The most valuable features of the product are probably the capabilities, the functionality, and then the reliability.
It gives us a consolidated management tool to keep track of the user directories on our z/VM platform.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
It gives us a consolidated management tool to keep track of the user directories on our z/VM platform, as opposed to having to use a bunch of disparate products to accomplish the task.
What needs improvement?
It might be nice if it had more of a modern-type GUI interface. Right now, it's all green screen-based.
Other than that, it does what it needs to do.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using it for about eight years, since I joined the team.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
The upgrades I've been involved in have been smooth and compared to other products they seem to be pretty smooth.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We had an issue a few weeks ago in a test environment after putting an upgrade on, but we think it turned out to be that it wasn't really CA's fault. We think it's a problem with IBM and the GDPS product, and a test was being done with it the night before.
It caused some weirdness with other products that we found out later, because it allowed two machines to get read/write access to a single minidisk, which never should have happened. That caused problems for CA but it wasn't really their product.
We ended up on the phone with them for quite a while until we realised it was something else.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
As far as I know, it scales well. In our environment, we have four production LPARs and four development LPARs, and we haven't had any issues as our number of machines grows. We're up to over 450 Linux virtual machines and no issues yet with scalability.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is very good. Any time we've had an issue, they've been very responsive getting it addressed, such as when we went to the SSI-based z/VM clusters, there were some issues we ran into - a couple of things that weren't working quite right - but they got them addressed quickly.
I use the online community some and, of course, their online support system, which works well.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
This product was already in place when I joined the team.
What other advice do I have?
This product is definitely worth taking a look at and comparing it with other products, if there's something else they're considering. As far as the functionality, stability and integration with the other products in their suite, I think this product would be hard-pressed to beat.
