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Savings by Deleting Unused datasets


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swathykrishnan

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Joined: 01 Oct 2010
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 10, 2015 6:26 pm
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Hi All,

We are planning to develop a tool which identifies all obsolete datasets.
By deleting these datasets its going free around 200GB disk space. Is there any benefit out of these? Will it do any monetory benefit for the company?
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Robert Sample

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PostPosted: Fri Jul 10, 2015 7:14 pm
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That is a question that can only be answered at your site. If the dasd was purchased then the cost is gone; if the dasd is leased your site might be able to return the space to lower the monthly bill. Ask your site support group or site management.
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swathykrishnan

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PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 11:07 am
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Thanks for your reply Robert.
Since we are working from offshore Its quite difficult for us to connect with the site support to get such information.
We know that the DASD is leased. Could you please give us a rough idea about the saving if we can save around 200GB. Will it give a considerable saving for the company?

Thanks in Advance
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enrico-sorichetti

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PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 2:45 pm
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You, Your group, should talk to the people who know the contract,
once You know the terms of the contract You will have all the info needed to take a decision.

nobody here know anything about Your environment so the advice we can give will be pretty generic.

in general ( very very rough approach ) the cost of data can be split in two parts

the cost of storage ( depends on the contract )
the cost of managing it ( depends on Your storage handling standards )

getting rid of unused data will certainly save money,
how much we cannot tell .
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daveporcelan

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PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 5:26 pm
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I know you are looking for a big windfall, but...

A 4TB external hard drive goes for $120.

This is 20 times larger than the 200GB you are looking to save.

Cleaning up unused datasets is always a good idea, but you will not save a lot of money on 200GB.
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prino

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Joined: 07 Feb 2009
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Location: Vilnius, Lithuania

PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 6:53 pm
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swathykrishnan wrote:
We are planning to develop a tool which identifies all obsolete datasets.

And which PHB has decided that such a "tool" is useful? And when is a dataset obsolete? In the UK some companies have to keep data for decades. It will probably kept on tape, and for all intents of purposes the datasets are obsolete, but you can bet your ass that you will get a visit from a regulatory busybody the day after you decide to delete them. And as mentioned before, what does 200Gb save you? My AD 2002 PC already had more disk space...
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vasanthz

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2015 7:46 am
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If you have DFHSM, then revisit the management class set up of the datasets. Then let DFHSM take care of managing the datasets.

The number here varies depending on the storage box,vendor,contract etc.. But I think 1 GB costs around $8- $10 if you buy it.
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swathykrishnan

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2015 11:55 am
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Thanks Enrico....
The info seems to be very pertinent.
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swathykrishnan

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2015 12:03 pm
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Thanks Vasanth... Actually I was looking for such an information.

Quote:
A 4TB external hard drive goes for $120.

@daveporcelan: I was not looking for the price of external hardisk. For that I would have visited amazon.com. We are talking from mainframe perspective. See the posts by Enrico & Vasanth.[/quote]
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Bill Woodger

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Joined: 09 Mar 2011
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2015 12:18 pm
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swathykrishnan, from a Mainframe perspective you should find out what your DASD consists of these days.
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daveporcelan

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2015 4:53 pm
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Quote:
The number here varies depending on the storage box,vendor,contract etc.. But I think 1 GB costs around $8- $10 if you buy it.


I highly doubt it is that expensive.

I used the retail price as an example.

The price of mainframe storage will be no more expensive than you could buy retail for your pc.

Many mainframe hard drives are a collection of smaller drives similar to what I have shown. They are linked together under a single volser.

The cost of management is split across your entire dasd pool. The cost for any single gb is probably only pennies.

Go ahead Don Quoxite, continue to tilt at this windmill. There is money to be saved.
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vasanthz

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2015 5:38 pm
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Quote:
The price of mainframe storage will be no more expensive than you could buy retail for your pc.


As far as I know Mainframe drives are very expensive than the consumer grade harddisks.
Consumer harddrives with 10,000 RPM have varying response time something from 10ms to 50ms.
This only gets worse with high IO rate & concurrent accesses.

However latest Mainframe DASD box delivers less than 2 ms response times even with IO rate of 8K-10K IO/second(I have not seen more) even with RAID & mirroring enabled.

Also taking into account of the intelligence in storage boxes in accessing the data with Cache management, Also taking into account the mirroring, $8-10 price is justified for enterprise grade hardware.

Also Enterprise drives have extended warranties.
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daveporcelan

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2015 5:53 pm
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I understand what you are saying. I see that they may be more expensive due to this fact.

The price you mention is 250-300 times more expensive than consumer grade. That would be death to the mainframe.

The word on the street is dasd is cheap, so buy more dasd.

We recently changed our entire Tape system to virtual tape. Everything is on dasd. We have no physical tapes on site. If dasd was that expensive, how could we do that?

Now look at 200gb. What portion of a drive is that? How can you calculate the value of a partial drive?

Thinking there is real financial savings for 200gb is folly.

Just my opinion.
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Pete Wilson

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2015 9:06 pm
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Mainframe DISK is expensive due to the Controller, not the disks. The controllers are an extremely substantial processor in their own right. It is silly to compare it to consumer grade. If it was too expensive then mainframe would already be dead; it isn't, and unlikley to be in the forseeable future.

In saying that a 200GB saving is going have miniscule financial benefit and there could be overriding risks in deleting it if you don't know the data very well.
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