We do actually have one of the products on trial but it has proved a nightmare in the install as it is one of those where it has been packaged up with lots of other related products so uses common agents and has endles STC’s, APFlibs and RACF to sort out. The interface is not that great either, although the GUI versions is an improvement. The problem is time , we only have it on a test system with low load so stat’s aren’t that helpful. We do have Omegamon and RMF etc for monitoring so you can get an idea of what”s going on but in the real world with 6 LPAR or more sysplexes things change.

I have directly asked for reference sites and info about overhead but as with most vendors they’re a bit coy over this. Our capacity and performance people were quite adament it would be very significant overhead so I wanted something tindependent o confirm or refute this.

We have now got to a stage where the original reasons for the product are becoming less compelling and it is likely to be dropped altogether. We used to have separated storgrps and usercatalogs for each test environment and used Shadow Image or Flashcopy to backup to equivalent DASD to be used for roll-back. We have now moved to shared DASD storgrps and usercatalogs and use DFDSS DUMP’s for backup as it save many terabytes of space. Originally I was concerned that we could have ‘rogue users’ swallowing all the shared DASD and a quota product would have dealt with that, but ithat issue has materialised so far. I also wannted to be able to see highwater marks for usage of each project and build historical data for projected vs actuals etc, but we can do that other way, except for highwater marks.