IBM Mainframe Forum

All, I work for a company that has what I feel is a rather awkward delineation for M/F storage administration...prior to working here every company I worked for incorporated M/F Storage Mangement within the Systems Support Groups (SSG) i.e.(M/F Systems Programmers). This is not the case where I work today. We have a Storage Management Team (SMT) that manages ALL storage (M/F and Open Systems). Out of the total 500TB of managed storage the M/F is only about 5.5 TB lees than 1% of the total aggregate. This forces SMT to have expertise in DFSMS, DFHSM, ABARS, IODF, and general M/F operations features...yet all this is controlled by the Systems Support Group. To me this seems like a clunky relationship at best and maybe a little risky as well. At best 90 of SMT is Open Systems savvy while only (1 person remotely understands the M/F side of the house.

So what is your opinion should M/F storage be managed within the SSG or is it better off in SMT?

Thanks,
Shive

Hello and welcome to the forum,

This forces SMT to have expertise in DFSMS, DFHSM, ABARS, IODF, and general M/F operations features...

Whoever is responsible for supporting m/f storage has to understand how things work in this environment. . . There should be more than one person with this knowledge.

Over time, is the m/f volume expected to increase or go away?

How important is it to the business if there is insufficient knowledge to handle a m/f storage outage?

I believe there are many more questions to be asked/answered before saying one "group" should be used over the other.

Dick, so to answer your questions...

M/F storage is decreasing gradually...about 4 years ago it was 8TB's

If there was an outage... today it would be impactive to some revenue generating processes!

The problem as I see it is this...the M/F "expert" in SMT still has to manage the open platforms...requiring allocations, performance reviews, capacity upgrades, break-fix, on-call, data recovery, across NAS(NettApp) Hitachi USP, EMC Celera/Centara. Then is required to be the "expert" in DFSMS, HSM, TMS, ABARS and Coordinate 2 M/F D/R exercises per year..."A JACK of all trades a MASTER of none"... this is a little risky in my opinion. If you have other questions don't hesitate to ask.

Thanks,
Shive

Hello,

If this one person is responsible for both the m/f and the "open" systems storage, i suspect this should be a management issue. There is no good business reason to have all of this in one person. Possibly i misunderstand.

Why do you believe a "jack of all trades"? I've known several people that support storage in multiple environments and they are pretty much masters of each. These organizations often split the storage support by product lines or business units. And the storage support people are cross-trained to know all of the disciplines they support.

Depending on exactly the situation in your organization, management should be concerned that the desire to save costs may cause the organization damage. This however has nothing to do with whether the support should be centralized in one storage support group or divided as you mention or some other division.