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 NEWS & EVENTS Home > Resources > News & Events EPV User Group 2009 report The VII EPV User Group has been held in Rome on 27th October 2009. About 40 people, belonging to 15 different companies, take part to the conference making it a very interesting and useful day. User presentations Two users discussed EPV implementation at their companies and highlighted some of the benefits provided. Groupama Italia focused on the high flexibility of EPV for z/OS that allowed them to answer to questions coming from Management: >> Could we integrate another company in our IT ? >> Which additional resources will we need ? >> It will be any impact on our current production applications ? As always, they had just few days to answer so they had to collect measurements from the new company, create an historical database, analyze them and produce reports. Thanks to EPV they were able to complete all these activities on time. EPV implementation required less than one day. UGIS presented their experience managing more than 500 Unix systems (most in AIX partitions) by using EPV for UNIX. "EPV for Unix is now a reference tool both for the analysis of system administrators and for the activities of capacity planning, thanks also to the possibility to be accessed by all the users who have access to the corporate portal." "With the integration of systems of HVB-IS the product is activated on all the AIX LPARs located in Germany, enabling a global view of the entire AIX environment and part of Sun Solaris environment regardless of their location with a few mouse clicks. UGIS also discussed how easy it was to implement an installation package in AIX bff format (like all system packages) which includes all the manual activities needed to activate EPV data collection on a new system. Finally they described two "Real events of practical use": >> the migration from P5+ to P6 >> a critical application deployment. In both situations EPV allowed them to manage the upcoming issues and solve them. New EPV Products release EPV developers presented the new versions of EPV for z/OS and EPV for Unix. EPV for z/OS V9 presentation showed the following major enhancements: >> a Management Summary view providing a synthetic manager oriented view of most relevant metrics >> Fast Path functionality providing predefined paths by activity >> a full set of IBM VTS (Hydra) views allowing to analyze the most important metrics by grid, cluster, hnode and vnode Additional views designed to support the new functions of the most recent z/OS versions such as High Performance FICON, HyperPAV and Group Capacity has been discussed. New GUI functions to improve product usability and effectiveness such as customizable combo-box and automatic empty views detection have also been presented. EPV for Unix V8 presentation showed the following major enhancements: >> A brand new Exceptions vision, including 7 views which are a must for an effective control of any UNIX environment >> Multiple benchmark support, the possibility to use different benchmarks on different servers >> A more usable GUI, including all the new functions already designed for EPV for z/OS The presentation focused on the most relevant Exceptions views which allow an automatic detection of very important events such as: >> Missing Systems; systems not providing performance data and making historical statistics unreliable; >> Suspected Looping Processes; processes wasting CPU resources that, if not detected, could cause an undesired increase of costs when doing Capacity Planning studies; >> Suspected Memory Leaking Processes; processes that don't release storage and, if not detected, could cause system degradation and also system crashes. Methodologies As in all editions the User Group includes technical presentations of general interest (not product based). WLC & Cost Accounting: old procedures, new challenges depicted a very clear picture of Cost Accounting tools and procedures used at most z/OS sites. It also showed how the new technologies released in the last years (such as WLC, zAAP and zIIP) made these tools and procedures obsolete. The aim of the intervention was to highlight how in many cases Companies are still using old methodologies, trying every month to provide explanations to the numbers produced, instead of focusing on the new available ways to reduce software bills. EPV for Windows data collection discussed the possibility to use WMI to put in place a light and efficient data collection process able to control hundreds or thousands Windows systems. Pros and Cons of agent and agent-less data collection has also been discussed. A solution designed to provide input to EPV for Windows (but quite general as approach) and allowing to implement both agent and agent-less data collection using WMI has been presented in detail. Capacity Management Issues in 2010 (Part1) showed how current mainframe technologies made Capacity Management activities much more complex than in the past. This presentation focused on: zAAP and zIIP contribution to MP effect, Service units instability, z10 capacity variability and expected impacts on Capacity Planning activities due to the new zAAP on zIIP technology. Invited speaker DBA Sistemi, distributor of Neon products in Italy, drove the last presentation of the day. Capacity Management Issues in 2010 (Part2) was in fact dedicated to the zPRIME "issue". Technical elements related to the way zPRIME works and what you have to do to install it has been presented but the most interesting part was the one related to legal and commercial. >> What could IBM do towards Neon ? >> What could IBM do towards customers exploiting zPRIME to shift consistent amount of workload to zAAP and zIIP in order to reduce costs ? >> It will be possible for IBM to change the system code to prevent zPRIME to run ? These are just some of the questions raised up and discussed during the presentation. Conclusions Based on participants feedbacks, it has probably been the best EPV User Group ever. This is the reason why EPV Technologies decided to repropose most of the content in a new event to be held in Milan: the EPV Performance Day. See more details in this newsletter. GSE UK 2009 The GSE UK 2009 conference will be held on 4th-5th November at Whittlebury Hall Hotel, Spa and Management Centre, Whittlebury, Northamptonshire, NN12 8QH. EPV Technologies will present a "compact" version of the '10Ways to Save Money on the Mainframe" seminar. The seminar will be presented in the Software Asset Management stream on 5th november from 09:00 to 10:00 (Part1) and from 10:30 to 11:30 (Part2). Inspired Solutions, EPV distributor in UK and Ireland, will sponsor the conference. Agenda and details at: http://www.gse.org.uk/tyc/invite.html "10 Ways to Save Money on the Mainframe" in Zurich EPV Technologies and TPS-DATA will present a new edition of the '10 Ways to Save Money on the Mainframe" seminar. The seminar will be held in Zurich on 12nd November 2009. More details at: http://www.tps-data-de.com/news,5.html EPV Performance Day The first edition of the EPV Performance Day will be held in Milan on 24th November 2009 at SIA-SSB, Via T.Taramelli, 26. The conference will repropose all the EPV Technologies presentations of the last EPV User Group. If you couldn't participate to the user group this is an opportunity you absolutely have not to miss. Subscription is free of charge but it has to be approved by EPV Technologies. The deadline to subscribe to the event is 18th november 2009. Preliminary Agenda
Mark the day in your agenda to avoid missing this event. More details at: http://www.epvtech.com/PDG2009.pdf About_us | Products | Resources | Services | Distributors | Support | Contact_us | Home | Site_Map |
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