IBMi VIOS: How to create multiple virtual disks in a Shared Storage Pool I recently installed a Power8 system with VIOS 2.2.3.4 and used this opportunity to configure a Shared Storage Pool (SSP) cluster. I needed to allocate around 34TB of storage space across 2 x IBM i LPARs which necessitated me creating 245 x 140GB virtual disks. While the
News Opinion: Toy Story or Rise of The Machines? Behold, your toddler’s next Power System client device will be a Watson-connected toy dinosaur. But am I the only one who finds the idea of letting a global megacorp’s A.I. communicate directly with our children slightly creepy? I ask because among this week’s media coverage of
News German i developer improves cross-platform testing A German IBM i-based developer has cut errors and test times with Rational Quality Manager. Boppard-based Ehrhardt + Partner specialises in warehouse management and transport logistics solutions. But while it does all its original coding on the Power i, it needs to test its software in different environments. In a new
News Survey shines light on Power i in Europe Back in October, PowerWire.eu urged our readers to take part in a new survey of the IBM i market conducted by HelpSystems. The reason was simple. Since the i was subsumed by the wider Power Systems brand and midrange publishers both in Europe and the States fell by the
News Speedy website’s a winner with Power i and Watson A German developer has combined the Power i’s strength with Watson’s savvy to carve out a niche in the hotel market. Kaufering-based IT consultant Rainer Ross used a Power 720 and IBM’s Watson Content Analytics software to create a new hotel search engine called myhofi (pictured). In
News i-UG to hold action-packed event in February The UK’s i-UG will hold an action-packed conference on Thursday, February 19 at the Mercure Norton Grange Hotel in Rochdale, Lancashire (pictured). Seminars include a look at the latest version of DB2 Web Query, a presentation on the real-world benefits of Power8 hardware and an intriguing-looking demo of the
News Brussels conference focuses on security Common Belgium is kicking off its 2015 schedule with a close look at security. The IBM i user group will hold its first major meeting of the year at the IBM Client Centre in Brussels on March 11. In his invitation to the event, Shirang “Ranga” Deshpande, the group’s
Featured How to take advantage of the new, smaller IBM i 7.2 With the release of IBM i version 7.2 Technology Refresh 1, Big Blue has reduced the size requirement for the load-source disk for virtualised storage implementations. “So what?” I hear you cry. “All my disks are physical, they are bigger than 70GB and have been for years. What’s
News Opinion: let IBM i have its day in the sun Last week, IBM launched its new z13 mainframe (pictured above). Apparently, it had hurried the announcement along so that it came before its latest set of earnings. This move was rewarded by acres of virtual newsprint by the press. The oldest tech giant of them all is reportedly going through
AIX Masterclass: advanced vSCSI disk monitoring (includes scripts) In my previous article, I showed how you can use nmon in VIOS to display the performance statistics of hdisks that are mapped to client LPARs. This is achieved by creating a file which nmon reads and then displays the relevant performance data. The script I used required that the
News Indian institution jumps to Oracle/Power combo India’s Council of Agricultural Research has made the jump from paper-based processes to an Oracle-on-Power ERP system supporting well over 100 sites. The ambitious project is something of a coup for IBM’s Global Business Services division. Partly funded by the World Bank, it is one of the first
Featured Can free-form RPG catch on? Ah, my first article for PowerWire! I hope that the editor chose me for my RPG knowledge, not my photo on LinkedIn (go on, take a look). My experience of RPG goes back to RPG II on the System/36 in the early 1980s. I’m sure a fair portion
Featured 7.2 things I love about IBM i 7.2 (part 2) It’s hard to believe it but 2014, the year that brought us v7.2 and Power8, is almost over. Indeed, it may well be gone by the time you read this. So, without further ado, here is part two of my list of things that I love about version
News OpenPower looking strong for 2015 with 80th member IBM’s OpenPower Foundation appears to be going from strength to strength as it heads into 2015. The consortium Big Blue formed around its Power processor technology found its 80th member last week in the form of major cloud vendor Rackspace. The Texas-based company has data centres around the world
News Ethiopia gets 21st century banking Ethiopia’s biggest bank has undertaken a huge expansion and modernisation programme based on model 795 and 770 Power Systems. Founded in 1942 and headquartered in Addis Ababa (pictured), Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) has more than eight million account holders and annual revenues equivalent to $586 million. It now
News Halcyon adds new layer of IBM i protection Halcyon Software has launched Exit Point Manager, a rule-based security solution for IBM i. Halcyon’s new security tool protects the main exit points on i-based machines and uses a range of criteria to determine system access including users, IP address, date, time and other datasets. It logs all activity
News HelpSystems improves BI and security tools HelpSystems‘ ShowCase division has released a new version of its eponymous IBM i BI tool. ShowCase10 includes new executive dashboards, dynamic drill-down analysis, improved reporting and a redesigned interface. Its creators say that a new ShowCase Deployment Bundle expands basic ShowCase into an ideal data access tool for both technical
AIX Masterclass: how to monitor VIOS vSCSI disk performance In my previous article I showed how you can use nmon in VIOS to display the performance statistics of hdisks that are mapped to client LPARs. This is achieved by creating a file which nmon reads and then displays the relevant performance data. Let’s look at a script I
IBMi 7.2 Things I Love About IBM i 7.2 (Part 1) I recently gave a presentation at an i-UG event in England on some of the new features in IBM i v7.2. In an attempt to make it a little more fun (and in tribute to Friday nights as a young lad), I delivered this in the style of a
News Big Blue releases new IBM i Express Editions IBM has made a number of tweaks to its Power Systems lineup. First up, buyers of its new 4-core or 6-core Power S814 models (pictured) have the option of choosing IBM i Express Editions. Similar to the old model 720 Express Editions, these work out cheaper but have some restrictions.
News Power8 gets more acceleration, new compilers Altera has unveiled new accelerators for Power chips and Nvidia is to introduce compilers to run x86 Linux apps on the processors more easily. Silicon Valley-based Altera makes field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that are used to speed up processing (pictured). It announced support for IBM’s OpenPower Foundation in November,
News IBM & Nvidea team with top German HPC centre As well as landing a mega deal from the U.S. government, IBM and Nvidia have teamed up with Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Together, they plan to set up the POWER Acceleration and Design Centre to “advance the creation and optimisation of research applications on GPU-accelerated OpenPower-compatible systems”. The
News Power/Nvidia combo bags $325m supercomputer order IBM’s OpenPower alliance with Nvidia has borne its first fruit in the form of a $325 million contract from the U.S. government’s Department of Energy to build two of the world’s fastest supercomputers. A huge Power9 processor-based machine codenamed Summit will be installed at the Oak
News Multi-threaded replication speeds IFS backups Maxava is gearing up to introduce multi-threaded IFS replication to help firms back up their ever-increasing mountains of data faster. According to the HA specialist, IBM i replication solutions have generally only been able to run IFS replication in single-threaded mode until now. This, in effect, drip-feeds data replication – which
AIX Is the new HMC interface enhanced or not? IBM has rather quietly brought out a new interface to its Hardware Management Console (HMC). This became an option in V8R8.1 Service Pack1 of the HMC. IBM has called it the enhanced interface and you will have an option to select it at log in. Don’t worry, you’
