Hello Hervey, I work for CA Technologies, and perform QA for CA Allocate. I also was a customer of its predecessors (VAM/VSAM and VAM/DS) in the late 1980s. As a systems programmer I was able get my employer at the time to bring the products in and start using them.
CA Allocate basically lets the Storage Administrator override JCL or dynamic allocations by the customer. You write an Allocation Selection Routine and test values of certain variables, and then you can make overrides if the environment exists. For example, you can look at a data set name and change the SMS storage class. When I was a customer, we were starting to implement pooling of DASD. Before that, departments owned volumes and programmers had to request allocations on a specific volser. I used it to override the allocation to "the test pool" or "the production pool". Since that time, we have added support to extend data sets to add space, or to reduce allocations to fit on fragmented volumes. There is also a quota feature that allows you to warn or deny allocations to users that have exceeded their space allotment. For most of the time at CA, I have been working on CA Disk and CA Vantage, and just started working with CA Allocate again earlier this year. There are other members of this discussion board who have been using it on a more continuous basis than I have so you can also pick up a lot of useful information from others here, but I will help you with whatever you need, or go to the source to find out. Regards, Bob Longabaugh CA Technologies Quality Assurance Architect -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Hervey Martinez Sent: Monday, October 07, 2013 8:47 AM To: [email protected] Subject: CA-allocate Anybody out there use or have converted to CA-Allocate? If so, can you share your opinion on the product? I've been looking for reviews of the product and just don't seem to find anything. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
