The effective withdrawal date for i5/OS® V5R4, additional selected programs, and features, as announced in Software withdrawal 909-003, is January 7, 2011.  Click here for the official IBM announcement. But wait...there's more...hot off the press... We've just been informed that on November 23rd IBM will be announcing an extension of support for i5 v5r4 through 1/6/12.  Why you ask?  I'll keep my opinions to myself, but the stated reason is to provide ample time for ongoing upgrades from v5r2/v5r3 and to allow necessary POWER6 purchasers to include v5r4 in their POWER6 configuration.

A client with a large MS-SQL database residing on a DS4300 is experiencing some growing pains, and they're trying to tweak some parameters on the SAN to get better performance. Currently they have 10 15k spindles in a RAID 10 w/ a 128k stripe size, and according to their DB consultant, they'll get better performance by changing the stripe width on the SAN to match the block size on the NTFS volume (currently 64k). Does that seem like a good idea? Would it be worth the outage to make the change? Does IBM have any sort of guidelines or recommendations for stripe sizes for different workloads?   Here is my thought. If the nominal IO size is 64K, then the segment size should be set to 64K.  This would allow for isolation of the random IOs to a specific drive.  If you wanted to ...

IBM has a "Remote Support Manager" offering that will "phone home" to IBM when events occur on monitored LSI arrays. At first, it was a software-only download, but within the last year or two, IBM had come out w/ a complete solution comprised of both hardware and software. First, it was the 1818-RS1 (2008) and then the 1818-RS2 (2009). The software only version is still available as well (and as a side note, it can run in a VM).  In that time, Storage Manager GUI updates have started to include something called "Storage Monitor" or "Storage Manager Profiler". This allows for a single point to automatically collect CASDs at prescribed times, and send out email notifications when critical events occur. One of the mail destinations there can be dasdsupt@us.ibm.com.  So, my question is...

Any issue mixing a 300GB 3Gbps drive with the 300GB 6Gbps drive in the same array on the DS3200, DS3300, or DS3400? The short answer is “There is no issues with mixing the 3Gbps SAS drives with the 6Gbps SAS drives in the same Array (RAID GROUP).  The 6Gbps SAS-2 drives are fully compatible with the 3Gbps SAS-1 drives, and will run at the 3Gbps if used in the DS3200/DS3300/DS3400.  I’ve also heard a rumor that the SAS-2 drives cost less, but have not verified recently.

Too many times I have seen customers fully thinking that they have their Disaster Recovery (DR) taken care of due to the fact that they have successfully been backing up their environment and have it on tape at the vaulting company.  If you are one of these people raise your hand… I’ll pause for a second while you ponder your response wondering why I just made that statement. I’ll ask a few other questions now:     Do you have a disaster recovery plan?     Have you tested your disaster recovery plan?     Have you tested a server recovery?     Where are you going to perform DR?     Who is going to be available to perform the DR?     What level of expertise is going to be required to get things rolling again?     What kind of hardware...

IBM Tivoli has made some important changes to the SVC Entry Edition.  Check out the list of enhancements. The drive cap per cluster is now raised to 250 drives  no cap exists when virtualizing IBM DS3/4/5 disk and ordering through Passport Advantage SVC EE FlashCopy is now included at no additional charge with SVC EE base virtualization SVC v5 with iSCSI support, performance improvements, and integrated solid state drives, among other enhancements

IBM has extended IBM i v5r4 for an additional year. This removes a pending event but there are still good reasons to move to V6R1.  Contact thinkASG for an understanding of the best roadmap for your business. IBM Announcement on change of support withdrawal date.

It has been a common practice for a lot of systems administrators to take systems in the Data Center for a spin; some are inspired by their buddy Chuck… you know Chuck, he is the outgoing guy from the local users’ group… and others by their own thirst for knowledge. They click around in the GUIs, look to see first hand what the command they heard about actually does, bang at the keyboard while exploring the CLI, and mull over what features they think they need to implement in their environment. I see the hunger to expand their understanding of the systems as a very valuable trait – a trait I personally wish was more dominant in our world. I praise administrators who actually take the time to read the CLI guide, discover that they can create server farms full of 4-way SMP VMs in ...

Here's a fun one. When you install a new power6 520 with multiple partitions you might want one of them to own the internal SAS raid controller. If you planned to use Raid5 then you purchased the auxiliary cache card. Now when you add the SAS controller to the partition profile, you would think that it would take the cache card along with it since: 1) you aren't given a option to select the cache card and 2) where the heck else should it go?  Well you would be wrong. When you get the system up and running, you may notice that the drives are running in DEGRADED mode. This means that the system doesn't see the aux cache card and to protect you from a SAS controller failure, it is kindly running without using any disk controller cache. Did I mention that it probably took you a LONG time t...

In the early days of computing, companies bought giant computers called mainframes. Those computers utilized specialized external components called "chillers". The idea was fairly simple - run chilled water through the mainframe computer to keep the components running cool, dissipating the heat created by each. Jump ahead to the 1980's and the PC revolution begins taking over, and in most cases, replaces much of the need for mainframe functioning due to the smaller computer's ability to process applications efficiently at a fraction of the cost of the mainframe systems.  Since the computers "clock speed" or processor speed is low, there is very little heat compared to that of the mainframe. In 1965, Gordon Moore of Intel created a fairly reliable prediction that was labeled "Moore...