Candle announces day one monitoring support for IBM's IMS 5.1; new version of OMEGAMON II for IMS and DBCTL will fully exploit new release of IMS.

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 5, 1995--Candle Corp., the leading supplier of solutions for systems, network and console management across the enterprise, Wednesday announced day one support for IBM's Information Management System (IMS) Version 5.1.

Versions 120 of Candle's OMEGAMON II for IMS and OMEGAMON II for DBCTL will provide support for this new release of IMS. In August 1995, Candle will provide users with full exploitation of IMS 5.1 when the company begins shipment of Version 300 of both OMEGAMON II for IMS and OMEGAMON II for DBCTL.

New features of Version 300 of OMEGAMON II for IMS and OMEGAMON II for DBCTL provide an abundance of functionality and ease-of-use enhancements that enable users to take full advantage of the robust features of IMS 5.1. These new releases of OMEGAMON II for IMS and DBCTL also provide enhanced monitoring capabilities for the current releases of IMS.

"Candle's commitment to the IMS marketplace remains strong," said Bill Yaman, solutions director, database solutions at Candle. "We recognize that IMS, which manages 7.7 billion transactions per day, continues to be the cornerstone of many mission-critical applications for our customers."

Proactive Alerts and Remote Site Recovery (BSR) Displays

IMS Version 5.1 provides the ability to have an active IMS transaction-processing system ship the associated log records to a remote IMS subsystem for the purpose of backup and recovery. This log transmission requires that a new IMS system address space be available in order to facilitate the transmission of the log data.

OMEGAMON II for IMS V300 and OMEGAMON II for DBCTL V300 will monitor this new address space called Transport Manager Subsystem (TMS) and provide new alerts to monitor RSR status and VTAM connections between the active and tracking systems.

Enhanced Database and System Dataset I/O Statistics

A new data-sharing technique in IMS Version 5.1 exploits the features of the MVS Coupling Facility, enabling an IMS database or system administrator to share IMS databases among as many as 32 IMS subsystems with little or no additional processing overhead.

The new versions of Candle's OMEGAMON II for IMS and DBCTL provide I/O statistical information for IMS system datasets, user database datasets and IMS volume response time, all of which assist users in deciding which databases are candidates for N-Way data sharing.

Monitoring Lock Contention (IRLM 2.1)

The IMS Resource Lock Manager (IRLM) 2.1 is required when using the N-Way data-sharing feature of IMS 5.1. OMEGAMON II for IMS V300 and OMEGAMON II for DBCTL V300 provide extensive lock contention statistics. Up to the last 24 hours of IRLM near-term information is displayed on both the Record List Entries (RLEs) and Contention data panel displays.

Detailed Analysis and Dataspace Mapping for Fastpath Virtual Storage Option

The purpose of IMS Fastpath databases is to provide the fastest possible retrieval of data from the database. IMS V5.1 now allows users to move their Fastpath Data Entry Databases (DEDB) to MVS dataspaces to optimize the physical I/O and improve performance.

OMEGAMON II for IMS V300 and OMEGAMON II for DBCTL V300 are enhanced to provide statistical information such as read-and-write counts, as well as I/O rates to the dataspace(s). This facility will provide information to IMS system administrators and analysts so that they can determine the overall impact of using virtual storage option (VSO) for their Fastpath databases.

SAP Application Package Support

Many IMS customers commonly use the SAP Application Package. All SAP functionality is under an umbrella transaction code. Although this architecture allows the underlying user functions to be independent of their operating environment, it makes it difficult to monitor and differentiate the performance of individual transactions, since all transaction codes under the SAP umbrella transaction are the same.

With Version 300 of Candle's OMEGAMON II for IMS, users of SAP and OMEGAMON II solutions can identify the internal SAP function being executed by an IMS transaction. All of the details of the individual transactions are provided.

This will also be the case for SAP transactions in the extracted Transaction Reporting Facility (TRF) file. The accumulated CPU time for SAP transactions will also be available in the real-time monitor. This feature significantly increases the value of OMEGAMON II as a tuning and problem-resolution tool for SAP users.

Bottleneck Analysis

Unique to Candle's new OMEGAMON II for IMS and DBCTL is easy-to- use bottleneck analysis, which quickly identifies how transactions within IMS are executing. Summary and detail displays show the reasons transactions are waiting.

With bottleneck analysis, users can identify and isolate IMS wait conditions such as CPU or paging, internal IMS, VSAM/OSAM or Fastpath buffer, database or application I/O, and locking or latch conflicts.

Company Background

Candle is the world's leading independent developer and supplier of software solutions that manage the availability and performance of critical systems, network and console resources, as well as business applications, spanning across the enterprise.

Since its founding in 1977 by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Aubrey Chernick, Candle has developed a complete line of solutions for enterprise availability management, including automation, status management, application integration and database management.

The company recently began delivering its Candle Command Center solutions, which are essential in helping customers make the transition to large enterprise production environments composed of both mainframe and client/server applications.

CONTACT: Candle Corp., Santa Monica

Philip Little, 310/582-4725

[e-mail]

or

Miller Communications, Marina del Rey, Calif.

Wendy Allen, 310/822-4669

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