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ASC and Tango/04 Help OS/400 Shops Cut Interactive Costs
by Dan Burger
In 1993, IBM created server models with governors, diminishing the performance of green-screen applications when compared with regular systems based on the same hardware. To many OS/400 shops, this artificial distinction between systems and servers amounts to an interactive tax on RPG and COBOL applications. A new set of performance tools created by Tango/04 Computing Group and sold by Advanced Systems Concepts helps users better balance their interactive capacity usage with their budgets.
The name of the OS/400 green-screen governor is CFINT. This governor determines how much processor performance within an AS/400 or iSeries machine can be applied to green-screen workloads, and pricing for these machines reflects these limits. Base server models in the iSeries and AS/400 line are very inexpensive compared with machines that have some or all of their interactive capacity activated. If customers add too many screens or try to process too much work through their machines, exceeding the interactive processing limits imposed by CFINT, this will obviously have a negative effect on system performance.
Within the ranks of iSeries customers, there has been--let's call it a passing interest--in products that can defeat or at least negotiate around CFINT. Some consider the use of such products to be both risky and illegal, yet interactive performance is almost always limited, and the penalties are always expensive.
ASC, a provider of application and system management solutions, announced, at the COMMON conference in Nashville last week, a tool that plugs into its OpCenter performance management suite that helps keep the interactive tax man from your door. Rather than try to break or trick CFINT, like Tiger Tools' Fast400, OpCenter balances the processing cycle budget of machines running a mix of interactive and batch jobs. Because it makes OS/400 servers more efficient, customers are less likely to have to buy interactive features that allow them to have unfettered access to their processors for using the 5250 protocol. This is an indirect way of dealing with CFINT, and one that is perfectly legitimate as far as IBM is concerned. Metaphorically speaking, Fast400 is like telling the U.S. Treasury you make less money than you do when you do your taxes, while OpCenter shows you how to live on less money.
OpCenter is a set of performance-related products designed to eliminate or at least diminish the effects of an unbalanced system without affecting the integrity of the operating system. Its purpose is to optimize batch and interactive processing power as jobs are running on an AS/400 or iSeries machine. With regard to CFINT, OpCenter monitors critical performance indicators and alerts operators when CPU usage approaches whatever limits CFINT or the physics of a PowerPC chip has imposed on workloads. These alerts can be sent to telecom devices by e-mail or by pop-up windows in networked PCs, or they can be distributed to other systems via Simple Network Management Protocol traps.
To avoid the built-in interactive penalty, the control center sets aside the resource-hogging jobs and automatically optimizes the system. It balances the system by shifting resources to the processes that are critical to service level requirements. The adjustments ensure that interactive jobs do not exceed resources. They also reduce the risk that performance will deteriorate for other applications and users.
Hundreds of performance graphics are available, including ones for disk use, CPU use, response times, and subsystem activity. With these tools, OpCenter offers users the capability to improve the overall performance and predictability of processing times for their online transaction and batch jobs.
OpCenter links to OS/400 problem diagnosis tools that provide the capability to see and edit internal job data (QTEMP, LDA, and LIBL, for instance), and it provides the potential to inspect running source code. It also integrates with ASC's Message Alert, a combination that delivers a complete enterprise system management package on both the iSeries and Windows systems.
Pricing for OpCenter ranges between $1,500 and $26,000, depending on the size of the iSeries or AS/400 system and the OpCenter modules chosen.
ASC's OpCenter is designed and manufactured by Tango/04, which is headquartered in Barcelona, Spain. Tango/04 is a software solutions company that specializes in the iSeries and Windows markets. Outside of the United States and Canada, Tango04 markets and supports the product under the name VISUAL Control Center.
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