Disk Dangers Avoided with Robot/SPACE 3.0

February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

Help/Systems last week launched a new version of Robot/SPACE, a utility designed to spot potential problems with System i disk usage before they escalate into full-blown crises. With version 3, the company has expanded the areas that Robot/SPACE analyzes for potential danger.

There are few certainties in life. But aside from death and taxes, you can feel pretty confident that your data storage needs will never go down. On the contrary, adding more storage–usually in the form of disk–is about as close to a certainty as paying Uncle Sam and the Grim Reaper their due.

While the rest of the world basks in the bounty of cheap and reliable disk, people using the System i are forced to pay IBM very high prices for the privilege of internal storage. That means System i shops tend to get as much disk as they need to cover their requirements, and not a gigabyte more.

But flirting with the minimum disk utilization line can be a dangerous game. Let the internal storage fill up, and it can bring your System i crashing down like a ton of bricks. For that reason, products like Help/Systems’ Robot/SPACE, which monitors disk usage on short-term and long-term bases, can be worth their weight in gold.

With Robot/SPACE version 3, Help/Systems has made the product even more pertinent by expanding the areas it analyzes for problems. The product now monitors the storage allocated by QTEMP libraries and spooled files for active jobs on a system. If one of these jobs begins to consume more than its allocated amount of disk, Robot/SPACE sends out a warning message.

Comparing present disk usage statistics with the past is also easier now. With Robot/SPACE 3.0, Help/Systems allows users to compare two collections from any period, and list the various libraries, objects, IFS directories, and other items that have changed over time. This release also brings a new on-demand reporting feature that allows users to quickly create reports of these collections, and to save them in HTML, text, and PDF formats.

Last but not least is a new role-based security feature that allows administrators to define which Robot/SPACE functions certain users are able to access. For more information, visit www.helpsystems.com.