Overview

Executive Introduction to Velocity Software, Inc

Velocity Software was founded in 1988 to create premier performance management products for the z/VM platform. For over 35 years, Velocity Software has been innovative in accomplishing this objective worldwide, working with a customer set that includes many international banks and government installations.

Corporate Objectives - Our singular objective is to reduce our customers' cost of ownership for the z/VM platform. This objective is accomplished in different ways:

zVPS for Performance Management - The objective of performance management is to utilize system resources efficiently. If we save our customers 10% of their hardware/software costs, that would provide them considerable savings. Performance management has four components:

  1. Performance Analysis support reduces the time to analyze platform performance problems and resolve them quickly. This can positively impact end users both inside and outside the organization.
  2. Capacity Planning allows for planned growth to meet business requirements, by understanding existing requirements and projecting requirements to support future growth and applications.
  3. Operational Support provides alert mechanisms for any detected problems. With potentially thousands of servers, any one of which could impact different applications and users, it is critical to programmatically detect problems and alert operations or application owners of situations that may degrade their user functions.
  4. Chargeback Support is used by many IT organizations to understand the costs associated to support each application or set of users. Many installations act as a profit center with each organization paying for their consumption which more closely aligns IT to business objectives.

Managing your system with zVPS will allow better performance from your existing system resources at a higher utilization. When resources are utilized at higher utilization, less hardware is needed and the associated software licenses decrease.

zVPS is our "Velocity Performance Suite" and is easily recognized as the industry leader by your systems programming staff.

zPRO for z/VM Modernization

The objective of zPRO is platform modernization and transformation. Traditional vendors of z/VM products have not moved to a web based modern front-end interface, but rather have maintained their outdated 3270 terminal based functions. As the ONLY z/VM based web server is provided by Velocity Software, that significantly advances our ability to modernize the platform. For 20 years, Velocity Software has been building modern front-end interfaces for z/VM based on our modern z/VM based webserver, where as other vendor products have attempted to use their only option of a Linux based apache interface with tremendously complicated and cumbersome programming interfaces to z/VM.

zPRO has the singular goal of simplifying the z/VM platform. This is performed by:

  1. Web/Browser based functions to replace traditional 3270 terminal based system functions
  2. Replacing other vendor products with modern functions that take advantage of the many improvements over the last 30 years in both z/VM and the hardware, all of which are included at no additional cost in zPRO.
  3. Private Cloud architecture to allow end users to utilize a controlled environment to manage their own server farm and the associated resources. This greatly reduces the traditional end user dependency on systems programmers for managing end user applications.

Many installations are having difficulty maintaining a skilled staff. With zPRO, the productivity improves such that staff requirements often drop to one (or less) full time skilled systems programmer. Additionally, Velocity Software also provides short term services for our customers for upgrades and other larger systems tasks when/if/as needed.

Performance Matters

Velocity Software also provides two add-on features to assist installations in maintaining optimal performance.

  1. zTUNE has two components. One component is a set of rules that is applied against collected performance data each minute to look for performance problems that have been identified over the last 30 years. The second component is working directly with the experts at Velocity Software to analyze and solve performance problems when they happen. As z/VM has many components that are part of the platform, performance problems may not be easily identified without experienced performance skills. Think of this offering as insurance for the next time there is a problem that impacts production and is not quickly resolved.
  2. zVRM dynamically adjusts your Linux servers to ensure the servers are configured to meet system objectives. Defining large servers is often a perceived requirement. However, in a shared resource environment, what one server wastes could be used by a server performing productive work. zVRM will dynamically reduce server storage using CMM (Colaborative Memory Management) when servers are oversized, as well as return the storage as workloads ramp up and more storage required. zVRM will also reduce the virtual CPU counts to minimize the overhead of Linux managing many virtual CPUs. When servers are created to support workloads much larger than actually implemented, there is system overhead associated that then consumes CPU resources that otherwise would be used for productive work.

By dynamically tuning your system as a process, we optimize your system in a manner that no other vendors can provide.

Education:

Velocity Software strives to educate our customers on the latest performance analysis techniques as well as in what we have learned over the last decades.

Costs Matter

Every business and government agency scrutinizes costs. Often costs are not obvious such as carbon impact of thousands of servers in a large data center. As installations look more at costs of their IT infrastructure, Velocity Software assists in many ways:

  1. Cost of Software - Velocity Software has maintained the same cost structure for almost 20 years. And we have added many features that are delivered at no charge to meet customer needs.
  2. Product Upgrades Included - All product upgrades to support new hardware, new releases of the operating systems, and new function we have added are provided at no charge.
  3. Product Support is always free. Support is always included in the standard lease agreement.
  4. Current Support - Velocity Software has their own datacenter with a z15 T01 that runs current levels of each z/VM release as well as old ones, every supported release of Linux, supported releases of VSE as well as z/OS. Our purpose of keeping leading edge hardware and software is to provide our customers support when they need it, reducing time to introduce new function and capacity.
  5. Minimal Implementation time, Measured in hours, not days/months! For example, our z15 was installed, turned over to Velocity Software, and two days later, z/VM was installed with RACF and the Velocity Software stack. At this point, zVPS and zPRO were installed and fully operational. We had about 200 Linux servers created and managed across four LPARs configured in Single System Image architecture. As compared to months of implementation for competitive products implemented using the Linux webserver and the IBM SMAPI interface. Reduced implementation time of all our software reduces customer costs significantly as compared to any other product options.
  6. Product Trials and Proof of Concept is always FREE. We are generous with trials and POCs to ensure everybody is happy. This includes everything customers get at no charge.
  7. VSEMON no charge feature for those installations with zVPS and VSE, we provide the VSE feature at no charge.


Velocity Software is a privately held global company, headquartered in Mountain View, California.