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When it comes to a 360° view, looking at performance and capacity challenges from all possible angles for IBM System p and System i servers, their sophistication merits a little special attention.
IBM pSeries and iSeries processors have become the primary hub in many large distributed networks making managing their performance critical. IBM provides the Hardware Management Console (HMC) to provide strong server hardware and virtualization (partition) management for such systems. This includes collation of all data required to enable effective capacity management for all System p and System i servers.
Information retrieved from the HMC includes the configuration of the hardware, logical partitions (LPARs), and shared processor pools.
The HMC Capture Pack extracts data from an HMC and formats it so that it can be imported into Metron’s athene® Capacity Management Information Store (CMIS). Once the data is stored in the CMIS, athene® can be used to report, analyze, trend, and model the data in order to answer key capacity management questions.
Nick Varley, Chief Services Officer commented ‘athene® allows the Capacity Manager complete visibility to plan for changes to the business and our range of Capture Packs, produced in conjunction with our customers, are making information from all sources available for analysis. For good performance and capacity analysis of pSeries and iSeries systems, specific data is required, particularly around virtualization.Using the HMC as a data source gives us access to this data.’
The HMC Capture Pack retrieves hardware utilization data by LPARs and by shared processor pools.
Using this information charts are generated to show:
• the CPU usage of LPAR stacks, with the top of the stack representing the total utilization of the physical machine
• an aggregated view of all partitions with a trend line projecting utilization in the future
• the configuration of memory by partition
• utilization of shared processor pools.
Capacity Management today has the same goals and desired outcomes as it did decades ago – providing adequate capacity at controlled costs, both now and in the future.
Metron’s 360°Capacity Management initiative gives those involved in Capacity Management the ability to properly meet their mission. 360°Capacity Management has been designed to meet the varying and specific needs of performance analysts and capacity planners for their businesses, for their software environment, or as with the HMC Capture Pack, specific hardware facilities.
About Metron
Metron has been leading the way in Capacity Management since 1986 and is justifiably proud of its history. An independent company, Metron delivers Capacity Management solutions across the Globe and has an impressive client list of Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 Companies including ACS, Internal Revenue Service, LA County, Deloitte, Marriott, US Customs, T-Mobile, WH Smith, Telefonica O2, Nestle and LloydsTSB.
Metron believes its expertise in this area is second to none, after all Metron literally wrote the book, having co-written and advised on the original Capacity Management processes and guidelines contained within the UK Office of Government Computing Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and continues to be involved in the ongoing formulation of the latest versions.
Metron’s 350+ man-years of experience, amassed helping businesses to implement successful capacity management solutions, are available to help Companies meet the challenges of managing their physical and virtual environments. All that expertise has been built into the athene® capacity management software that Metron develops and sells in the US and UK, and through partners around the world.
Metron works in partnership with leading IT suppliers such as Hewlett Packard, Microsoft Systems, VMware, Computer Associates, IBM, Capgemini, and Oracle and alongside the world’s leading Outsourcing Companies, assisting with expert ITIL® consultancy and training services.
Athene® is a registered trademark of Metron Technology Ltd and Metron-Athene, Inc.
® ITIL is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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dianne.chapman[.]metron-athene.com 
