ORSYP Monitors IBM Power VIOS with Sysload Tool
January 21, 2014 Alex Woodie
ORSYP, a developer of IT operations management tools, recently announced that it now supports the monitoring of the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) in IBM Power Systems servers with its Sysload tool. The company says that customers can eliminate performance bottlenecks and reduce the need to upgrade Power Systems hardware. Sysload is a productivity tool used to detect and diagnose IT performance problems before they are reported by users. The software works by collecting performance data from processors, memory, disk, file systems, and network resources. The data is then analyzed to identify the source of problems without requiring extensive manual troubleshooting by IT staff. A capacity planning tool is also included. With the latest update, Sysload has been enhanced to support the capturing of dedicated VIOS metrics from Power Systems servers. VIOS, introduced by IBM in 2008, is an AIX partition that runs under the PowerVM hypervisor. The software virtualizes the disk and network adapters in a Power Systems environment, which eliminates the requirement that IBM i or AIX LPARs have actual adapters dedicated to them, thereby reducing the number of physical adapters. VIOS abstracts away some of the busy work involved with maintaining physical network links and adapters. But that abstraction layer can have consequences in the form of less insight into network activity on the part of IT pros. “For IBM users, it is very difficult to predict what I/O activities LPARs will generate,” ORSYP product marketing manager Yann Guernion says in a press release. “A change in behavior can be devastating so effective monitoring of VIO Server performance is essential.” The improvements in the latest Sysload agent mean IBM Power users will spend less time fire-fighting and IT operations managers will be alerted to problems before users are affected, Guernion says. “With extra facts and figures on how systems are performing, they will have more scope when pooling applications as well as the ability to realize cost savings when planning upgrades,” he adds. ORSYP says the insights delivered by Sysload software has saved Power Systems shops up to 50 percent on the cost of capital expenditures related to provisioning of server capacity, and up to 30 percent off operational costs. In addition to Sysload, ORSYP develops job scheduling and automation tools. Its Dollar Universe is a cross-platform job scheduler that can also work with IBM i. The company counts about 1,400 customers, and has three headquarters, in Paris, Boston, and Hong Kong. For more information, see www.orsyp.com.
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