Halcyon Saves Time and Dodges Expensive Disk Upgrades at Plan International

Plan International is a child-centered development organization (NGO) operating in 60 countries. Founded over 75 years ago, Plan International is one of the oldest and largest children’s development organizations in the world. Plan works in developing countries across Africa, Asia, and the Americas to promote child rights and lift millions of children out of poverty.

Operating with the minimum IT resource, Plan International required a solution that allowed them to maximize the availability of their systems and ensure that their time was spent on more productive projects. After-hours support was at a peak as system levels were running at near capacity, with disk space and spooled file storage as areas of particular concern.

Replacing Outdated Tools

“Our original management software was very much out-of-date compared with Halcyon’s products,” says Max Charman, System Support Manager of Plan International. Plan International chose to replace existing toolset with a suite of four Halcyon products.

They chose Disk Space Manager to manage and contain unnecessary disk space availability creep, and Spooled File Manager for managing and archiving user and system reports. They also selected Advanced Job Scheduler to manage both start- and end-of-day processes and are now able to have a scheduled, unattended, after-hours full weekly backup and reclaim storage (SAVSYS and RCLSTG) using Restricted Task Manager.

Charman says, “The support staff at Halcyon has been fantastic. The software was easy to install and configure. Help is always available and the well-informed staff can even remote into our IBM i to show how a feature can be used or configured.”

Once set up, Advanced Job Scheduler has fully automated many regular processes that previously required an operator’s assistance.

Disk Space Manager is regularly used to sort on size, check for rogue libraries or files in QSYS, QDLS, and the IFS and display the number of deleted records within a file.

Spooled File Manager ensures that the varying types of spooled files are kept for a preset length of time before being archived in PDF format onto an Intel server.

With Restricted Tasks Manager, valuable support resource can now be used elsewhere.

Saving Time and Resources

Plan International has utilized Halcyon products to remove the repetitive, day-to-day system tasks, saving an estimated 15 percent in time to free valuable resources that can now be used elsewhere.

Disk space availability has been increased even though more environments have been installed. Additionally, the number of spooled files stored on the system has been drastically reduced as old reports have been archived. Both these actions have resulted in Plan International not having to perform an expensive disk upgrade.

“Halcyon as a company has been very easy and stress-free to deal with,” says Charman. “Everyone is good-natured and eager to help, but that is not surprising when they have such a good product to work with. Understandably, I highly recommend Halcyon as a company and their extensive product suite.”