Five steps to setting up a shared storage pool
In the first three parts of this series, we discussed the advantages of putting highly active users in their own storage pool. In Part I we considered an example group of order-entry users that key orders into the computer and presses the Enter key all day long. Such users alone can be responsible for a majority of the transactions that your system processes each day. Making sure these employees never have to wait on the CPU is key to making them efficient.
In Part II, we took this example further and decided to create a private pool for the order-entry users. We assumed that they all ran in a single subsystem (e.g., QINTER) and we discussed how to calculate values for the two parameters that govern the performance of jobs in a storage pool, activity levels and pool size.
In Part III, we took a look at how you use the values calculated in Part II to configure a private storage pool and how you route certain users into that storage pool.
In this installment, we will discuss how to set a shared storage pool.
Five steps to setting up a shared pool
Let us now continue with our order-entry example, except now let's drop the assumption that all the order-entry users are running in a single subsystem. Let us now assume that the order-entry users are split between two subsystems -- QINTER and QINTER2 -- and we want to set up a shared storage pool that all the order-entry users can share.
Setting up a shared pool is very similar to setting up a private pool except for a few extra steps. Follow these five steps:
- Choose a shared pool that is not being used (*SHRPOOL1 - *SHRPOOL10). Use the WRKSHRPOOL command to determine which shared pools are not being used (pools with no storage or activity levels are not being used).
- On the WRKSHRPOOL display, set the size and the number of activity levels for the shared pool you will be using. Specify the size in the Defined Size (K) column and the number of activity levels in the Max Active column. Use the same procedure we discussed in Part II to determine the activity levels and pool size.
- Now add the shared pool to each of the subsystems where order-entry users run. For example:
CHGSBSD SBSD(QINTER) POOLS((3 *SHRPOOL1))
CHGSBSD SBSD(QINTER2) POOLS((3 *SHRPOOL1))
- Add routing entries to each subsystem.
- Finally, finish up by duplicating the job descriptions currently being used by the order-entry users, modify the duplicated job descriptions with the new routing data, and change the user profiles to use the new job descriptions.
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About the author: Ron Turull is editor of Inside Version 5. He has more than 20 years' experience programming for and managing AS/400-iSeries systems.
