ETJ First Impression: VR 5.1

VELOCI-Raptor Release 5.1 – Enabling Applications to Perform at Their Peak

By Denny Yost, ETJ Magazine (5-minute read)


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With a significant percent of Fortune 500 size organization’s running on mainframe systems, their value and importance are critical to the continued success of the enterprise. Yet, running these applications in the most efficient manner possible to speed execution time and minimize resource usage continues to be challenging if the proper steps are not taken.  A key area of focus is always determining and setting the best buffering environment for an application when accessing VSAM and non-VSAM data.

Application owners that get the buffering environment precisely correct for each application executed will see significant
improvement in application execution time due to the reduction or elimination of I/O operations issued against data sets. Of course, once the proper buffering environment is accomplished, you have to repeatedly monitor and adjust the defined environment to maintain or further improve an application’s performance. The process of monitoring and adjusting the buffering environment for an application to maintain or improve an application’s performance takes time away
from creating new or performing maintenance to applications. Application developers’ time is already stretched quite thin, and their priorities are almost never focused on optimizing application performance over the long term.

VELOCI-Raptor has addressed this issue with a solution that monitors and dynamically adjusts the buffering environment for a particular application’s access to a data set.  To optimize an application, VELOCI-Raptor utilizes its knowledge of access method behavior, access declarations made by an application and the current status of the data set—number of records, CI-size, etc.—and determines the best buffering environment to use for each access to the data set. The result is that VELOCI-Raptor determines a buffering solution that is in keeping with the current state of the application and the data set it is accessing. Best of all, VELOCI-Raptor does this on a continuous basis, automatically and
dynamically defining the optimal buffering environment each time an application opens a data set. For VSAM data sets, this means VELOCI-Raptor is not locked into a predefined selection. It will choose either Non- Shared Resources (NSR) or Local Shared Resources (LSR) buffering, without any manpower required.

Version 5.1.0 of VELOCI-Raptor continues to deliver the application performance results it has for many years, along with several new enhancements.

Enhanced QSAM Support
Three new QSAM enhancements are provided in Version 5.1.0 of VELOCI-Raptor.  Additional support for address spaces experiencing “region stress” issues is provided.  Support for the use of R31 buffers where possible has also been added.  Additional support for buffer pool storage monitoring and reclamation completes the enhancements for QSAM.

Enhanced VSAM Support
Two new enhancements have been added for VSAM support. First, enhanced support of the use of LSR in a batch environment is included. This permits VELOCI-Raptor to dynamically determine the originator of LSR requests—whether made by the application or by IBM’s Batch-LSR (BLSR) component—and customizes the optimization based on who originated the request. Second, the interface has been re-structured and is now faster—especially when gathering statistics.

Reduced Product Footprint
VELOCI-Raptor 5.1.0 now operates using a smaller footprint. The R24 “below-the-line” footprint for the VELOCI-Raptor VSAM interface has now been reduced to less than 512 bytes. The VELOCI-Raptor rule sets have also been condensed, resulting in fewer CPU resources being used when searching for the optimal rule.

Enhanced User Interface
User customization of VELOCI-Raptor has been simplified so that Dynamic Control Facility (DCF) can now be used for all product customization. DCF can now be used to dynamically override all VELOCI-Raptor global settings, to select specific optimization rules (such as forcing the use of either LSR or NSR) and to dynamically apply overrides to selected optimization rules.

Conversion-Assist
Organizations that are changing utilities or consolidating and standardizing on VELOCIRaptor for VSAM and non-VSAM buffer optimization will benefit from the Conversion-Assist feature now integrated into the base product. In most cases, the Conversion-Assist feature will aid in the conversion from a user’s existing performance optimization tool to VELOCI-Raptor by ensuring product segregation. During a VELOCI-Raptor trial period, the Conversion-Assist feature allows the product to be tested without modification to the current performance optimization tool’s
environment, thus permitting an organization’s current solution to remain active. When an organization is converting to VELOCI-Raptor, the Conversion-Assist feature eliminates the need to manually migrate optimizations from one product to another, along with the need to stop one product in order to use the other. In addition, the Conversion-Assist feature can permit the reproduction of the previous performance optimization tool’s environment into VELOCI-Raptor when an organization provides some basic configuration details. The Conversion-Assist feature allows the running of VELOCI-Raptor 5.1.0 alongside a previous release of VELOCI-Raptor when upgrading, enhancing and simplifying the entire process.

To learn more about VELOCI-Raptor, contact Dino-Software at 703-768-2610 or visit their website www.Dino-Software.com. ETJ

 

About Dino-Software

Dino-Software Corporation develops enterprise-wide solutions for the management, analysis, protection, and repair of complex z/OS mainframe environments.  Dino-Software has long been acknowledged for its superiority in ICF catalog management and technical support, helping organizations ensure their business-critical assets remain online and recoverable in a disaster.  Learn more about Dino-Software and its z/OS mainframe storage solutions at https://dino-software.com.

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