Innovation Data Processing and IntelliMagic Partnering

INNOVATION Data Processing is announcing, in conjunction with the general availability of FDRPAS V5.4 L75, a partnering with IntelliMagic that will give customers a single offering that combines the strengths of FDRPAS and IntelliMagic Balance; FDRPAS non-disruptively moving customer z/OS volumes to new storage systems, or relocating them to underutilized existing storage; as determined by the IntelliMagic Storage Performance Management solution Balance.

The benefit to customers over contemporary storage configuration and disk volume placement methodology, is the non-disruptive establishment of a z/OS disk storage configuration that can improve performance and reduce hardware costs, over a longer useful lifespan.

"FDRPAS/FDRMOVE V5.4 L75 is the fastest, most reliable, safest and easiest to use z/OS volume migration solution available today", says INNOVATION Data Processing, Vice President Advance Technology, Thomas J Meehan."The whole point of FDRPAS is to keep systems and applications up and running as z/OS disk volumes are being relocated. Customers are unaffected as new, more efficient disk storage moves in to support the dynamic growth we are all seeing today, or volumes are non-disruptively being relocated to more efficiently use their existing equipment, at any time of day, on any day in the week, any week of the year."

"IntelliMagic Balance reduces risk of performance problems and improves storage efficiency by identifying during all critical processing periods which logical volumes have the hottest data from a back-end hardware perspective, and giving a recommendation on how to move it to optimize balance", says Brent Phillipsn IntelliMagic Managing Director of the Americas.

Phillips explained: "The BALANCE – FDRPAS package solution we are offering includes IntelliMagic PAS/Automation tools that will take IntelliMagic Balance recommendations and create ready to run FDRPAS JCL that will direct FDRPAS to move customer volumes to the best locations for their most efficient and highest performance potential. Balance also has the ability to determine and direct the optimal moves for migrating existing DASD storage to new high efficiency tiered storage systems."

FDRPAS Highlights
FDRPAS V5.4 L75, the latest version of INNOVATION’s world class solution for non-disruptive volume migration and low impact consolidation of System z mainframe z/OS DASD includes major new enhancements.

Some of the FDRPAS enhancements that are making non-disruptive volume migration safer and simpler than ever before include:

Source Volume Checking that can now detect potential integrity issues with source volumes and warn users in advance of swapping.
Dynamic Monitoring, in GRSplex and MIMplex environments, that can eliminate the potential for clerical errors, as PAS swap and simulation tasks will now dynamically start monitor jobs on any LPAR they detect doesn’t have a monitor running and dynamically pass the addresses of the volumes the monitors are to swap.
FDRPAS recognition of JES2, JES3 SPOOL and CHECKPOINT volumes, that eliminates the need for users to manually segregate JES volumes, allows FDRPAS to avoid potential interlocks while concurrently swapping JES volumes with each other or any number of other volumes.
FDRMOVE Dynamic Allocation Exit business continuance improvements now allow jobs requesting data sets that FDRPAS is moving to wait until they become available, instead of failing.
New ISPF menu enhancements allow users to quickly and easily migrate an entire controller, an SSID group or a user defined volume group, helping to eliminate the potential for clerical errors as a user now can, for example, simply specify two controller serial numbers and FDRPAS will generate everything else necessary to swap all the volumes in one controller to the other.
Lifting the SMS Storage Group 255 volume limitation, FDRPAS can optionally sort all the volumes in a migration group by allocated space, or by remaining free space, and select target volumes that will evenly spread the allocated space across the new volumes.