• Multiplatform Capacity Management
• Unisys (Voicemail) CAP Systems
• Unisys Libra 590/595/690 Metered Systems
• Unix
• RG Solutions
• Unisys Libra Systems
• Service Level Reporting
• Financial Management
• Service Continuity
• Availability
• Capacity Management
• VMWare ESX

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RG Solutions has been designed to import performance data from ANY platform and present that data in a standard format. You no longer need to have different capacity planning and management software on each of your platforms.

RG Solutions runs an agent on each target system. This agent collects the available performance data from the system and produces a file each day. That file is then imported into RG Solutions in the early hours of the morning, the data is analysed, and reports are produced so that you can have up to date information at your fingertips. RG Solutions will also import other information (Such as transaction logs), and present that alongside the "standard" data.

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RG Solutions Service Level reports help you to manage and improve the quality of services that are to be delivered by IT to the Business.

When reporting Service Levels in RG Solutions, we look at the systems from the perspective of the services that are being provided. In some cases, there might be a single service running on a single machine. In others, there might be multiple services running on a single machine. RG Solutions can handle all of these scenarios.

Quite often, the Service(s) being provided run in either Interactive (online) or Update (batch) processing modes. Each of these modes of processing is very different from the other, and therefore, measurement of service levels in an interactive environment is treated very differently to that in an update environment.

In an interactive workload where activity on the system will largely be driven by transactions, the primary concern is that those transactions are serviced in accordance with your Service Level Agreement (SLA). Agreements reached in your SLA can be incorporated into RG Solutions for this measurement.

Update environments are largely concerned with turning round high intensity processing as quickly as possible. Therefore, the approach RG Solutions takes is to measure the batch processing elapsed time against a deadline (usually the start of interactive processing).

The following charts provide some examples of how RG Solutions can address Service Level reporting.

Interactive Service Levels

The example below shows the response times for real-time services for a financial institution with a service level agreement (SLA) of 99% less than 1 second. The “Business Banking” service is highlighted in red to show its service level was 97%, which is below the required service level of 99%.

Interactive Service Level Trend

As a result of the Business Banking service falling below its target, the next example shows how the Interactive Business Banking service was delivered over the last 12 months.

Quite clearly, this was the first month when the service target had not been realised. Closer investigation of this system revealed there had been a step change in Online Capacity on the system where this service runs due to new functionality being added. Due to this the online system was now out of capacity and unable to deliver the service required.

Update Service Levels

The next example shows the turnaround time for overnight updates for a financial institution within a service window of 18:00 to 08:00.

Click on the chart to see that “Business Banking” ran over its window and did not finish until 8:40, preventing the online service from being available.

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RG Solutions Financial Management Reporting provides a means of being able to allocate overall and unit costs broken down by business service. Again, we have to focus on the Services that are being provided and take into consideration that there might be one or many services running on a single system.

Using RG Solutions Financial Management Reporting, activity based costing becomes a reality and this provides a number of distinct advantages:

·         Instead of expressing usage in IT terms, usage can be expressed in monetary terms which the Business will understand.

·         IT can be transformed from a cost center to a profit center and increase visibility within the organization.

·         If the business wants to run a sales promotion of say predicts 5000 more transactions per day, the cost of doing so will be quite clear.

·         Assess the cost of providing services on different platforms

·         High cost / non-profitable services can be targeted with a view to improvement

The following are some examples of Financial Management reporting in RG Solutions.

Activity Based Costing

Using CPU utilization by service, this chart shows online and batch usage by business service in true monetary terms.

Business Transactions

This chart shows the number of business transactions per month by business service. This can be combined with the previous chart to give unit cost per transaction for planning purposes.

Business Transaction Trend

This next chart shows the number of transactions performed by Business Banking over the last 12 months.

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RG Solutions Capacity Management reporting provides assurance that IT can meet current/future Business needs in a cost effective manner and lets the business know when IT investments will need to be made.

In fact, Capacity Management reporting is core to Service Delivery because if your systems are out of capacity there’s little point trying to agree on service levels etc as they’ll probably never be realized.

As with Service Level reporting, our approach to Capacity Management reporting takes a look at capacity from the perspectives of Interactive (online) and Update (Batch) processing workloads but in the context of the Server rather than the Service.

Interactive processing is generally a transaction driven workload and you need to ensure there is sufficient capacity to service transactions within the agreed service level agreement (SLA). Capacity of interactive workloads is therefore measured on the peak processing interval.

Update processing requires the opposite in that the CPU’s should be 100% utilized in order to turn around processing in the shortest possible time. Therefore, capacity is measured using batch elapsed times.

In the following examples, you will see some illustrations of how RG Solutions can be used for Capacity Management reporting.

Interactive Capacity Management

The real time transaction services for this bank are provided on a number of different platforms. The capacity required is based upon the peak load for each individual server. The ATM Wintel servers are clustered for contingency purposes. The IBM i5 server shaded in red is running at 100% of capacity and requires urgent attention.

Interactive Capacity Management Trend

As the IBM i5 system was in need of urgent attention, a trend report was used to review the growth over the previous 12 months.

The report shows a period of steady growth over the first half of the year but from August there was a sudden step change. This happened when new functionality was introduced into the online service. The additional processing effectively reduced the lifecycle of the server.

Update Capacity Management

The overnight processing capacity usage also needs to be taken into account for this bank. If this overruns, it will impact on the real-time service availability. The server shaded in red is critical, although the processing shows it could have been started 90 minutes earlier.

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Cluster Failover

Service Continuity Capacity reporting is required to ensure that failover/disaster backup strategies have sufficient capacity.

A variety of different strategies can be employed for disaster recovery so it is impossible to provide an example that covers all angles.

