MPG Supports Latest POWER Hardware with Performance Tool

May 7, 2013 Alex Woodie

Midrange Performance Group last month unveiled updates to its Navigator family of performance management and capacity planning tools. Performance Navigator version 16 gives IBM i shops the capability to see how their applications will run on the latest Power7+ chips from IBM, and also has better modeling for SSDs and specific applications.

Performance Navigator has been used for many years by IBM i shops and resellers to help match IBM i application workloads to IBM hardware. In more recent years, MPG has expanded the Windows-based product to support Unix and Linux environments on Power Systems via its Power Navigator product.

When loaded with customers’ historical performance data, MPG’s software is able to tell how their applications will run on new machines. MPG has loaded detailed performance metrics for all models and possible configurations for Power Systems, PureSystems, and Power Linux servers. This allows customers to correctly size their new machines with the “Goldilocks” approach–not too much computing power or too little, but just enough computing power to get the job done in the appropriate amount of time.

MPG says the new Power Analytics functionality in Performance Navigator version 16 should help customers gain a better understanding of the performance relationship between their applications and the hardware it runs on. The Power Analytics functionality, which debuted two years ago with the release of Performance Navigator 15, helps users understand how hardware upgrades or configuration changes impacted application performance in terms of specific areas, like disk, memory, SSDs, IFS, and ODBC.

With version 16, Performance Navigator now sports more than 30 Power Analytics functions, more than double the number of reports that debuted with version 15. The company also reorganized the Power Analytics menu into a more meaningful format, says Randy Watson, co-founder of MPG.

The capacity planning functions of both Performance Navigator and Power Navigator have been enhanced to better support solid state disks (SSDs) and external disk. MPG has noticed a big increase in interest about SSD and external disk.

“The biggest issue we see is customers hear about SSDs and how fast they are and naturally want to know it they would help their performance,” Watson says. “I always start the conversation asking what problem are we trying to solve? In a lot cases, the perceived problem is not worth the investment in SSD technology. For example, is it worth $100,000 to make a batch job run in half the time?”

Finding out how much storage you can reclaim with a file reorg is easy with the new “on demand” file reorganization analysis function in Performance Navigator 4.7.

If it does make sense, then Performance Navigator can give the customer a comprehensive analysis that will go a long way toward eliminating any uncertainty about investing in SSDs. Version 16 also gets the capability to track SSD performance at the job level, and better on-going comparisons against traditional hard disk drives.

Performance Navigator also gets a new “on demand” file reorganization analysis function that will help users determine whether to execute a file reorganization, and tell them how much space they can expect to reclaim. The file reorg analysis function can be initiated from the drop-down menu, and enables users to drill down into libraries to see which files have the most deleted records that need cleaning.

MPG also says that users can consolidate disparate workloads from any platform–be it IBM i, AIX, Linux, or even HP-UX or Solaris–and “model the combined workload to any IBM Power, PowerLinux, or PureSystems.”

Meanwhile, Power Navigator version 9 gains more detailed virtualization data as it relates to VIOS. For more information, see www.mpginc.com.