MPG Discounts VIOS Tracker for PerfNav Customers

September 23, 2014 Alex Woodie

Midrange Performance Group (MPG) has put together a superset of its performance management tools for IBM Power Systems environments. Navigator MAX bundles the Performance Navigator for IBM i and Power Navigator for AIX, Linux, and VIOS environments.

MPG has been helping IBM i shops get the most out of their hardware investments since the days of the AS/400. The company’s Performance Navigator (“PerfNav”) offering is known as the go-to product for resellers and large shops embarking upon capacity planning and server-sizing exercises. When IBM joined the i5/OS and AIX worlds under the Power Systems umbrella, the Boulder, Colorado, company unveiled Power Navigator (“PowerNav”), which delivers PerfNav-like capabilities for AIX and Linux environments.

With last week’s launch of Navigator MAX, MPG is bringing the two tools together. The offering is designed as an upgrade for PerfNav customers or business partners who find they need to understand historical AIX and Linux workloads and find the appropriately sized machine to run them on.

VIOS cannot be forgotten as part of the Navigator MAX equation. There are a growing number of IBM i shops that have adopted VIOS virtualization, but because VIOS is an AIX workload, it can cause confusion among administrators and managers. The coverage for VIOS alone may be enough to draw existing PerfNav customers shops toward Navigator MAX.

As VIOS creeps into the IBM i customer base, IBM i customers are finding a need to familiarize themselves with it. “If you have a performance issue on your i partitions, it could be VIOS related. You don’t know unless you monitor,” says Randy Watson, president and co-founder of MPG. “In a virtualized world, when you have a problem, it’s more and more difficult to find out where the problem lies.”

Buying the Navigator MAX gets PerfNav customers a 45 percent discount compared to buying a PowerNav license separately, the company says. Customers can unlock the functionality of the entire Navigator family of products with a single key code.