In the following example, the failover strategy for the ATM network uses Wintel clustering. If one server should fail, its processing is automatically moved to another cluster. This chart shows provides an illustration of the workload from the WinTel4 system failing over to WinTel3.

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Service Availability

The business expects all services to be available for 100% of the service window. Where this is not the case, this needs further analysis and possible corrective action.

Availability management is also quite subjective. Some organizations have a relatively simplistic approach and simply track keys programs and make sure that they’re up. Others take availability management to a whole new level and want to monitor availability in an end-to-end sense over a number of network nodes. All of these measurements are possible but it comes down to what is good enough for you.

In the following example, the business service availability chart shows that all services were 100% available for the whole month except for Business Banking, which was available for 98.6%. This could be due to an overnight update overrun, a hardware failure or a software failure. Further analysis to establish the nature of the shortfall is required, possibly followed by remedial action.

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The Unisys Libra 590, 595 and 690 systems introduce a whole new way of managing your system. Instead of investing in a system with a fixed power for a fixed time period, you are now investing in an unlimited power system but only paying for the amount that you use.

This gives you all the performance advantages of a much more powerful machine, such as improved response and turnaround times, without any additional cost. In fact, as a result of installing Libra 590’s, clients are claiming as much as a 30% reduction in overall hardware and software costs.

This almost seems too good to be true, but the reality is that this is an opportunity that all users of Unisys NX systems should take advantage of. As users have remarked, in terms of costs and accountability, this makes the Unisys mainframe a very competitive long term option.

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Resource Guidance Solutions (RGS) is a complete Capacity Management product for Unisys Libra systems and has been our core business since being established in 1988.

On this particular page, a specific module that can be used for analysing Unisys Libra systems is discussed. Users of Libra 590/595 systems should refer to Metered Systems for additional information pertinent to this particular Libra system.

The RGS Product consists of an Agent for collecting data and a PC software package. The agent uses standard documented system calls for retrieving the data and is a very low overhead (typically < 1%). Running 24 * 7 * 365, the agent creates just 1 file per day which contains all of the information required by the PC application to produce capacity reports / analyse issues further.

The whole process of collecting data, importing it into the PC product and creating reports is fully automated to minimise user involvement. In fact, the person reviewing the reports does not need to be a Unisys Libra expert to decide if any further action is required.

Computer Performance International is a Unisys Approved ISV. However, we are fully independent. Our only obligation is to our clients, ensuring they minimise their costs while delivering a quality service.

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Our Unisys CAP Product was originally developed in co-operation with Orange UK and Unisys in 1995 in response to concerns that CAP systems were unpredictable and could not achieve high utilisation rates without losing calls.

By implementing our methodology, the CAP systems were stabilised and could sustain much higher utilisation levels. We now worked with major telecoms companies in the UK, Netherlands, France, Poland, Spain, Germany and Belgium. They have all been able to make major cost reductions through the use of our methods, and our product has developed with their requirements.

CPI is a Unisys Approved ISV. However, we are fully independent. Our only obligation is to our clients, ensuring they minimise their costs while delivering a quality service.

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The smart product for the smart IT Manager!

Our methodology enables a single person to manage the capacity and performance of a large number of servers - no matter what platform or what application they are hosting.

Traditional methods that rely on examining huge amounts of data to determine whether each server is able to provide the required service level to support the business.

In contrast, by interpreting this data into concise meaningful metrics, we eliminate this time-consuming analysis and present a summary of what you need to know in a single daily "All Systems" report.

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Resource Guidance Solutions (RGS) is a complete Capacity Management product for multiple platforms. The RGS reporting and analysis software runs on a Windows server using the same approach for all platforms (similar approach to the current implementation of Unisys Libra).

The RGS agents for Unix are all developed by Resource Guidance in co-operation with Computer Performance International. The agents use standard documented system calls for retrieving the data and are a very low overhead (typically < 1%). Running 24 * 7 * 365, the agents create just 1 file per day which contains all of the information required by the PC application to produce capacity reports / analyse issues further.

When importing the collected data into the RGS product, complex algorithms within the product calculate the used capacity from not only the processor perspective, but also including allowances for headroom and IO boundness. This provides for a much more accurate measure of capacity than traditional methods/tools.

The whole process of collecting data, importing it and creating reports is fully automated to minimise user involvement. In fact, the person reviewing the reports does not need to be a Unix expert to decide if any further action is required!

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RG Solutions® incorporates its own Capacity Management database which is structured to provide top-down analysis and trending that can cover many months or years of information from multiple physical servers. RG Solutions® for VMWare provides accurate management and technical answers and the information required to answer questions like these:

• Are we making full use of our VMWare servers ?  
• Can we add another VM, assuming that it is similar to an existing VM and if not, why not?
• We are experiencing performance issues in one of our VMs; is this a guest operating system problem or is it due to contention at the VMWare level?
• On four occasions this month, we experienced response-time problems in several VMs; is this a VMWare issue?
• Can we optimize usage and minimise costs, by “juggling” VMs?

In addition to its powerful ad-hoc data analysis features, RG Solutions® has strong support for automatic analysis and report production. For example, the arrival of raw data can be used to trigger data import and post-import report production and distribution.

The objective now is to show how RG Solutions® for VMWare can be used to manage a VMWare installation, here are some of the things we will illustrate:

• How to get an overall view of usage of each physical platform and how this varies across the day.
• How to compare performance on different days for the same system or different systems on the same day. This is most easily done using Summary data either directly in the RG Solutions® browser or in reports.
• How to determine usage trends.
• Identification of the peak period and quantification of usage at that time.
• The ability to “drill down” into the detailed data to investigate issues or to examine data from the perspective of specific Virtual Machines (VMs).
• The ability to profile whole systems or individual VMs in terms of their resource usage and daily profile.

See the example Analysis and Reports for more detail.

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