RE: Capacity Planning on As400

I'll stick my neck out and say that we are a Performance Navigator
customer and I am very satisfied with their product.  Performance
Navigator will allow you to easily take your current workload, or
workloads from multiple servers and model that to any size system you
choose.  It also allows you to maintain years of data for reference,
without using huge amounts of disk space.  We have over three years of
data taking up only 350 MB.  Certainly you can do all of this yourself
using the iSeries Performance Tools, but Performance Navigator makes it
very easy to view tha data and drill down into it.

The tools in iSeries Navigator/Management Central have gotten much
better also, but I still use PN for monthly trending and modeling.  As
far as accuracy goes, about five years ago I used PN to predict that a
system would be out of gas in about six months.  The management in that
shop pretty much ignored that prediction; six months later the SysAdmin
called and told me that they had maxed out their CPU right on schedule.

You can download the software from their website and use a free subset
of the tools to get a feel for how it works.  This allows you to get
some baseline data saved ahead of time that will be helpful if you
choose to buy the full product.  The people at MPG are also very
knowledgeable and helpful if you do need help.

I am not familiar with BMC Predict so can't help you there.  What Queue
depth are we talking about?  Job Queues?

Regards,
 
Scott Ingvaldson
iSeries System Administrator
GuideOne Insurance Group


-----Original Message-----
date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 18:45:52 -0400
from: Sanjiv <sanjivji@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: Capacity Planning on As400

In my Organization we are running couple of 840's , 810's etc and it has
come time to upgrade them to newer i5 models

What I am looking is a tool to do capacity planning on the Series

I have heard of a tool called Performance Navigator from
(http://www.mpginc.com/ ) which seems to do a good work and also have
heard
that BMC has a tool called Predict.  Is there any other tool that can be
used effectively for Capacity planning ?

If anyone has used Performance Navigator , I would like to know their
experience as how accurate it was and similar for BMC Predict tool

One of the differences which I had seen was that BMC Predict tool uses
Queue
Depth for modeling while Performance Navigator does not. Performance
Navigator  takes trending data and growth into account for Doing The
analysis

Any Help / information would be appreciated

Thks in advance