On July 23, IBM made a series of hardware, operating system and software announcements for the zEnterprise platforms. There were several parts of each announcement that pertained to I/O and channel technology. One common denominator of each of these parts was that they 1) encourage a movement toward consolidation of channels on the host, and 2) encourage avoiding direct attached FICON channels and adopting switched FICON architectures…

The most common reason for extending storage networks over geographical distances is to safeguard critical business data and provide near-continuous access to applications and services in the event of a localized disaster. Designing a distance connectivity solution involves a number of considerations. The enterprise must classify stored data and determine how important it is for business operation, how often it must be backed up and how quickly it needs to be recovered in the event of failure…

Let’s talk about the zEC12, FICON directors, cars and tires. Huh? Bear with me for a few minutes…

Modern Fibre Channel (FC) Storage Area Network (SAN) fabrics, both Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) and Fibre Connection (FICON), have evolved from simple data transport mechanisms to much more complex infrastructure. Fabrics containing multiple hosts across a wide spectrum of operating systems and hundreds of storage ports are common today. I/O levels and data traffic volumes, particularly across the core of a SAN fabric, are much higher…

The article “Performance Troubleshooting Using the FICON Director Activity Report” (March/April 2013 Enterprise Tech Journal available at http://entsys.me/c000r) is the latest in a series of articles on System z I/O performance. As a quick review, this series has assumed there was an application Service Level Agreement (SLA)/Service Level Objective (SLO) for transaction response time that wasn’t being met. Some basic root cause analysis was performed by checking the key RMF reports used in mainframe I/O performance management. The most recent article examined the RMF 74-7 record, the RMF FICON Director Activity Report, to determine if the FICON Storage Area Network (SAN) may have caused the performance issue…

Back in the day, storage management at a large, multibillion dollar global enterprise was comparatively easy. Storage was directly attached to servers, networks were “hard-wired” in place and virtualization was a concept rather than a reality. You need more capacity? You buy more storage. You need a business continuity solution? You buy more storage. You need to back up data? You buy more storage. You need storage at a remote branch office? You buy more storage. Simple, right?…

Virtual tape systems can provide significantly more functionality for tape data sets than physical tape systems. Virtual tape disk arrays provide levels of scalability, performance and flexibility for mainframe tape operations that are simply unavailable with physical tape. In many cases, a single virtual tape array can take the place of multiple tape subsystems to meet functionality requirements for batch processing, data protection, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) migrations and archiving. In addition, they can extend Disaster Recovery (DR) capability to tape workloads with array-based replication…

The mainframe has long been a stable, reliable consistent platform for high-value, critical transactions such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), online order-taking and financial transaction processing. Mainframes today continue to touch most transactions worldwide. According to Independent Assessment, an industry authority on mainframe computing, 72 percent of the world’s financial transactions are processed on mainframes…

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a one-stop program or report you could use to completely solve any performance problem you’re troubleshooting? While, regrettably, that doesn’t exist, but you can use the FICON director activity report to drill down further into I/O performance problems. Only this report provides FICON frame pacing delay information, giving you a valuable way to narrow down the potential root cause(s) of a performance problem…

Today’s enterprise data centers typically span multiple locations and include a collection of storage products from various vendors. There’s likely a combination of storage types and storage media, including Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS), each filled with an assortment of Solid State Disks (SSDs) and Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Tape archive storage is probably also in the mix. IT managers face an ongoing challenge getting everything to play nicely together while still providing data protection and high-performance information access. To manage virtualized cloud environments within today’s IT budgets requires efficient, feature-rich, multi-platform storage management tools…