Testimonials
Mainstar® provides powerful mainframe expertise for serious results. But don't take it from us – find out what our customers and others are saying!
Products
Catalog RecoveryPlus™ (CR+™)
I have always appreciated your direct approach and the personal interest that you have shown towards all your customers, especially the way you "listen" to your customers and followed this by developing enhancements in your products, especially CR+ that the users get greatest benefit from.
I look forward to the future product announcements and enhancements. CR+ is still one of the best pieces of software (as a Storage Manager in the Mainframe World) that I have been privileged to use.
- Peter Zander, Storage Administratortop
A large bank in New Zealand had a high level qualifier (HLQ) that was growing at an exponential rate. Because the availability of the bank's data is critical, they decided to avoid this risk by isolating the HLQ into a new catalog. The problem was that the entries that needed to be moved included almost 2,000,000 records - and they had to contend with severe timeframe constraints.
Read about this installation's experience with CR+ MERGECAT.
I really appreciate good software products, like Catalog RecoveryPlus, that save me time. Especially knowing the product is sound and has been developed by hands-on techos with the strong backgound that I've found Mainstar's people to have.
- Storage Administrator, South Australia
Catalog RecoveryPlus is saving me many, many hours of work compared to using Catalog Solution, and even more hours if I had tried using the traditional IDCAMS LISTCAT/REPRO. I recently had occasion to extensively use the BCS/VVDS diagnose - it worked like a charm!
- System Programmer
I would like to thank Mainstar Tech Support for their assistance in setting up the Catalog RecoveryPlus MERGECAT and reorganization jobs to split up a critical production. The jobs ran without any problems and the timings were much faster than I expected (based on the simulates I ran). After the merges, the backup / recover of this catalog ran in under 2 minutes and the total elapsed time from start to finish was just under one hour - WOW! It is a welcome change to have a software partner step up and take the initiative to help a customer. We hope to continue to tap your knowledge base to improve our use of your products and simplify our support effort.
- Storage Manager, Illinois, U.S.A.
I have recommended that that we replace Catalog Solution with Catalog RecoveryPlus. Based on my observations and tests, here is what I've found:
- Storage Administrator, South Australia
- Superior performance of Catalog RecoveryPlus, resulting in reduced I/O, CPU and elapsed times for our daily jobs and tasks, particularly in BCS and VVDS BACKUPS.
- The ability of the Catalog RecoveryPlus SUPERCLIP feature to enhance our Disaster Recovery capabilities.
- Integrity of the CatalogRecoveryPlus MERGECAT feature.
- Layout and ease of use of panels and manuals in Catalog RecoveryPlus.
- Responsiveness and support from Mainstar Software Corporation.
- Anticipated future enhancements to Catalog RecoveryPlus.
FastAudit™
Mainstar's HSM FastAudit™ Shines for St. George Bank
St. George Bank, the 5th largest bank in Australia, recently asked Mainstar to help analyze their CDSs, to determine how clean they are following a merge of their Development DFSMShsm™ environment.
Amerigo Baldassarri, Mainstar's Storage Management SE for the region, worked with St. George's Storage Administrator, Peter Zander, to quickly install Mainstar's HSM FastAudit. Peter then put the product through its paces during the next couple of days, and sent this quote to Mainstar about his impressions: "HSM FastAudit is one of the best pieces of space management software that I have ever used, and the work over the last few days has been a very worthwhile exercise."
The details below are extracts from Peter's report to his management:
DFSMShsm CDS errors identified and cleaned up: Almost 60,000 errors in the DFSMShsm CDSs! The majority of the errors are associated with old files dating back as far as 1993. The major issues causing the large number of errors is maintenance of alias entries and damaged or corrupted cartridges. The largest proportion of the errors had not been identified previously with traditional DFSMShsm Audits. I was really impressed with the speed at which the Audits run — 15-20 minutes for multiple audits with HSM FastAudit — that used to take up to 6 or 7 hours each.
The other great benefits of the product include: The ease with which the software can be installed, and the minimal amount of tailoring required to actually use it.
- Peter Zander, Storage Administrator, St. George Bank, Australia
OK... I'm impressed!
I came home from SHARE and installed the FastAudit product. I ran the FAUDITAL procedure and it ran in 13 minutes! I corrected most of the errors using the FIXAUDIT CLIST, and am running the procedure again to see how it looks now...
- Manager of Storage Operations, U.S.A.
Seminars
Mainstar products are very well supported and always being improved upon. These seminars are very educational and informative.
- Paul VanDunk, UPS
I would have liked the class to have been an hour or two longer! Based on my testing with CR+, it's a very impressive product that I hope to be using on a non-trial basis.
- Mike Edsall, UPS
Technical Support
As a customer trial, this sale is now on track and Mainstar's Technical Support team has been instrumental in keeping it that way. I believe you should be aware of the great effort they have put in.
We were originally going to stay with CSL. After a bit of tap dancing and shoe shuffling, your sales team convinced us that we had made a bad choice and that Catalog RecoveryPlus was the way to go. We were on a tight time frame to replace CSL, we needed everything to go just right. As luck would have it, we experienced several problems. However, your Technical Support team turned them around very quickly.
The next morning Technical Support contacted us by telephone and asked ask if we were completely happy. This went down extremely well and helped to bring closure of the sale another step closer.
- Storage Administrator, New South Wales, Australia
We were at a Disaster Recovery Test and had some problems. I just wanted to let everybody know "how grateful I was" for the technical support person who went out of their way in assisting us. He was very professional and helpful. I have dealt with other software vendors in the past, and I felt he did an outstanding job.
- Enterprise Storage Manager, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Webcasts
Thank you very much for such a QUICK response! I am looking forward to viewing the webcasts, as I have been a HUGE fan of Mainstar in general, and Ron Ferguson's for a LONG LONG time! I am personally familiar with several of your products, know well of their worth in ANY MVS shop, having used many of them before!
- Senior Tech Specialist, California, U.S.A.
I really, really enjoyed the webcast presentations today. They were well thought out, and well presented. Thanks for taking the time to put them together.
- Webcast Attendee, Texas, U.S.A.
