I had the opportunity to try out part of the functionality of an earlier version of the product. It has some interesting capabilities that may be useful in some siutations, but it depends on your specific situation. I don't think it's "a drop it in and it will magically save you money": you need to understand your workloads, how capping works, what your financial goals are, and how VWLC/AWLC works with the R4H. If you have an ELA with IBM, you also need to understand where you are in that contract relative to your planned-for MLC cap and how much time you have left on the ELA, etc.
Basically, it helps you actively manage your R4H value by dynamically modifying the caps. Whether that can help you save money or not depends entirely on your situation. If you're using 100% of the machine every night for 6 hours to get batch done and you absolutely can not delay that workload any then it's not going to help. But if you spike at different times of the month, depending on ad hoc workloads, and there are workloads on the system that may be able to be delayed at that time, then yes it very well may be useful. Also, it *may* be able to help you avoid some of the peaks. Note the emphasis on "may". I believe you could write the code yourself to do at least part of what it does via BPCii, but there is something nice about not having to figure that out. At the time that I looked at it, it was a bit on the edge for us as whether it could be cost-justified. I wanted it, but it got nixed for reasons that weren't the fault of the product. That was a little while ago before ESAi picked it up. In short, actively managing your MLC costs by managing your R4H caps can save you substantial amounts of money in specific situations. This is a tool to help you do that active management a little better / easier. Oh, and finally, I was interested in the ability to dynamically/programatically change weights. That wouldn't necessarily save money, but would allow us to better manage which LPARs suffer how much, making it more of a tool to optimize performance within a given financial constraint (i.e. a specific R4H cap). Not surprisingly, opinions are my own, not my employer's and I'm not an active user of the product so take everything with a grain of salt: the product today may be different than the one I looked at several months ago. Scott Chapman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
