The Core of Storage Performance Management Processes at Finanz Informatik

Finanz Informatik, one of the largest banking IT service providers in Europe, relies on IntelliMagic Vision, a DASD performance monitoring solution, 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.

Storage performance management at Finanz Informatik is particularly challenging due to the sheer magnitude of the environment which includes processing for 126.9 million accounts and more than 300.000 devices to maintain. To support this task the IT group operates three data center locations with IBM mainframes. There, 380,000 MIPS are distributed across 23 sysplexes with a DASD storage capacity of 2.3 petabytes spread across 86 disk systems from multiple hardware vendors.

“In day-to-day operations, my department needs to guarantee that the time frame for batch processing is maintained, especially for critical processing deadlines,” says Mr. Reimann, head of the DASD mainframe department and adds, “It’s critical that we do not let this window slip, not even by a few minutes.”

“We’ve developed automated, advanced storage management processes to deal with the rapid workload growth,” Mr. Reimann emphasizes. “IntelliMagic Vision plays a central role and keeps us informed with daily dashboards showing the throughput and performance of our DASD storage. With IntelliMagic Vision we’ve been able to identify concurrent job execution and by making specific data moves we’ve been able to drastically reduce overall job execution time”, Mr. Reimann observes.

Since installing IntelliMagic Vision in the summer of 2009, my team has been able to deal proactively with upcoming resource bottlenecks in our storage installation.

“Complexity had previously kept these bottlenecks hidden. IntelliMagic Vision gave us visibility to easily and timely reveal emerging constraints inside our storage systems,” Mr. Reimann underscores. “In our opinion, IntelliMagic Vision is unique in the storage performance management area. The integrated expert knowledge within the product provides for the easy identification and visualization of the hidden back-end information, and supports us in tiering our application data. It focuses equally on economy and efficiency and guarantees us the ability to be vendor independent.”

The IntelliMagic Vision dashboard provides a daily performance health check and gives a good summary of whether or not a more detailed analysis needs to take place and also where to look. “My team is now able to concentrate on analyzing performance data rather than on creating it,” Mr. Reimann emphasizes. This allows Finanz Informatik to identify performance problems early. The creation of monthly trending charts is another way to identify problems early and initiate corrective procedures before problems become critical. The automatic creation of graphs is very well suited for producing management reports, especially when reporting on end-of-month, -quarter, half-yearly, and end-of-year processing.

Mr. Reimann states that, “In the future we plan to use IntelliMagic software to help us with the preview and follow-up assessment of configuration changes.” and adds, “IntelliMagic Vision and IntelliMagic Direction will help us to implement vendor-independent hardware migration most efficiently, optimize the configuration for SSD implementation, and oversee the migration from static to dynamic tiering.” Mr. Reimann summarizes by emphasizing, “Our storage performance management process continues to be a significant contributor to providing an efficient service to Finanz Informatik customers. IntelliMagic is a key element in our future oriented, progressive service.”

About Finanz Informatik

Finanz Informatik, based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, is the IT service provider for the Savings Banks Financial Group. The services provided by Finanz Informatik encompass the entire IT spectrum – from the development and deployment of IT applications, networks and technical infrastructure, to the data center operations and consulting, training and support.

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