysterical firefighting and start using historical facts, you should consider working with IntelliMagic.