WHY UDM
Why is UDM necessary?
Management of z/OS storage is becoming more of a challenge due to the ever-increasing size of Data Storage farms and the decrease in the manpower to TeraByte ratio to manage this Storage. The net result is critical management processes, such as Audits of the Catalog environment, are being ignored while other tasks, such as the initializing of volumes, are performed without the time to ensure the required checks have been actioned, thereby increasing the possibility of user errors.
UDM solves these issues by simplifying and automating most of the tasks involved in managing your data.
Distributed with UDM are a series of processes which collectively provide an out of the box solution:
- Collect information on objects and retain Historical information, allowing proactive analysis of data to determine any actions required.
- Simplify the processes needed to report on an object via a series of boxed reports.
- Trap critical Console messages and alert you when critical conditions such as DASD errors occur.
- React to object conditions such as Catalog or VTOC errors.
- Notify you of exception conditions as they occur via the central Monitor window that receives alerts from all your Systems.
- Simplify the day to day processes, such as initializing volumes, by ensuring volumes are offline to all systems, including systems outside the sysplex.
Additionally, UDM provides the ability to define and test your Service Level Agreements on a single system and then via a single mouse click provides the ability to propagate the processes to manage these service levels to all your Systems.
Who is UDM designed for?
UDM fits seamlessly into any Data Center thanks to its flexible architecture. Customers with existing third party products can easily tailor UDM to interface with these existing products.
Irrespective of the Data Center size, UDM provides immediate benefits:
- Large multi-site customers can use UDM to define a standard set of Service Level Agreements and then propagate these to existing customer Systems, via a single mouse click, or implement these standard Service Level Agreements as new customer Systems come on board.
- Big data centers benefit from the ability to work with multiple systems at the same time; for example, defining a new ICF Alias for a new User can be performed on all Sysplexes in a single request.
- Smaller data centers with less manpower resources benefit from the supplied and pre-configured processes, meaning fewer resources are needed to maintain and monitor storage, thereby freeing up personnel for other tasks.
Storages managers, operations support, systems programmers and capacity planners can all benefit from the UDM features:
- Storage managers can use the powerful monitoring facilities to be alerted when critical Storage conditions occur such as full Catalogs or Storage groups. They can then utilize delivered Commands or JCL to react to these conditions or customize the product with their own, site specific, actions.
- Capacity planners using the SQL based reporting processes can automate the collection of capacity related data such as Usage by High-level qualifier and easily review and manipulate this data.
- Operations support can easily analyze problems such as volumes accidently being offline to systems and react using customized Commands or JCL decks.
- Systems programmers can easily analyze System messages, Spool or the general Storage architecture and issue z/OS maintenance commands via the Command Interface.
When should UDM be used?
UDM can be used to proactively monitor your Systems, or it can be used to perform adhoc tasks on request.
By activating UDM on a System, simply by starting the Started task, UDM will be automatically monitoring and maintaining your Systems as well as collecting historical information on your System for further analysis.
Once active, UDM provides a comprehensive set of processes which allow you to perform common tasks, such as the following:
