RTD | RealTime Defrag

RealTime Defrag (RTD) provides automatic and easily controlled z/OS DASD volume maintenance for the 24×7 operating environment, without the disruption to production schedules which legacy defrag and volume maintenance products engender, and with high throughput due to its advanced multiple address space architecture.  Today the availability and reliability of your organization’s data is critical to its success. But finding the time required to keep your systems operating efficiently often strains a data center’s resources and its ability to meet service level agreements. In order to utilize available resources more efficiently, more and more computer centers are optimizing their disk space with RealTime Defrag (RTD).

Do you also want to benefit from RTD processing on DB2 volumes?  Contact sales@dino-software.com to receive a free trial of RTD/DB2.

RTD/zOS Version 8.5.0 is a complete replacement for RTD/zOS 8.3.0 and earlier releases, and includes the following optional features:

♦ PM – Preserve Mirror Support provides full support for devices using Remote Pair FlashCopy to maintain business continuity in z/OS environments with continuous dataset operations.  FRO is a pre-requisite for PM.

♦ FRO – The Fast Replication Option allows optimal I/O performance and reduced dataset enqueue contention by letting I/O operations run as a background task in the I/O device controller, rather than being executed by channel programs in an RTD address space. Since the operation is almost instantly complete from the viewpoint of RTD processing, datasets are enqueued for significantly shorter periods when data movement takes place. FRO supports FlashCopy V2 devices.

♦ MAS – Multiple Address Space Support allows concurrent processing of up to 28 volumes and circumvents the MVS TIOT size limit which restricts the number of allocations (about 3,200) within an address space.

The main new features of RTD/zOS Version 8.5.0 are:

♦  The RTD password can now be refreshed dynamically via operator command (that is, without stopping and restarting the RTD STC).

♦ TMA and CMA size fields (tracks in Track Managed Area, total tracks on volume) have been added to the statistics data. A new statistics export program (ROUSTAX) is provided to export this additional data. The data is not displayed by the RTDISPF statistics function.

♦ The handling of RTDLOG dataset archives, sequential log datasets and RTDSTATs archives has been improved.

♦ An Esoteric name or volume name can now be provided in the CDS for dynamic allocation of RTDLOG and Statistics archive files and the sequential log.

♦ The sequential logging now supports a “keep for days” parameter, allowing old logs to be automatically deleted after the specified number of days.

♦ New INCLUDE/EXCLUDE parameters are provided at the Global, Volume and Dataset levels to select on the basis of days before or after end–of–month, and on the current month. This may simplify changes of RTD processing at month– or year–end/beginning especially when using the Global Function.

♦ The RTDICDS CDS initialization program has been extensively rewritten incorporating new RTD/zOS features and allowing invocation directly from the RTDISPF dialog.

♦ Function names have been added to dialog error messages arising during translation of specification members to aid in diagnosis.

♦ The dialog and CDS format now allow a user provided name to be part of a Configuration. In addition, the old ‘CC’ and ‘CF’ main panel options have been replaced by a single ‘SC’ (“Select Configuration”) option. This displays all 8 configurations and their settings as an ISPF table, also showing details such as whether a configuration is the start–up configuration and the selected function specification member names.

♦ The main panel “Services” option ‘A’ (introduced in V830) has been removed. The previous single “Services” option “Copy Config” may now be invoked from the new configurations table via the select option ‘C’. The copy function itself is improved to display additionally the new user defined configuration names.

♦ The LOG and Statistics main panel options now always show a select list with options to select display of data or export of the data to a sequential file.

Your current RTD/zOS Version 8.1.0 or 8.3.0 password IS VALID for RTD/zOS Version 8.5.0. If you are running RTD/RIO Version 8.0.0 or earlier, your password IS NOT VALID for RTD/zOS Version 8.5.0. Please send the output from the z/OS operator command “D M=CPU” to support@dino-software.com. Your new password will be generated and sent to you.

Should you wish to test the Preserve Mirror Option, the Fast Replication Option (FRO) with support for FlashCopy Version 2 or Multiple Address Space (MAS) support, please contact support@dino-software.com so that we can provide you with the appropriate password data.

RTD End of Service Dates are:

♦  Product maintenance support for RTD/z/OS Version 8.3.0x will terminate on 01 June 2019.
♦  Product maintenance support for all RTD versions prior to RTD/zOS Version 8.3.0x has been terminated.

* RTD is owned by INTERCHIP AG