More From the Grab Bag

Every now and again I like to present a grab bag of links that I find to be interesting, even if they don't warrant their own post.

For instance, some weeks back I wrote that more people are talking about AIX on Power and its industry-best downtime numbers.

Here's more on that topic.

"Among the customers surveyed by ITIC, IBM's Power Systems running AIX experienced (this includes older System p and pSeries iron) the least amount of downtime per year, when averaged across all customers using these platforms. AIX shops reported an average of 0.42 Tier 1 incidents per year and 0.34 Tier 2 incidents, and not one customer reported a Tier 3 outage on their AIX boxes. The Power Systems machines (and this includes older System i and iSeries iron) had an average of 0.56 Tier 1 outages per year, 0.44 Tier 2 outages per year, and 0.12 Tier 3 outages. So in 2009 at least, the i platform fared a little worse than the AIX platform running on Power iron."

I also liked these recent articles:

* From ComputerWorld:

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) system, which went online in August, is compromised of 'Stratus' and its backup, 'Cirrus,' two separate supercomputers with about 5,000 IBM POWER6 chips running AIX operating systems."

* IBM developerWorks has this piece on a script that can gather information about your systems. Then you run the diff command to find the differences between them.


* Here, the reuse of SAN disks is examined:

"The support of these scenarios in which remapping, copying, and reuse of SAN disks is allowed and supported has never been officially documented. There have been some documents and IBM Redbooks that have claimed support for specific scenarios, but they do not list the specific steps or restrictions. The scenarios detailed here guide systems administrators through the steps taken to achieve the specific environment desired. They also attempt to explain why the setup must be followed to achieve the desired results. If the steps are not followed, in some cases the system may not boot."

* Here's an IBM Systems Magazine Web Exclusive on using the mkramdsk command:

"One of the most common concerns for system administrators is maximizing disk performance. The AIX command mkramdisk is ideal for producing very high speed I/O by letting the memory do all the work. Database administrators are well aware of the benefits of keeping frequently accessed data in memory in order to reduce the need to retrieve that data from disk. The AIX mkramdisk command allows system administrators to create memory-resident file systems. The performance benefits of using RAM disk can be astonishing. The unload of a large TSM database was reduced from 40 hours on SAN disks down to 10 minutes using RAM disk."

* Finally, here's something to look forward to with the POWER7 processors:

"IBM's Hot Chips presentation on its forthcoming 45nm POWER7 server processor had a wealth of information on the chip… POWER7 will come in 4-, 6-, and 8-core varieties, with the default presumably being the 8-core and the lower-core variants being offered to improve yields."

If you've found interesting articles online, please share your links in Comments.