Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

iTera last week announced that the newest version of its Purge & Archive data management tool, V2R1, features major improvements in helping users choose the right data to archive. The new release features several enhancements, including a new data selection interface, a "mock purge" function, and new data grouping functions, designed to increase the product's effectiveness. Purge & Archive V2R1 also features new interfaces to other programs, and the capability to archive to disk and tape simultaneously.

iTera developed Purge & Archive to make more palatable the tedious task of purging old or infrequently accessed records (or even a single record) from production environments to intermediate storage on disk or long-term storage on tape. It is too often the case at OS/400 shops that these old records are not purged until they present a problem: DASD utilization rates have gotten out of hand, the response times of interactive application have begun to resemble molasses, or both. Removing old data from a production system can provide a measure of relief, even if it is not always the root cause of a performance problem.

Of course, one solution to the old or unused record problem would be to simply delete the data. This could do wonders for OS/400 systems performance! However, this is not an option at companies that actually value their customers. And this is what makes Purge & Archive unique: It's indexing technology that allows archived records (or even a single record) to be easily located and quickly restored to the production environment. In fact, it is this same indexing technology that the Salt Lake City company uses with its other products, such as Convert While Active and Restore While Active, that allow various data management chores to be conducted without causing downtime and interrupting production.

With Purge & Archive V2R1, iTera has built on this core indexing capability by adding new functions on the front-end to facilitate finding the right data to index and move. iTera says the utility's new data selection interface provides nearly unlimited ways to select the data that is to be purged. Other new features that should make it easier to select the right data include the new capability to create "calculated" result fields, the capability to translate date fields into system-date formats, and new SQL-like, free-form data selection capabilities, iTera says.

Users will make fewer mistakes during the purge process thanks to the new simulated purge function, or mock purge, in Purge & Archive V2R1. This function allows users to verify the results of a purge before actually removing the data from the production environment, which allows them to see how the system will react to the purge.

Purge & Archive V2R1 also plays better with others, iTera says. First, records can now be simultaneously purged from both customized and add-on types of files because they are associated to the Purge & Archive data structure. Second, Purge & Archive can now be executed directly from a command line or called from any program. iTera says this latest release also features new interfaces to users' own pre-purge as well as post-purge programs, which should streamline verifying data to be purged before the event, and summarizing the purge activities afterward.

Finally, Purge & Archive now supports the capability to purge data from a production environment to tape and to disk at the same time. Users might want to do this if they expect they may need to quickly restore the data from disk. This new feature adds to the utility's previously supported purge operations: purge to tape, purge to disk, and purge from tape to disk. Similarly, the utility supports three modes of restoring archived data: restore from tape, restore from disk, and restore from tape to disk.

Purge & Archive V2R1 is available now. For more information, go to www.iterainc.com.

Sponsored By

MIDRANGE PERFORMANCE GROUP

Performance Navigator ® at Boise Cascade Office Products

Doug Mewmaw, Technical Support Manager for Boise Cascade Office Products, manages an iSeries environment that includes 14 separate servers. Doug's responsibilities include performance management and reporting. For several years, management was receiving regular weekly reports on the performance of each system. This time consuming task fell to Doug. Until March of 2000, Doug used a combination of IBM's Performance Tools, and various desktop tools such as spreadsheets and graphing packages. In March of 2000, Doug attended COMMON, and registered for a vendor course offering that discussed Performance Navigator.

Doug immediately saw the huge impact this product would have in his operation. "With Performance Navigator, everything is a simple point-and-click" said Mewmaw. He continues- "What I used to have to do involved 6 or 7 steps for each graph, for each system. With PerfNav, I can set many of the reports up on a scheduler, and they're done automatically." Mewmaw estimated that he used to spend over a day each week doing routine reporting. Now that is reduced to an hour or two.

Performance Navigator also provides Boise Cascade with the ability to constantly tune their configurations for optimum return on investment. Consolidations of multiple workloads onto a single server can be modeled in minutes, with complete confidence in the results. Increasing the workload of a specific job can be modeled to provide clear impact on future growth. As Doug Mewmaw said, "If Performance Navigator says we have a bottleneck, we almost certainly do. Better yet, PerfNav can tell us which users or which jobs are causing a performance problem."

Another issue that Performance Navigator addressed was Mewmaw's comfort level. "Best/1® has always been my performance and capacity planning tool. To be honest, I've not only felt frustration with the 'hardware promoting' tool, but I have never felt 100 percent confident in its predictions. I hate that. After switching to Performance Navigator, I don't have that uneasy feeling anymore. I really think this product will become the new industry standard".

Mewmaw continues, "MPG's support is just terrific, however there is so much that Performance Navigator does I actually went to their headquarters for a 2 day course. Even though I had worked with the product almost daily for over a year, I learned an incredible amount in those 2 days."

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www.mpginc.com