Features

Feature	Description
Broad Platform Support	IntelliMagic Direction supports storage systems from all major vendors, regardless of which server platform they are connected to. They may be attached to z/IOS, Unix, Windows, Linux or i/OS servers or a combination thereof. See Supported Hardware for details.
Intuitive GUI	IntelliMagic Direction runs on a Microsoft Windows PC. No connection to the actual storage system is needed to perform any of the functions. Results are presented in the graphical user interface and in text reports or Excel charts. See Sample Results for some examples of the GUI output.
Automated Input	IntelliMagic Direction features automated procedures to load workload data using reports created on native tools such as iostat (UNIX), perfmon (Windows), Performance Tools Reports (i/OS) and IBM's TPC for Disk, and it supports IntelliMagic Vision data input. For a list of supported inputs please see Supported Data Sources.
Comprehensive Modeling Scenarios	After loading the data, IntelliMagic Direction creates a model of the current environment. Once the model is created it is very easy to model the impacts of changes to the hardware and workload. The following list contains some specific examples of scenarios you might entertain: Determine if your workload can run on fewer larger capacity drives Evaluate the effect on response times of moving workloads to different tiers of storage Understand and track the utilization levels of Disk Subsystem processors, channels, host adapters, and RAID ranks Assess the performance impact of moving from Fibre to FATA disk drives Compare bandwidth requirements and response time impact of various copy services solutions Assess the result of consolidating multiple older Disk Subsystems into one new Disk Subsystem Analyze if critical applications run better on alternative configurations, for example RAID-10 or RAID-5 Predict the performance benefit gained from increasing cache size, adding channels, etc. Assess whether energy efficient high capacity drives will support service levels demanded by business needs