Deep Discounts on Disk Management Software Offered by S4i

Published: January 18, 2010

by Dan Burger

Who does the housekeeping chores on your IBM AS/400, iSeries, System i, or Power Systems box running i/OS? If you answer, "No one," then the next question is have you noticed the server isn't performing like it used to? And if you have someone doing tasks such as identifying and clearing job logs and journal entries, cleaning up the IFS, managing job and message queues, and staying current with file reorgs, how much time is devoted to those tasks?

Paying IT staff to do work that could be eliminated through automation is not a particularly good use of money. You can probably think of more productive things for your IT staff to be doing. That's if you think about these types of things at all.

Susanne States, director of sales and client services for S4i Systems, says the return on investment on disk management software is startling to a lot of people. With the price discount S4i is offering during January, the reward for re-examining your IT housekeeping procedures is a pretty strong incentive.

"The return on investment on disk management software is based on administration that an individual doesn't have to do," States says. "And in a lot of cases, the day-to-day administration of cleaning output queues, message queues and journals is not being done, because no one has the time. The consequences are being thought about until the system reaches 80 or 85 percent of available space. Then someone spends two or three days cleaning up space. That's why the ROI is so easy."

Although it's difficult to put a dollar value on performance degradation, States says it's common for application performance to be dragged down by deleted records that are not cleaned from the system. Reorganizing data files on a regular basis and getting rid of deleted records means a lot to system performance in many cases. "It's possible to recover 1.5 to 4 gigabytes of space the first time a user runs our product," she says.

S4i sells three disk management products: DASD-Plus, DASD-Alert, and DASD-Plus Charts.

DASD-Plus automates tasks such as clearing history logs; compressing data; resizing libraries, job queues, and objects; and reorganizing physical file members. It is typically set up to run on a schedule that ensures maximum DASD efficiency with minimal manual intervention.

DASD-Plus Alert automates data collection and analysis and provides system operators with notification when performance indicators forecast a pending performance problem. Without the DASD-Plus module, manual intervention will be required to take corrective action.

DASD-Plus Chart is a management tool that provides viewing options in a graphical format that is preferable to executive-level managers. The options include pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, and histograms. It also makes it easier to distribute and share the DASD-related information with those using products like Microsoft Excel.

The standard pricing for each of the individual products is tier-based and starts at $4,995 per system in the P05 software tier; at the P60 tier, the products are individually priced at $20,995 per system. However, during January, any module, at any tier level, can be purchased for $2,010. The return on investment for buying the tool, according to States, is figured by the number of features a customer plans to use. By using all the features in DASD-Plus, an ROI in less than two months is reasonable, she says. If only the automated disk cleanup feature is used, an ROI of about four months can be expected.

S4i products are available directly through the company and also through a reseller channel. A listing of resellers can be found here. The January discount program is available through all sources.

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