IntelliMagic Vision Supports Hitachi Mainframe Analytics Recorder

Aug 04, 2015

IntelliMagic, the worldwide leader in solutions for Availability Intelligence, today announced new support in IntelliMagic Vision for automatically monitoring the health of the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G1000 via the newly available Mainframe Analytics Recorder (MAR) from Hitachi. 

Hitachi announced the Mainframe Analytics Recorder for z/OS environments on August 4, 2015. Hitachi’s Mainframe Analytics Recorder (MAR) reports to SMF new performance information about the internals of the HDS G1000 array. This allows mainframe customers to get more insight into the inner workings of the advanced storage system functions. IntelliMagic has worked closely with Hitachi on this new capability and has enhanced IntelliMagic Vision so that it supports, from day one, the newly available data about the performance and availability of the VSP G1000.

Virtualization in the storage system processor and I/O hardware, as well as the ever increasing complexity and intelligence in today’s architectures, puts the manageability of these storage systems at risk. Hitachi’s Mainframe Analytics Recorder (HDS MAR) is a feature that helps mitigate that risk by exposing new performance metrics to the mainframe platform and to solutions that can exploit the data like IntelliMagic Vision. By combining the new data with built-in expert knowledge about the hardware and how different workload characteristics stress the internal hardware components, IntelliMagic Vision is able to automatically identify when the risk of handling the peak workloads is approaching unacceptable levels.

“In the 10+ years I have been with IntelliMagic I have yet to meet a single mainframe site that (prior to using IntelliMagic) automatically monitors for threats to availability due to storage component overload. IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS Disk combined with Hitachi’s Mainframe Analytics Recorder will dramatically reduce the risk of disruptions due to saturated components inside the storage array. Besides avoiding disruptions, the resulting intelligence about the storage infrastructure availability during peak periods also dramatically accelerates the time needed to diagnose and fix the kind of problems that are not predictable such as faulty fibre connections or other hardware or microcode failures, untested application changes, unpredictable workload spikes, etc.,” explained Brent Phillips, IntelliMagic Managing Director for the Americas.

IntelliMagic believes that this capability marks a very important step in the evolution of z/OS storage, as it has the potential to give unprecedented visibility into what happens inside the storage box.

For more information on this subject, please see the following white paper “IntelliMagic Vision for Hitachi VSP G1000 SMF Records from Mainframe Analytics Recorder” or contact IntelliMagic at sales@intellimagic.com.