System i Disk Management Case Study: Oriental Trading

Better monitoring and control of erratic disk consumption is attained through the use of DASD Plus Alert (formerly known as disk/HUNTER). Oriental Trading has deployed DASD-Plus Alert on three iSeries machines that are used to run Websphere®, JD Edwards®, Order-Processing and Lotus Notes®, and is integrated with Bytware's Messenger Plus. DASD-Plus Alert has saves time and money, and gives Oriental Trading better control.

Nebraska-based Oriental Trading Company, Inc., one of the nation's leading direct marketers of value-priced novelties, toys, party supplies, crafts, gift items, home décor products and garden accents. Oriental Trading had been searching for a better way to manage iSeries DASD consumption.

"We initially installed and configured DASD-Plus Alert on an iSeries processor that has always been prone to very spiky DASD consumption," Cargill said, "so we were well aware of the causes and the amount of time necessary to monitor and control those spikes. DASD-Plus Alert immediately went to work and succeeded in automatically detecting and reporting on the originations of the spikes.

DASD-Plus Alert provides economical iSeries DASD spike detection, automated data collection/analysis, and real time reports to equip system operators with the root-cause information they need to take corrective action quickly and accurately - even if the spike originations are invisible to standard IBM i management tools. With DASD-Plus Alert running, when an anomalous disk situation is detected, systems administrators can quickly find out which jobs are consuming disk, what objects are associated with those jobs, and who created the job - all the things an administrator needs to know to manually go in and stop the process... and do it fast!

We easily integrated DASD-Plus Alert with MessengerPlus from Bytware so our operators are now notified whenever DASD consumption reaches threshold levels on two other processors as well. We also think additional investment in iSeries disk will now be easier to plan for, and may even be kept to a minimum in some cases."

The benefit of using DASD-Plus Alert to prevent disk overload and system crashes that immediately result is substantial. Since the utility runs as a background job or is launched from IBM's Management Central, the high cost of dedicated, manual DASD spike monitoring is eliminated. The causal detail it provides helps avoid strategic application downtime, which is very expensive and disruptive to the organization. Though some organizations have controls in place to manage iSeries DASD consumption originating from the native IBM i file structure, complex, modern applications that use the Integrated File System (IFS), SQL, WebSphere, or end user query tools increase the guesswork and uncertainty.

You can run DASD-Plus Alert in conjunction with S4i DASD-Plus, our DASD management system that uses your rules and timeslots to keep your iSeries/400 DASD cleaned up while also forecasting your future DASD requirements. That way, you'll be doing "preventative maintenance" on an ongoing basis, tracking DASD utilization variances and trends, and be prepared for the occasional, unforeseen and expensive DASD spikes. A "killer" combination!

Give us a call to arrange an in-house evaluation of either of both of our iSeries DASD management solutions, or visit us on the web at http://www.s4isystems.com/diskmanagement/