When Roy Cawthra joined the Cornhill Group in March 2001 as Technical Services Manager, he was taking on a big job. With some 2,500 users located throughout the UK, his responsibilities included all hardware and software requirements, design and standards for the desktop environment, email systems, disaster recovery, change management, Performance Management and Capacity Planning. The latter area of responsibility quickly rose to the top of his agenda when he was faced with strident complaints from users about response times on the company's main business application (the claims system known as Coronet) caused by frequent periods of 100% utilization on the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) mainframe.

As a firm believer in the importance of performance monitoring and Capacity Planning, and with hands-on experience of using specialist tools, Roy Cawthra commissioned Metron to undertake a Performance Management study in June 2001 using their Athene software. He said: "The report produced by Metron was excellent and formed a major part of the documentation which I had to produce for senior management at Cornhill to justify the investment in an upgrade. In addition, modeling of the different options using Athene proved that we could upgrade our existing HDS system rather than having to invest in new mainframe technology. The upgrade cost us less than a tenth of the amount which would have been required to move to new technology."

modeling and predicting
Cornhill installed their Hitachi Data Systems 315 Skyline mainframe in 1997 and since then it has been upgraded twice. By March 2001 some of the branch offices were experiencing symptoms of very high mainframe utilization through deteriorating response times. Metron's brief was to carry out an assessment of the performance of the system, to model the effect of future workload changes and to evaluate the effect of upgrading the system to a number of different alternatives. Roy Cawthra: "We were very short of time to sort out the problems with the mainframe. My belief was that using Metron's expertise to carry out a consultancy study would be much faster and more effective than spending time trying to update our in-house Capacity Planning tools. Our own Capacity Planning team worked alongside the Metron consultants during the study, which proved to be a very effective way of ensuring we had the skills in-house for future capacity modeling exercises."

His belief was justified. Metron undertook the study in June. One month later, having received detailed information from Metron's consultant on how the system was working and what he needed to do to solve the problem, Roy Cawthra was able to order and have installed the HDS Skyline 317.

Metron used their Athene Performance Management system as the primary tool for carrying out the consultancy study, with the Athene capture agent - Acquire - used to collect z/OS data. Application data, captured by an existing system at Cornhill, was input into Athene to assist in the modeling and analysis process. Early assessment of the results covering memory, CPU and disk indicated that slow response times could be attributed almost entirely to the effects of queuing for the CPU with the system reaching 100% utilization in the busiest periods of the day.

Performance prediction was carried out by creating a baseline model using data captured from the existing system and then using this to show the effects of changes in hardware and workload. Using Athene's Planner module various scenario models were created to demonstrate CPU utilization with differing workloads and hardware, including the new IBM z series.

Metron's modeling indicated that there would be a dramatic improvement in performance if Cornhill upgraded to an HDS Skyline 317, capable of supporting a 25% increase in production workload.

Roy Cawthra: "The results of Metron's study provided me with the proof and the comfort that a relatively low cost and simple upgrade to our existing mainframe would certainly improve response times and would give the business and our development teams what they needed.

"There are lots of benefits in installing the new mainframe technology from IBM, but the study confirmed that we didn't need to make such a major investment in a hurry. In effect, the work carried out by Metron has bought us some much needed time during which we can develop a longer term strategy for our systems."

Predicting the future
Cornhill Group's corporate plan shows dramatic growth predictions for the next three years. This will be achieved through both organic growth and acquisition. The Cornhill Capacity Planning team are already using Athene to predict the effects of this growth on the current mainframe applications, and the likely impact of upgrades to newer technology.

Roy Cawthra: "Undoubtedly in an acquisitions scenario, the ability to model the impact of this type of activity is invaluable. However, equally important will be our ability to use Athene to model the impact of our customers moving to the newer ways of doing business with us via the internet. Although our web-based business is relatively new and relatively small at the moment, it is bound to grow over the course of the next couple of years. We need to be able to model the effect on our systems of unpredictable high demand in response to marketing activity. We have to be able to ensure that our systems are available and that response times are fast. If the system fails to deliver the standard of service expected by customers, they will simply go elsewhere. As is so often stated, when you are dealing with web business, you don't get a second chance. In my view, Capacity Planning and Performance Management will become ever more key to the growth and success of an organization."

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