• Some Power Systems Hardware Tweaks

  October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever there is a software update on the Power Systems line, IBM usually has a few hardware announcements to toss into the mix. And last week was no exception, although there were not any new systems announced. Just tweaks to existing ones.

  In announcement letter 122-084, we see that IBM is reselling Nvidia’s two port, 100 Gb/sec ConnectX-6 DX network interface card on the Power10 lineup. This is a very popular NIC out there in Server Land, and in fact, it has been in short enough supply in the past year and change to actually have an impact on …

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• Give Me A Fulcrum And A Lever Long Enough, And I Can Move Your Data

  July 13, 2022 Brad Jensen

  An old adage about the power of mechanics and physics illustrates perfectly how we feel about virtual tape libraries, and not just the ones made by us, but about other VTL wares out there in the field: Give me a fulcrum and a lever long enough and I can move the world.

  We know that there are other good VTL tools out there, and it is good because the competition keeps us all honest. The important thing is that using VTL brings IT organizations out of the Stone Age of managing data archives and backups.

  First off, if you are …

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• Getting A Firm Handle On Power Systems And Storage Firmware

  June 15, 2022 Richard Warren

  Back in the old days of the AS/400 and the iSeries, most customers had a single box or maybe two, one for production applications and databases and one for development of high availability. And everything that box needed was inside of itself.

  And at most, you applied two kinds of PTFs – those for the operating system and those for the microcode – to the machine, and you did that maybe once or twice a year and every once in a while you might add some group PTFs to update security or other important features.

  But the world has changed …

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• IBM Power: How Strong Is Your Backup Game?

  June 8, 2022 Jason Hardy

  Your business runs on IT and chances are if your systems are down, your business is down. Have you contemplated the most common reasons for data loss and whether your strategy can protect you in the event of natural disaster, hardware failure, fire, ransomware, human error or theft? Depending on the reason for your outage, you may experience data loss and need to leverage your backups to recover. Are you confident in your backup and recovery strategy?

  One of the simplest tests you can do to assess your backup strategy is to see how you stack up against the 3-2-1 …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing Case 4 – Investigating Time-Sensitive Transaction Issues

  June 6, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  Among the central processing hardware resources in a computer system – CPU, GPU, memory, disk, PCI-Express I/O bus – disk has always been the slowest component. Even the latest flash disk or NVM-Express flash drive or card is slowest, but not by much. Back in the days of hard disk, disk I/O was the most popular cause of performance problems. From experience, I always looked at it first in my investigation.

  The modern SAN flash disk can still be the performance bottleneck when it is not deployed properly, as I shared in Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – When Performance Issues Come From Without

  April 4, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  When I started my IT career 35 years ago, it was in the “centralized” universe that originated from the mainframe model. All core application codes ran in one — and only one — big iron that all users accessed with “dumb” terminals devoid of any GUI. Problem solving in AS/400 systems was frequently straightforward and not time consuming because most cases were anything but elusive.

  But the contemporary IT infrastructure universe has evolved into a big onion, with layers that we must peel while troubleshooting. I often find myself having to address a problem in multiple layers, and it no …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Taking Charge of Your Hardware Refresh in 2022

  February 14, 2022 Peder Lundblad

  IBM i shops are well known for paying a premium for their systems because they are worth it, but they are also just as well known for hanging onto aging hardware a bit past its prime, which has its own kinds of economic costs in higher maintenance and operational costs as well as the risk of a failure in some key component of the hardware or of having an older operating system release that does not have a key security vulnerability or bug patched.

  IBM does a very good job of keeping hardware technology cycles regular, and so there is …

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• DSC Bullish On IBM i Cloud Growth

  January 31, 2022 Alex Woodie

  You may know Data Storage Corporation as the company that provides hosted high availability and disaster recovery services. But the New York company has moved beyond its roots in data storage with its fast-growing cloud hosting business, where it runs hundreds of IBM i environments on behalf of its customers. With the great cloud migration just starting for Power customers, there’s a considerable upside for companies like DSC.

  Data Storage Corporation was one of the first IBM business partners to get into the cloud business. It started building its IBM i cloud in earnest in late 2012, and launched it …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Time To Develop Your IBM i HA/DR Plan For 2022

  December 6, 2021 Josh Osborne

  Disasters and unplanned downtime can hit any company at any time – regardless of where its applications or data sits. Establishing a high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) plan is paramount to getting your mission critical IBM i applications and your business back up and running – fast!

  2021 saw its fair share of challenges. Everything from bush fires to earthquakes to flash floods, and the continuation of the pandemic. And, those are just the ones mother nature sent our way. The manmade risks in the form of cyberattacks and ransomware also grew exponentially in 2021. With over 30,000 security …

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• New LTO 9 Gear, SAN Switch On Tap From IBM

  November 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops facing a storage crunch may be interested in new tape products unveiled by IBM last week, including a new LTO 9 tape drive and LTO 9 compatibility for an existing tape autoloader and an existing tape library. Big Blue also announced LTO 9 compatibility for an existing storage enclosure, and a new 48-port c-type switch for connecting SAN environments.

  IBM’s LTO fun starts with the IBM TS2290 SAS Tape Drive Model H9S, a half-height drive based on the new LTO 9 Ultrium specification. The TS2290 connects to hosts – including Power servers running IBM i, AIX, …

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