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NY Brokerages Weather Tsunami of Trading (continued)
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Combating Computational Havoc
Created to address just the kind of computational havoc that Wall Street experiences every year or
so, the partnership between Hitachi and ISM offers a long-term perspective on capacity planning.
ISM emphasizes an enterprise-wide process that helps customers assess, plan, and implement the
right solution for their environment.
Hitachi leverages PerfMan to give end users a better handle on systems management issues such as
capacity planning and critical performance metrics. Hitachi offers the ISM services to its prospects
and customers on a turnkey, value-added basis. Using PerfMan as a performance management engine,
Hitachi provides reports detailing current and historical systems information at no cost to the
customer. Customers send in a tape of their raw performance data, and HDS does the rest at no
cost. Performance reports are generally segmented into three parts:
- Executive summaries-indicate critical performance numbers in predefined categories
(CPU %, DASD I/O, etc.).
- High-level enterprise views-contain more specific data on areas such as CPU utilization,
central storage, tape mount profile, and workload histories.
- Detailed technical information-drill down to details such as top 16 DASD by I/O rate,
non-idle profile, response time distribution, etc.
The color-coded reports give managers a quick and reliable indication of performance trends
at their data centers. If further analysis is required, customers can acquire a site license
for ISM's in-depth PC analysis tool. When initiated, 12 months of historical data is preprocessed,
allowing informed and useful analysis from day one. Customers receive diskettes with current
information on a monthly basis to update the database. The performance data allows data centers to:
- Achieve Service Level Objectives-MVS Performance Management gives data centers a bird's
eye view of current and historical resource utilization, systems performance, and workload
service-level indicators. Armed with this information, they can anticipate bottlenecks,
proactively tackle potential problems, and zero in on short- and long-term utilization trends.
Managing service level objectives has never been easier.
- Get a big-picture view-MVS Advanced Workload Management lets data centers define, analyze,
and report on MVS workloads. This easy-to-use tool lets data centers see the entire MVS picture,
from any combination of factors, over any time frame.
- Eliminate Capacity Planning Barriers-MVS Capacity Planning forecasts CPU utilization and
DASD I/O activity. It helps data centers tear down the barriers to productive capacity planning
through automated data access and a user-friendly methodology.
Major Lesson
The major lesson here is that a Wall Street brokerage shapes its destiny by building infrastructure
capacity before the need becomes desperate. That requires planning and cooperation from its hardware
and software partners. The high performance of Hitachi's Skyline Series as configured by ISM's PerfMan
opens up a broad range of opportunities in high volume transaction processing and database repository applications.
The bottom line of Wall Street's recent history with high trading volume was articulated by a
securities industry CIO, who pledged to "make absolutely sure that in the future we have tremendous
excess capacity. We're going to have extra horsepower and complete redundancy in terms of CPU, in
terms of bandwidth, and in terms of servers."
John Kador is a business writer based in Geneva,
IL. He can be reached at jkador@compuserve.com
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A Wall Street brokerage shapes its destiny by building infrastructure capacity before the need becomes desperate.
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