Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

It's an "on demand" world, and your server had best adapt to it. That's the message coming from Midrange Performance Group, which is this month introducing a new version of its iSeries performance tracking and capacity planning tool, Performance Navigator, which helps OS/400 shops maximize their AS/400 or iSeries hardware investment. With Performance Navigator Version 9.0, MPG has enhanced the tool's ability to track and analyze the movement of on-demand-type workloads, such as logical partitioning, high availability, and backups.

As Gartner analyst Tom Bittman pointed out last week in his keynote address at the COMMON conference in Florida, overall use of computing capacity is quite low. Worldwide, approximately 60 to 70 percent of MIPS (a unit of work for mainframes, but applied by Bittman generically) is unused, he says. A new class of virtualization technology, generally referred to as on demand computing, is emerging to help companies use that capacity for new workloads and to deliver access to it more effectively.

Although the world of Unix, Linux, and Windows servers is just now waking up to the realization that it needs to manage workloads more effectively through on-demand technologies, IBM has been providing virtualization technology, in its mainframes and OS/400 servers, for years. In his presentation at COMMON, Bittman listed the zSeries and iSeries as technology leaders in various on-demand categories, including unplanned downtime, disaster recovery, partition management, capacity management, and clustering.

However, even though the OS/400 server features advanced on-demand computing capabilities, including multi-node clustering, dynamic logical partitioning (LPAR), Capacity Upgrade on Demand (CUoD), and a virtual LAN that supports Windows and Linux I/O, putting that technology to use most effectively can be a problem, unless you have an army of programmers and systems analysts providing back up. A group of independent software vendors, including Midrange Performance Group, of Boulder, Colorado, offer tools to help you.

MPG's Performance Navigator is a Windows program that connects to OS/400 servers (V3R2 through V5R2) and downloads raw performance data via ODBC. The tool offers nearly 100 colorful graphs and reports that show how server performance has changed over time and how the server will likely perform in the future. It tracks many performance attributes, including job type, job priority, user, actual and logical CPUs, application response time, disk utilization, and memory pools.

The tool is loaded with the exact performance capabilities of IBM's entire iSeries product line and what-if analysis, which lets resellers and business partners use it for capacity planning and sizing. OS/400 shops that have already purchased hardware can use the software to help track performance problems and to save money on hardware upgrades. For a complete listing of Performance Navigator's features, click here.

As OS/400 shops adopt advanced on-demand type capabilities, their performance management techniques may no longer be up to speed, says Jim Young, vice president of sales at MPG. "In this new on-demand world, the traditional methodologies for performance management have to be reexamined," he says. "Many of the enhancements in [Performance Navigator] Version 9 are designed to support this new on-demand environment."

With Version 9.0, users can, for instance, track the dynamic movement of resources and its impact on performance. The support for dynamic logical partitioning that IBM added to the box with V5R2 is an excellent way to improve capacity use, through virtualization, and now companies can use Performance Navigator to get a long-term view of how they're using logical partitioning and what they can do to improve on those usage patterns.

Another important enhancement with Version 9.0, MPG says, is the capability to graph the combined CPU usage for all logical partitions. These graphs will aid users in setting scheduled resource movements along with minimums and maximums, MPG says.

Performance Navigator 9.0 also has improved support for disk subsystems. With this release, MPG has added metrics for measuring disk subsystem performance, such as IOA cache hit ratio, read to write ratios, and save dates. The company says these features give users a better understanding of any disk bottlenecks, particularly in the high availability environment.

The new version also tracks new workloads supported by the operating system. With this version, Performance Navigator is capable of graphing the effect that IBM Lotus Domino Version 6, Apache Web server, and task wait activities have on the system. In addition, the software has been enhanced to provide support for user-defined shifts, which, MPG says, which allows graphs of performance patterns to be created, using a shift defined as the backup window, the end-of-day window, or another shift.

MPG also announced two new contracts. First, in May 2003, MPG signed IBM as a remarketer for Performance Navigator, which authorizes IBM to sell licenses and use the tool in services engagements. Also, MPG last month signed Arrow Electronics' Support Net Division to a comarketing contract, for the third straight year. Like IBM, Support Net sells Performance Navigator and uses it as a capacity planning tool in client engagements. MPG says that more than 150 solution providers around the world are selling and using Performance Navigator.

MPG offers free downloads of a limited version of Performance Navigator from its Web site. This version lets users track the use of CPU and disk space. Users must purchase a key code from MPG to activate the full capabilities of Performance Navigator. Licenses for Performance Navigator 9.0 start at $2,995, for access to one OS/400 server, and range upward to $32,730, for access to 14 servers. Annual maintenance is 20 percent of the license fee.