Lee LaFrese has deep knowledge about z/OS and SAN storage architecture and is a recognized industry expert in storage performance modeling. Now (almost) fully retired and traveling the world, Lee was a Senior Storage Performance Consultant at IntelliMagic for many years.
His focus at IntelliMagic was to investigate thorny performance issues that customers faced and recommend practical solutions. He also showed customers how to use our products effectively, assisted with capacity planning and worked with developers to identify and implement new, high-value features and functions.
Lee has been a frequent conference speaker and has written several entertaining blogs about storage performance. He holds eight storage related patents and before joining IntelliMagic he had a 30+ year career at IBM where he was the technical team lead for Enterprise Storage Performance.
Resources created by Lee LaFrese
What’s New with IBM DS8900F?
Release 9.1 for the DS8900F storage array contains numerous product improvements that should be interesting and useful to any shop that has DS8900F installed or is considering it.
Understanding How Logical Workloads Behave On Physical Hardware
If you find elevated response time on a logical volume, how do you know which physical drives may be causing it?
The Circle of (Storage) Life
New storage technologies are quickly maturing and replacing legacy platforms. But will they be mature enough to meet your high availability, high performance IT infrastructure needs?
The Attack of the Disk Clones
While most mainframe shops have explored how to reduce mainframe software costs, we are finding significant latent savings opportunities still exist at even the best run sites.
The Storage Management Initiative (SMI): the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Part 1 “The Good”
The notion of having a common mechanism to communicate with and report on storage devices is good for both us as a company that provides storage analytics software, and for our customers.
Performance Modeling for Disk Storage Systems
This blog demonstrates how computer system performance modeling is done, specifically for disk storage systems.
Storage Management Initiative (SMI) and the Block Services Performance (BSP) sub-profile: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Part 2 “The Bad”
While the technology chosen by the SMI program has significant benefits, it also has challenges.
Does everybody know what time it is? Tool Time!
For managing your z/OS Disk performance, IntelliMagic Vision easily outperforms IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Disk (TPC).
What Enterprise Storage system vendors won’t tell you about SSDs
IntelliMagic Vision provides you with the tools to keep a careful eye on the performance of your Enterprise Storage arrays including any SSDs that may be installed.
Anatomy of an Anomaly – Finding the Root Cause of a CONNECT Time Increase
Recently a situation occurred at one of our cloud services customers that was a real head-scratcher. One of the disk storage systems saw a sudden jump in CONNECT time. What had changed?
The Perils of Complacency with Enterprise Storage Systems
Over the last few years, Enterprise Storage Systems have advanced so much that it seems that they have nearly unlimited performance and resiliency. However, becoming complacent with your storage performance is fraught with peril.
How Far Behind is My Asynchronous Replication?
Most peer-to-peer replication methodologies prioritize application performance over replication currency, but if replication falls too far behind you need to find out about it quickly and know what should be done to fix it.
Estimating Storage System Capabilities Should not be a Risky Business!
If you want a useful headroom metric you need to define it properly.
Troubleshooting Global Mirror RPO Spikes
This video will show you how IntelliMagic Vision can be used to provide visibility to the status of Global Mirror replication in a Globally Disbursed Parallel Sysplex environment.
High z/OS Disk Connect Time
By drilling down to specific volumes and consulting change logs, it is easy to determine the root cause of high z/OS Connect time as coming from a newly released SQL query.
How Can I Tell if My Back-End Drives Are Overloaded?
This case study shows how IntelliMagic Vision may be used to easily find the root cause of a z/OS performance issue related to overloaded back-end drives.