RE: DASD housekeeping -- MIDRANGE-L

Jerome,

I'm not sure that there is much in the way of automated management that
can help you.  Certainly there are products out there which will monitor
usage and provide reports, but in the end someone needs to look at the
objects in question and decide whether there is a business rationale for
retaining the stuff on your system.  So the trick is get usage
information on a regular basis and deal with the exceptions.

It seems that many smaller shops have a policy of ignoring disk
utilization until they approach or exceed their ASP threshold.  Then they
declare an emergency, run the reports, and delete a lot of libraries and
files.  Perhaps that's where you are right now.  If this is the case, I
would suggest buying some time by backing non-production big libraries
off the system twice and then delete them from your system.  Send one set
of tapes off-site.  If you have a rather informal development
environment, this is the time to administer mild beatings to your
development staff.  Your description of the items, "beaucoup libraries of
junk, savf, saved dups, just-in-case dbf", indicates that what you really
need to do is control your development and change-control process.  If
something is there just to protect against a possible disaster, it
probably should be on tape, not on your live disk.

In the long run, your first step is to gather information.  What is the
base size of your production environment (OS and IBM program products,
vendor programs, and database libraries)?  How fast is it growing?  You
could either run IBM's disk analysis programs monthly or purchase a
package which might give you more detail.  This is basic capacity
planning and will give you a curve so that you can plot the growth of
your production files and predict when you will need more disk.

>From the looks of your web site you may be purely a development/test shop
without a "production" environment like an ERP package.  In this case
development and testing is your production and you may benefit more from
looking at your policies and procedures than from examining growth
curves.  If the cure is worse than the disease, then buy more DASD.
Development environments are difficult.

I've been in the position of managing systems in a heavy development
environment.  I needed to deal with the developers as peers and did not
have the authority to issue orders.  Disk management in this case is a
rather political process which often does not receive management
attention until the ASP threshold is reached.

Can you give more details on how your machine is used?

Regards,
Andy Nolen-Parkhouse


> On Behalf Of Jerome Draper
> Subject: DASD housekeeping
> 
> I have run the disk analysis collection pgm on go disktasks and then
> the
> resultant reports which are useful.
> 
> How do others manage their DASD (aside from simply buying more and more
> and
> more)?
> 
> We have beaucoup libraries of junk, savf, saved dups, just-in-case dbf,
> etc.
> 
> I want a system but hasn't someone already invented it?
> 
> Jerome Draper, Trilobyte Software Systems