SoftLanding Turbo Charges IBM i Disk Utility
January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie
Data storage volumes are doubling every 12 to 18 months for the average organization, which means it’s more important than ever to keep on top of production storage resources. On the IBM i platform, a new release of the Supermon Disk product from SoftLanding Systems should help organizations monitor disk usage.
Regular maintenance of production storage environments is critical to ensuring smooth operations. On the IBM i server, where disk storage and memory combine to form one single-level storage pool accessible by programs, it’s perhaps even more critical to keep DASD below a certain utilization threshold (usually about 85 percent).
IBM i professionals can check storage utilization themselves using the command line menu or utilize system command supplied by IBM. Alternatively they can use one of the third-party products on the market, including the Supermon Disk product from SoftLanding Systems (owned by Unicom Systems).
Supermon Disk helps users by analyzing disk usage from a variety of angles, including how storage on IBM i servers are being utilized by applications, jobs, users, libraries, journals, and IFS folders. Administrators can then use this information to troubleshoot problems or performance issues, and to identify items that can safely be deleted or achieved to free up disk space on the production system. The software works on both internal and external disk.
SoftLanding unveiled a new release of Supermon Disk last week that should boost performance by a considerable margin. The company says it has added new “domain-level threading” that allows disk evaluation jobs to run place across multiple file systems, such as the library file system and the integrated file system, at the same time.
“This can result in a dramatic reduction in evaluation processing time, as witnessed with our own installations, with a 75 percent drop in evaluation run times when compared with the previous single-threaded approach,” SoftLanding Operations Manager Jim Fisher says in a press release.
SoftLanding bolstered Automon Console with a new GUI.
Storage is not cheap on the IBM i server, so finding ways to maximize existing storage capacity is smart. “As organizations continue to strive towards maximizing system throughput and uptime,” Fisher says, “reducing the runtime window of disk evaluations will come as welcome news for SoftLanding customers and prospects alike.”
SoftLanding made a second announcement regarding Automon Console, its message management system for IBM i. Automon can automatically respond to system messages, and as such is a component in unattended server environments.
One of the key new features delivered in the new release is a “fully responsive” Web browser interface, which will give users new ways of filtering and sorting messages from their PC or mobile device. The second new feature is a new templated message response system that will streamline how customers interact with messages through the product.
“The templated responses available with the new release of Automon Console will allow messages to be managed by exception, either automatically resolving issues or escalating them if required,” Fisher says. “This frees up precious time for IBM i administrators, allowing them to focus on more strategic activities that add greater value to the business.”
