H-P crafting Unix support: Roseville PTC lab dedicated to Unix performance management - system management applications - Performance Technology Center in Roseville, CA

Software Magazine, June 15, 1990 by John Desmond

H-P CRAFTING UNIX SUPPORT

SYSTEM MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Made by HEWLETT-PACKARD: For MPE and Unix: LaserRX/UX LaserRX/Forecast For MPE Only: HP OpenView System Manager HP TurboStore/XL II HP SPU Switchover/XL HP AutoRestart/XL HP Software Performance Tuner/XL

Independently Supplied Tools: Aim Benchmark Suite, Aim Technology, Palo Alto, Calif. Scert II, Performance Systems, Inc., Rockville, Md. Radar, Unison Software, Mountain View, Calif. Sysview and Sysplan, Carolina Systems, Mississauga, Ontario CIA, Tres Associates, Austin, Texas

Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., is among the leaders of an effort to bring better performance management software to the Unix world.

The company is also actively developing data center software for its proprietary MPE Reduced-Instruction Set (Risc) operating system.

HP last year established its Performance Technology Center in Roseville, Calif. The facility is dedicated to developing tools for diagnostics, performance management, capacity planning, and application optimization for the Unix and MPE operating systems.

This year, HP announced LaserRX/UX and LaserRX/Forecast, capacity planning tools for Unix developed at the Performance Technology Center (PTC). The PC-based tools capture and record data related to memory use, I/O throughput, transaction rates and response times. The data is entered into mathematical models to project needed computing resources.

Tony Engberg, section manager for the PTC, sees the development of Unix performance management and capacity planning tools as critical to the future of the operating system.

"We consider it critical to have a set of standards available to get the job done," he said. "If we don't have them, the growth of Unix will be sharply constrained. If you cannot supply capacity planning tools, data center managers will not be willing to use Unix in mission-critical environments."

HP, a member of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Open Software Foundation, is participating in the Unix performance management special interest group. The SIG is spearheaded by members of Parsippany, N.J.-based Unix International, the rival Unix effort headed by AT&T and Sun Microsystems. DEC, another member of the OSF, is also participating in the effort. So far, OSF-co-founder IBM has not participated.

The total membership of the UI performance management SIG is 85. Members represent 28 different organizations, including major users and SAS Institute, the Cary, N.C.-based software supplier. The group has submitted a proposal to Posix, the Ansi/IEEE effort to develop a standard operating system interface and environment based on Unix. "We hope OSF will get on board with it," said Engberg.

A successful effort would help committed Unix users such as Ford Electronics Manufacturing Corp. of Markham, Ontario. The plant has a three-level architecture, featuring HP 9000s running HP/UX. Level one is data collection machines tied to a work cell controller; level two is an "area manager" that connects multiple controllers; and level three holds host machines that provide various reports.

The firm now uses HP's Laser/RX tool. "What's missing is the planning portion," said Carol Leung, CIM systems engineer at Ford. She uses Laser/RX data to project needed capacity, based on variables such as production rates, number of users on the system and how they interface to the equipment. "So far, it has worked reasonably well," she said. "I build in a lot of margin for error."

However, "For planning, I don't really know the impact of a future load on the system," she said.

The issues to be resolved are both technical and political. The rivalry between OSF and UI could become an impediment, but members of the SIG are trying to work together. "We expect to see a standard recommendation shared among all vendors. We are trying to avoid political issues," Engberg said.

The technical issues are not minor. Up to now, analytic or "what if" models have been used to predict how much Unix computing resoruce will be needed, based on a standard unit of measurement, such as a transaction. Users of HP's LaserRX/Forecast tool define a transaction from their own standpoint.

In distributed environments, planners need to assess the impact of one r more additional servers on the network response time. "The models are not at the point today where they work to solve that problem. It will probably take a combination of analytic modeling and some kind of simulation, which is a much more expensive way to attack the problem," Engberg said.

The ultimate goal is to enable planners to plan capacity in heterogeneous, distributed computing environments. That means having one tool address capacity planning for more than one operating system. Engberg said HP is now studying what operating systems to pursue and when.

In the Unix user community, the idea of getting performance management software from a supplier other than the creator ofthe operating system seems foreign. "My feeling is that a performance tool has to be closely related to the kernel. I don't think it's appropriate to go to a third-party supplier for an HP/UX performance tool," said Paul Hite, systems administrator with PRC Realty Systems, McLean, Va. PRC supplies computer services to the nation's real estate industry.