Centerfield Passes a Stimulus Package for i OS Applications

Published: February 17, 2009

by Alex Woodie

During these tough economic times, we all do what we can do to get by. Centerfield Technology, the System i performance tuning experts from Rochester, Minnesota, last week announced it will try to help System i shops by dropping the cost of its HomeRun suite of tools.

As part of its stimulus package, CenterField is lowering the price on HomeRun from $18,000 per logical partition to $18,000 per system. For most companies that run applications in multiple LPARs, this will significantly lower the cost of acquiring and using HomeRun to boost the throughput and performance of their i OS applications.

"To use a baseball analogy, we are in the fifth inning of an economic downturn," says Mark Holm, Centerfield's chief technology officer. "There are very few applications that are as efficient as they could be, and Centerfield can help those applications throw fast balls the rest of the game."

HomeRun consists of several Centerfield products, each of which tackles a different performance-related concern. There is insure/INDEX, which does the heavy lifting of identifying and creating new SQL and DDS indices, identifying underutilized indices, and retiring old indices that are bogging down performance. insure/ANALYSIS helps by correlating SQL statements, individual jobs, application users, files, and indices, and analyzing how changes could boost performance. Other components include insure/MONITOR, which is used to notify operators of performance problems as they occur (or are about to occur); insure/RESOURCES, which protects precious system resources; and insure/SECURITY, which protects data and restricts access to applications like FTP.

The recession is providing an opportunity to find new ways of driving greater efficiencies into business systems, according to Holm. "The economy is driving business changes that tools can make possible. Many times we've seen where we have made an immediate impact on system performance so orders, business processes and workloads can be executed faster and with more efficiency," Holm says.

For more information, see the company's Web site at www.centerfieldtechnology.com.

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