University of Georgia and Mainline Resolve Bottlenecks and High Wait Times: IBM System z provides cost-effective and efficient solution

With statewide commitments and responsibilities, the University of Georgia (UGA) is the state's flagship institution of higher education. Through its strategic planning, the university aspires to have even closer contact and interaction with statewide public and private institutions, as well as with the citizens it serves. So, it's no surprise that the university must have the best information technology available. With the initial challenges of upgrading and inevitable ever-growing workloads, UGA found itself needing a thorough analysis with a recommendation for cost-effective and efficient solutions.

Chris Fleming, UGA's Associate Director of EITS Operations and Systems Support, shows off an IBM System z server located in the university's data center.

The Challenge
The university had been running z/OS 1.4 for about a year on the IBM 9672-X47, a 31-bit machine. To install the next operating system, UGA needed to upgrade to a 64-bit machine.

"We discovered that running 64-bit on a System z would also make us eligible for the sub-capacity pricing metric for select IBM software," said Chris Fleming, Associate Director of EITS Operations and Systems Support for UGA. "With university budgets getting tighter, this option was very attractive. So, we asked Mainline to perform a cost analysis against our current workloads."

Mainline provided UGA with an estimate of what its IBM sub-capacity eligible software would cost versus paying for full-capacity software. The results showed a dramatic decrease in monthly costs just by switching to sub-capacity alone.

Fleming said that this led to further system performance investigations.

"In addition to finding bottlenecks in our storage units, our internal teams also discovered new patterns in our day-to-day workloads and nightly batch work. We also found opportunity for system and application tuning to improve overall performance. If we had to upgrade to a 64-bit machine, due to operating system incompatibility issues, we may as well research newer storage devices and other equipment that would help us improve overall system performance by reducing storage I/O and wait times, as well as by decreasing production batch processing windows. The new technology would also add tools to help monitor, analyze and prioritize workloads. These improvements would ultimately lower our MSUs and software costs."

The university again called on Mainline to provide a performance analysis of the existing hardware and software.
"We wanted to be sure we had not overlooked any other problem areas," Fleming said. "We also wanted to measure our MSUs during normal months and months of heavy usage, such as drop/add periods when thousands of students hit the mainframe at once."
Mainline worked with the UGA systems support staff to collect data from its systems, and then met with the university to assess their findings. The analysis indeed uncovered I/O bottlenecks and high wait times within UGA's storage devices, as well as rising CPU utilization.

"Mainline helped migrate our data residing on 3380s to 3390s," Fleming said. "Most of our z/OS catalogs were on 3380 device types, so this was a very critical move. This was no challenge to Mainline's technical support consultants, and they completed the task with no problems."

As for the new 64-bit machine, Mainline recommended a model that would allow the university to meet its goals of ensuring operating system compatibility and growth, while improving performance and lowering software costs by using sub-capacity pricing. The model recommended was the IBM System z 2086-270. UGA also sought to improve the suite of tools used for monitoring and tuning.

"We brought in vendors to demonstrate products and help us realize the benefits of each," Fleming said. "In the end, we selected the products demonstrated by Mainline and IBM because they met UGA's requirements and were sub-capacity eligible. We now employ System Automation, Omegamon and RMF."

The Results
"The solutions implemented have helped us realize the potential in meeting the demands of our customers and our organizational priorities," Fleming said. "We are now able to quickly see how our systems are performing and make dynamic changes to accommodate increasing workloads. Thanks to the ESS 2105-800 and Parallel Access Volumes, we have the capacity to service storage requirements and provide multiple access paths to the same data, reducing wait times and bottlenecks.

"The replacement of our 9672-X47 four-way processor with the 2086-270 two-way processor gave us faster processors and the ability to utilize hardware encryption with the use of the Cryptographic Express2 co-processors, maximizing the security of the environment. In addition, the 2086 was configured with enough OSA cards to allow us to remove our aging console and communications controllers, thereby freeing up valuable floor space.

"Now, with the ability to clearly see and define our workload priorities; process batch jobs and transactions faster; and have more storage to better maintain the data spread with multiple access paths to the data, we are able to lower CPU utilization while processing a much larger workload," Fleming said. "We have seen an overall improvement in performance and productivity, as well as an increase in customer satisfaction. Also, with roughly the same amount of MIPS and MSUs as the 9672-X47, we have lowered software costs driving a better bottom line during tighter budget times."

Why Mainline
"Mainline won our business based on cost, quality of service, expertise and dedication to the customer," Fleming said. "Mainline has consistently gone above and beyond in meeting our requirements. They have a remarkable team, from sales to technical support, and are always more than willing to discuss our needs, recommend solutions and see the solutions through to a successful outcome."


For more information about this solution, call your Mainline account representative or call Mainline directly at 866.490.MAIN (6246).