Los Angeles-based Candle Corp picked the UK May Day holiday to announce Omegamon for System Managed Storage, and painted a picture of mainframe system administrators who are understaffed, overworked and desperate for system software that will advise and take decisions for them. The new product then attempts to pick up where IBM’s SMS software leaves off. IBM’s SMS philosophy is simple enough, letting the system, rather than the operator worry about the best way to spread the data around the disks. However Candle believes its current incarnation – Data Facility/System-Managed Storage – does not go far enough: gathering statistics from the Gartner Group, International Data Corp and Xephon Plc, Candle suggests that mainframe disk requirements are growing at 28% per year, while at the same time only around 50% to 75% of the space is actually used. IBM’s DF/SMS improves on these figures, but nonetheless Candle says it was approached by several large corporations including AT&T Co, with disk farms containing many Terabytes of storage who asked them to help out. Omegamon II for SMS is the result, building on and interfacing to DF/SMS. The main requirement, says Candle was for a system that could intelligently suggest answers to bottlenecks or problems, and if required implement the necessary changes. To this end Omegamon provides a status advisor that graphically display of the overall health of the storage environment, by application if necessary. At the same time the SMS Manager checks that the various storage groups and classes have been set up properly, while the Hierarchical Storage Manager keeps an eye on the way in which data is migrated across media types, avoiding the thrashing that can occur when, for example an application accesses some data every four days and the system is set up to dump unused data to tape storage after three. These can be set up to take action automatically if a human is not about. Other facilities include complete cache analysis, ensuring frequently accessed data gets priority treatment and disk and space management statistics. AT&T is the first company to get its hands on the product, which runs on MVS. It will be joined in June by five European and five more US companies with general availability pencilled in for fourth quarter. The company did not offer any prices for it.
