IT Systems Tuning involves a series of processes that help organizations understand issues in their systems, workflows and policies that might be having an impact on the performance of their infrastructure and applications. In addition, it involves recommendations for solutions to remediate problems that can often entail relatively simple adjustments in managing workloads and in adapting workload policies.
Typically, a customer will come to Vicom Infinity with a specific performance issue. Perhaps a mission-critical application is not responding as quickly as needed, or perhaps the overall system is experiencing bottlenecks that didn't occur previously. Our goal is to get to the heart of the problem and figure out how we can work with the customer to fix it quickly and cost-efficiently.
At Vicom Infinity, we take a methodical approach to addressing the specific challenges in your environment, identifying workloads or tasks that may be impacting performance and then helping you to modify your workload policies so that the system can do a much better job of meeting your performance objectives.
After a successful system tuning engagement, you may find that you need to upgrade your hardware. If that's the solution you need, you can be assured that you've examined all possible alternatives before going down that path.
However, we've had many customers that have been able to make simple changes in managing workloads and workload policies that have led to significantly improved performance and usage across mission-critical workloads – improving productivity dramatically at a fraction of the cost of buying a new system.
With system tuning, IT organizations can identify and remediate performance challenges that impact mission-critical applications.
There comes a point in the lifecycle of every system where the IT department has to address certain performance issues. These could be a specific application not performing as expected; challenges with specific workloads; inefficiencies in systems consumption or optimization, or many others. There can be a variety of ways the performance of the system is impacting the business – and IT needs to come up with a plan and a solution to address them.
In the IBM environment, the first step is to contact Vicom Infinity for system tuning. With system tuning, we get to the heart of the problem and come up with recommendations for the most effective, cost-efficient solution – which, fortunately, does not always mean just buying more hardware. Oftentimes, in fact, we come up with solutions that are simple and inexpensive to deploy.
In a systems tuning engagement, the customer will often send us documentation, such as Resource Management Facility (RMF) reports, that we will use to help identify how the system is being used and who might be the biggest consumers of CPU, storage and/or networking capacity. We also ask the customer to send us copies of their workload policies, so that we can identify workloads and how they are being managed by the system.
Between the RMF reports and the workload policy documents, we go through a meticulous analysis of who is using what systems and how each workload is performing and impacting the performance of other workloads. There are many ways in which performance can be impacted: From the basic health of the processor, to how the operating system is configured, to hardware console management, to workload policies, and many others.
All of these factors are coalesced into a position paper that we can prepare for the customer. Some of the fixes can be immediate and we do them on the spot. Other fixes might require changes in workload, changes in workload policies or, in some cases, the acquisition of new hardware.
Whatever fixes are needed, the customer recognizes that we have gone through a thorough, expert process and series of steps to understand and recommend the best – and most cost-efficient – solutions to their specific and unique problems. Each system is different and the factors that impact its performance can vary greatly. At Vicom Infinity, we take the time to understand your system and what needs to be done to get it back to performing to your expectations.
