Offloading SMF data processing from the mainframe

Mark Cohen Austrowiek - Fabio Massimo Ottaviani
May 2003

One of the z/OS characteristics, mainly appreciated by people responsible for I.T. is the availability, quality and completeness of standard performance metrics inside the SMF records which helps guarantee enterprise responsiveness to business needs.

SMF records are an invaluable source of information for capacity and system management but in many environments their amount can be overwhelming and cause high system resource usage when processing and performing analysis tasks.

Resource utilisation is a direct cost but you also have to consider indirect costs related to the impact of SMF processing on the LPAR utilisation and consequently software license charges. This issue will become more and more important as soon as companies will move to the Variable Workload License Charges policy introduced by IBM.

You can’t avoid the cost of producing SMF records (if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it !) but you can greatly reduce the cost of processing and analysing them by offloading this activity to a cheaper platform. The evolution of new hardware, network devices and software provides comparable alternatives to the IBM mainframe.

This paper can help you perform this task by providing different real life experiences. Special emphasis will be put on different alternatives to solve the problem of transferring SMF raw data from mainframe to a different platform.