Moving to an all-flash solution helps this small business make a big impact
Trident Services, Inc. — an IT consulting firm and software development company — works with some of America’s largest IBM® z/OS® customers. When latency issues slowed the development of its zOperating System Environment Manager (zOSEM) software, Trident sought an easy-to-install, high-performance storage solution.
Financial institutions, local governments and even the military rely on Trident’s zOSEM solution to manage their data centers and simplify z/OS upgrades. Trident developed zOSEM to help customers manage their system resources and control how those resources are used.
As the business grew, Trident’s internal network became more complex. Its storage was supporting mail and file servers, virtual desktops and multiple workloads critical to business operations and customer service. The company began to notice that it was taking more time and computing resources to perform these tasks. Eventually, data backups that should have taken less than an hour were taking six. Workload demands began exceeding the system’s capabilities.
Slow batch processing caused response times to increase for Trident’s CRM database. This also slowed the development of its zOSEM software. “Our current workload demands were really tough on our previous storage system. Batch jobs were slowing down and putting the system on hold for everyone, including our developers. We knew we had to find a way to increase our speed,” says Jaye Cerruti, Systems Administrator at Trident.
To get to the root cause of the issue, Trident used IBM Storage Insights — a predictive analytics software within the IBM FlashSystem® solution — that allows users to better understand and optimize their entire storage infrastructure. Using the tool’s data collector, Trident was able to gather storage usage metrics from its data center. These metrics were then sent to a secure channel along with insights into potential issues and solution recommendations.
It was through these insights that Trident confirmed its spinning disk was hitting input/output operations per second (IOPS) capacity. The company realized it needed faster drives to improve speed and performance, and to combat latency issues.
Decreased data backup time from 6 hours to
minutes with upgraded storage
By replacing spinning disks with flash drives, consolidated
of physical storage tech
Increased storage capacity by
by switching to a 1U server
Our flagship software is a Swiss Army Knife of system management tools. IBM FlashSystem 5200 lets us focus on developing our products and services to better serve our business, and our customers.
Our flagship software is a Swiss Army Knife of system management tools. IBM FlashSystem 5200 lets us focus on developing our products and services to better serve our business, and our customers.
Trident has been an IBM Business Partner and IBM Storage user for many years, so it leveraged this relationship to find a solution for its performance issues. The IBM FlashSystem family includes four models built for different data needs and workloads. Its one-platform design helps businesses upgrade seamlessly to the next model as their workloads grow, so IBM FlashSystem can scale with business as their needs evolve.
Trident decided to upgrade to IBM FlashSystem 5200 to speed up its data delivery and seamlessly virtualize its existing storage without interupting operations. This provided new levels of cost efficiency, performance, reliability and availability for the zOSEM workloads.
IBM FlashSystem 5200 is compact, 1U, NVMe all-flash storage system. It’s built with IBM Spectrum® Virtualize software, which provides high performance and resilience capabilities such as six-nines availability, FlashCopy® technology, thin provisioning, data compression and de-duplication. Additionally, it’s supported by AI-driven IBM Storage Insights.
Upgrading to FlashSystem 5200 allowed Trident to store more data in 75% less space, reduce storage latency and accelerate its workloads, thus solving its performance issues. “Our flagship software is a Swiss Army Knife of system management tools. IBM FlashSystem 5200 lets us focus on developing our products and services to better serve our business, and our customers,” says Cerruti.
Trident used Global Mirror processing to migrate data from the IBM FlashSystem 5000 to the FlashSystem 5200. With this IBM technology, Cerruti was able to complete the data migration himself. “The migration with Global Mirror was so easy. It’s not difficult to set up and it works in the background to replicate our data without stopping production.”
After moving to IBM FlashSystem 5200, Trident saw immediate improvements to batch processing time, developer productivity and overall business operations.
“We spent eight months trying to improve our performance. IBM FlashSystem 5200 has basically given us that time back. No more manually moving backup jobs around production hours. The new system streamlines this process and automates storage insights, so we can work more efficiently and without delay,” says Cerruti.
Nightly backups on z/OS used to take four to six hours to complete. As soon as it implemented IBM FlashSystem 5200, however, Trident was able to finish the same batch jobs in less than an hour. Most importantly, these accelerated jobs can run without disrupting business operations.
The IBM FlashSystem 5200 also allowed Trident to optimize its physical storage by using flash drives instead of spinning disks. They were able to go from 24 spinning disks to just six flash drives. This all-flash solution has increased its storage capacity by at least 50% and boosted its efficiency overall, empowering the company to continue innovating without concerns.
“Another positive impact of the upgrade is peace of mind,” says Cerruti. Availability is a top priority, so Trident purchased two IBM FlashSystem 5200 systems for offsite replication, fail over and business continuity.
“In addition to the performance improvements we’ve seen, IBM FlashSystem 5200 also supports our business continuity strategy. Disruptions can come in many forms so being able to easily replicate our data between locations ensures it's always available if something unexpected happens.”
TridentExternal Link is a consulting firm, z/OS software developer and IT service provider. Founded in 1978, Trident has developed and enhanced its OSEM and CICS/EM software products to keep pace with industry changes, emerging technology trends and client-driven needs.
TridentExternal Link is a consulting firm, z/OS software developer and IT service provider. Founded in 1978, Trident has developed and enhanced its OSEM and CICS/EM software products to keep pace with industry changes, emerging technology trends and client-driven needs.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2021. IBM Corporation, IBM Storage, New Orchard Road, Armonk, NY 10504
Produced in the United States of America, October 2021.
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zOSEM is not an IBM product or offering. zOSEM is sold or licensed, as the case may be, to users under Trident Services, Inc.’s terms and conditions, which are provided with the product or offering. Availability, and any and all warranties, services and support for zOSEM, is the direct responsibility of, and is provided directly to users by, Trident Services, Inc.