To allow your business to grow efficiently and profitably, you want to find ways to control the growth of your information systems and use your current storage more effectively. In an SMS-managed storage environment, your enterprise establishes centralized policies for how to use your hardware resources. The Interactive Storage Management Facility (ISMF) provides the user interface for defining and maintaining these policies, while the Storage Management Subsystem (SMS) governs the system.

Data and storage management policies balance your available resources with your users’ requirements for data availability, performance, space, and security. SMS implements these policies and manages most of your storage management tasks. This frees users from manually administering storage and makes more efficient use of your storage resources.

To implement a policy for managing storage, your storage administrator defines classes of space management, performance, and availability requirements for data sets at your installation. For example, the administrator can define one storage class for data entities requiring high performance and another for those requiring standard performance. Then, the administrator writes automatic class selection (ACS) routines that use naming conventions, or other criteria of your choice, to automatically assign the classes that have been defined to data as that data is created. These ACS routines can then be validated and tested.

When the ACS routines are started and the classes (also referred to as constructs) are assigned to the data, SMS uses the policies defined in the classes and applies them to the data for the life of the data. Additionally, devices with various characteristics can be pooled together into storage groups so that new data can be automatically placed on devices that best meet the needs of the data.

The ISMF panels make it easy to define SMS classes and groups, test and validate ACS routines, and perform other tasks to analyze and manage your storage.