IntelliMagic Releases Enhanced Oracle VSM Monitoring & Performance Analytics

Aug 23, 2016

IntelliMagic, the worldwide leader in software to outsmart z/OS mainframe service disruptions and eliminate infrastructure inefficiencies, today announced IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS version 8.8. This major release advances the ability of performance and capacity teams to efficiently maintain continuous availability and reduce costs.

IntelliMagic software has a built-in fundamental understanding of how workloads, logical concepts and physical hardware interact. By embedding human expertise into the software, the full potential of the SMF and RMF data is unlocked to better accomplish critical performance and optimization objectives.

The software detects performance and configuration risks before issues impact production. It also enables users to find true root causes quickly and reliably. Furthermore, it highlights where there is tangible potential for optimization, and ultimately it gives IT staff what they need to deliver a new level of application service reliability at optimal cost.

The initial version of IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS was created to provide this type of support for I/O performance from the Disk and Replication infrastructure. Over the years, the scope of the product grew to also support IBM and Oracle STK Virtual Tape Libraries, as well as key systems components such as the processor complex, Coupling Facility, XCF and many other aspects of the z/OS infrastructure.

What’s New

With this new release, IntelliMagic Vision adds visibility into Virtual Tape Volume (VTV) Exposure for Oracle VSM. IntelliMagic Vision is the only solution that provides excellent visibility in the performance of tape replication. It shows how much tape data will be lost in case of catastrophic disaster.

Furthermore, IntelliMagic Vision supports Oracle VSM Buffer Policies. When there is not enough disk storage for the workload, the virtual tape system will start to request many physical tape mounts, and it can quickly reach a situation where the physical tape mounts become a bottleneck for the overall tape performance. IntelliMagic Vision monitors whether or not the Oracle VSM buffer is large enough to allow the VTVs to stay in the buffer according to the policies configured and alerts before performance issues can occur.

The new release also provides the ability to track virtual volume consumption over time. The trending is based on daily processing of the Tape Management Catalog, which allows IT staff to identify which applications are causing tape consumption growth over specific periods. This highlights unusual behavior as well as new applications creating additional tape consumption demand.

Mainframe sites interested in seeing their environment’s Virtual Tape data with the new reporting and availability protection capabilities are invited to participate in a low-cost IntelliMagic Vision as a Service assessment. Dashboards and reports are typically available within 24 hours of when your SMF data is first sent to IntelliMagic servers. For more information, please contact sales@intellimagic.com or go to intellimagic.com/vtape.

About IntelliMagic

IntelliMagic software outsmarts service disruptions and eliminates infrastructure inefficiencies using the power of embedded expert knowledge. It has a built-in fundamental understanding of how workloads, logical concepts and physical hardware interact. By embedding human expertise about the specific systems into the software, the predictive potential of the data is unlocked. Some of the world’s largest corporations rely daily on IntelliMagic to proactively detect risks before issues impact production, and to find the true root causes that endanger the availability of their enterprise systems and storage. Furthermore, these companies are also able to maintain more efficient configurations with lower cost and better performance. Ultimately, IntelliMagic gives IT staff what they need to deliver a new level of application service reliability at optimal cost.