S4i DASD-Plus takes care of the whole process and it is now working for me...it just keeps doing the job automatically. We just dont worry about it.

With rapid growth, the LPARs were becoming increasingly hard to manage...during an initial test with DASD-Plus we were able to recover the storage equivalent to two 141 GB drives and got an immediate ROI. Now we use it to project our storage requirements as well as monitor library growth, proactively keeping storage use, performance and costs in check.

Before acquiring DASD-Plus, managing disk space was cumbersome. I’d spend hours trying to go through it, finding out the last time this report was used, or when that outqueue was cleaned. We were looking for a product to help us manage the outqueues and logs. It was a labor intensive, manual process. We wanted to find a software solution to support that function.

The Reclaim Disk Space function deals with output queues for spool files, message queues, journals, folders and a bunch of other things. The biggest thing for me was taking care of output queues, message queues and journals. I have fourteen hundred end-users, which means fourteen hundred message queues, and several hundred output queues. DASD-Plus allows me to make decisions and set parameters on each queue for how long I want to keep it available. Or, I can do a lump-sum change using generic naming. It is quite diverse. In a one-week period I was probably spending one-half to three-quarters of a day going through and trying to clean up output and message queues. Over the period of a year, that cost our firm several thousands of dollars. DASD-Plus easily paid for itself inside of a year. Now, we rely very heavily on it to keep all our queues in synch.

Within the first month of use we were able to recover 73 gigabytes of DASD by identifying a continually growing file in need of a purge process. We have also been able to identify thousands of unused files, programs and duplicated objects...It is a verycomprehensive product that is easily configurable to work within our environment and alleviatesmany of the mundane disk cleanup tasks.

The benefits for us are that all the DASD gets cleaned up the same way. Everyone is using the same product instead of writing their own routines. The big issue was not just cleaning up DASD, but that we clean it up on a regular basis. Now when an end-user hits the enter key, the response time is faster because the machine is not reading dead records. That’s difficult to evaluate if, for example, it’s a question of only a tenth of a second in response-time, but it definitely becomes a factor. Now disk management is automatic...it runs by itself and we don’t have to work about it.