Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power Systems I/O Enhancements
October 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreStarting on November 18, IBM will begin shipping a slew of new disk and flash drive features for Power Systems machines. The company is also previewing support for various I/O and storage devices that it will make available for the new enterprise-class E870 and E880 machines that were announced a few weeks ago. IBM is also making special versions of the scale-out Power8 machines available with hardened enclosures and DC power for telcos and other service providers that need such special gear.
All of the new features and the statements of direction are outlined in announcement letter 114-170. Most
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SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Tuned Up For Power8
October 13, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSUSE Linux, the German-American distributor of commercial-grade Linux operating systems that will soon be part of Micro Focus, is getting up to launch its much-awaited SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 operating system. And the Power8 machines from IBM are the first boxes that are being talked about running the updated Linux.
In announcement letter 214-378, IBM said that it was tuning up SLES 12 to run on the Linux-only variants of the Power8 scale-out servers sporting the PowerKVM V2.1.1 hypervisor. At the moment, when SLES 12 ships for Power-based machines on October 27, IBM is only supporting
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More Machines Get Cut From The Power Systems Catalog
October 13, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAnother set of announcements related to the Power Systems platform have come, and IBM is sunsetting a bunch of Power-based iron.
In announcement letter 914-199, IBM said that it was pulling the plug on the original Power7-based Power 770 enterprise-class server (product number 9117-MMC if you want to look on the back of your system). The Power 770+ machine (number 9117-MMD) based on the Power7+ and the just-announced Power E870 (9117-MME) based on the Power8 chips are the replacement products. The machine will be withdrawn from marketing on January 6, 2015.
On that same date, IBM will be withdrawing
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IBM Puffs Up New Cloud Controllers For Power Platforms
October 13, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs part of the Power Systems announcements on October 6, IBM did not just put out some new servers and an update to the current two releases of the IBM i operating system. The company also tweaked a bunch of software in the Power Systems stack, all of which is important because right now the Power platform is the platform of choice for Big Blue for just about every workload you can think of. There is no System x division.
If you want to build clouds based on Power machines, you have to have software to control the compute and
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OVH Fires Up Power8 Infrastructure Cloud
October 13, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOVH, one of the largest cloud computing and hosting providers in the world and the largest hosting provider in Europe, has gotten a bunch of Power8 machines and is offering virtual slices of the machines for customers to play around with as it works out how to more fully commercialize the service.
OVH was founded in 1999 outside of Paris by Octave Klaba, and the name is short for on vous héberge, which is French for “we host you.” The company built its first datacenter nearly a decade and a half ago in Paris, and now operates 16
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Admin Alert: A Skeleton Utility Program For Controlling IBM i Job Queues
October 8, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreFrom an IBM i operations viewpoint, there are several scenarios where you need to automate job queue management. Situations where you may have to automatically change one or more parameters for a job waiting in job queue include:
- Looking for a specific job and automatically moving it to another job queue.
- Moving all jobs in queue to a different job queue when they are held up behind a slow-moving job or a job waiting for a reply in batch.
- Rearranging or changing job priorities so certain jobs run before or after other jobs.
- Detecting an excessive number of jobs in
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A Bevy Of BIFs: Updates
October 8, 2014 Jon Paris
… Read moreIn my last tip I returned to the “Bevy” series to tell you about the latest addition to the family: %ScanRpl. Shortly after completing that tip I realized that there have been a number of more recent BIFs such as %SubArr and some enhancements to existing BIFs like %Trimx that seem to have escaped people’s notice. In this tip I attempt to fill those omissions.
%Trim: Specify Characters to Trim
Let’s start with a BIF that hopefully you are all familiar with: %Trim. Before going any further I should point out that when I say %Trim, I am referring to
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Find A View Of A View Of A View. . .
October 8, 2014 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
SQL’s Data Definition Language (DDL) offers many great features, one of which is the ability to define a view of a view. This can lead to simple or complex structures making use of views of views of views of. . . you get the idea.
But one of the difficulties with this technique is that, once created, it is difficult to determine the depth of dependencies for views. The Display Database Relations (DSPDBR) command will tell you which views are immediately dependent on a view but it will
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Single-Level Store Redux In New Power-Flash Hybrids
October 6, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the System x division now in the hands of Lenovo Group, IBM is being more aggressive about promoting its Power Systems lineup and, in particular, a new machine that brings Power processors together Tesla GPU coprocessors from Nvidia and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from Altera to create hybrid computing platforms.
The immediate benefit of these technologies are not apparent to IBM i shops, who run mostly RPG and Java code, but such hybrid machines will very likely be more common as GPU-accelerated Java comes to market in the next couple of years–perhaps next year, perhaps the year
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Maxava Doles Out $52,000 In iFoundation Grants
October 6, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHigh availability software maker Maxava has awarded the next round of its iFoundation grants to help promote the IBM i platform.
Founded in 2011, the Maxava iFoundation provides non-profit organizations that are promoting and expanding the IBM i community a grant of up to $2,000 to help in their efforts in the IBM i cause. The iFoundation grants are a perfect example of enlightened self-interest, as is, I must add, the support we get from Maxava in our Four Hundred stack of newsletters. Without companies like Maxava supporting our newsletters, user groups like COMMON, and other national, regional, local