Disk Space Management

IBM i often houses the core applications that run our banking industry, casinos, retailers, insurance companies, manufacturing plants, transportation organizations, and more. These applications host the business-critical, transactional data that must remain available, no matter how big that data gets.

With data doubling in size every two years (IDC), it is increasingly difficult—and imperative—to track which libraries are growing and how fast in order to pinpoint who or what is consuming disk space before you reach maximum capacity.

Believe it or not, some organizations do nothing to manage their disk space, and the IBM i operating system has only one built-in storage threshold for overall disk space usage. When it exceeds 90 percent, you receive multiple notifications in QSYSOPR and performance degrades to conserve disk.

That’s the last you’ll hear about it until disk space usage reaches 100 percent and your system shuts down and automatically IPLs, possibly deleting all your spooled file reports. Oops. Hopefully you had all that irreplaceable data from your critical applications—including month-end, accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, and inventory levels—backed up and know where to find it.

Any attempt at manually sifting through spooled files, the IFS, unsaved journal receivers, old PTF save files, and more to identify candidates for deletion on a regular basis is impractical, if not impossible. Using the disk space collection commands available in the OS to run reports over libraries and the IFS is a step in the right direction, but these are point-in-time reports with no easy way to compare growth trends over time.