Learn the critical areas that can lead to major disk expense and what is needed to resolve them.

Editor's note: This article introduces the white paper "How to Avoid the Top Five Most Expensive Disk Issues" available free at the MC White Paper Center.

Why risk the disk? Many IT managers will be familiar with the "disk or die" ultimatums that a disgruntled system can issue and have felt the resulting fallout of poor performance, lost data, and, most commonly, the additional cost which can quickly run into many thousands of dollars of unplanned expense.

A system that is equipped to monitor DASD effectively is one that can avoid the unnecessary expense of purchasing additional disk in a bid to buy extra investigation-time to resolve the underlying issues that cause disk-related problems. If you have been held hostage to the system’s insatiable appetite for disk and are looking for alternative solutions to soothe the savage beast, look no further than your approach to disk monitoring.

Immediately catching instances of runaway DASD and isolating the causes are the two preliminary objectives of optimal disk management.

Hungry Systems with Expensive Taste

“With no solution to pinpoint the cause, we may not know where to begin investigations as there is no apparent chain of events with an evident root cause, only the combined results of multiple problems. Decisions about purchasing extra disk often have to be made quickly and due to the urgency, that proportion of the budget is spent at the expense of other critical projects,” notes one IT manager, of a UK manufacturer.

“In our experience, if problems that affect disk are left unattended, they can escalate quickly and impact many other areas of our system performance so we’re under even more pressure to solve a number of issues requiring immediate attention,” says a systems manager of a U.S. managed services provider.

Disk Hit List: Top Five

Potential problems with any system object be it a file, data queue, ASP or spooled file, could trigger a situation that will impact DASD resource. The areas that most frequently cause problems are listed below and, when left unattended, could have the greatest impact on the system and the budget.

Want to Know the Rest?

To read the rest of the white paper "How to Avoid the Top Five Most Expensive Disk Issues" download it free from the MC White Paper Center.