EasyOptimize and IBM i

One of the many parts of the announcement on February 5 was the introduction of EasyOptimize technology. You might have missed it, but it’s briefly described in several places, including on the IBM Power Systems Advantages page. The key words used to describe EasyOptimize are:

“To achieve maximum performance, POWER processor-based systems are designed with EasyOptimize technologies that enable the system to tune automatically to specific industry workloads.”

There are various technologies in the EasyOptimize category. One of them is the Dynamic Platform Optimizer, which is used across a Power platform to optimize memory access for a system with multiple partitions running. I’m not going to describe it in detail, because it was very nicely covered in the Power Firmware blog a couple weeks back, but it’s a clear example of the kind of technology we’re building.

Another example that’s called out in some places is called AIX Dynamic System Optimizer. It’s an extension of the AIX Active System Optimizer and performs such functions as cache and memory affinity optimization, and tuning the operation of the operating system to optimize database workloads.

The same kind of function is integrated into the fabric of the IBM i operating system. Consequently, as we were preparing for the announcement, we also coined the term IBM i Dynamic System Optimizer to describe the integrated features tune system resources to optimize business workloads. In other words, just as for AIX, EasyOptimize refers to a set of capabilities, some of which are delivered by the Power processors in conjunction with the firmware that underlies all Power operating systems.

EasyOptimize is also a set of integrated capabilities in IBM i. The Dynamic System Optimizer (DSO) function is autonomic resource management built into the IBM i operating system. Its first underpinnings were made available to clients more than 20 years ago, and it has been enhanced every release since. IBM i has been actively working to make memory and processor affinity optimal for many years, and advancements are made in each release. Affinity, for those who are not familiar with the term, describes the “distance” data has to travel from memory in the system to the processors that need to act on the data in that memory. In a system with as many cores as Power has, and as much memory as Power has, it would be very easy to have data drift “away” from the processors acting on it. Very complex algorithms are involved in ensuring that data that’s currently being used, or that will soon be used, by a processing unit (a core) is as close as possible to reduce latency. Again, affinity autonomic processing has been a part of IBM i for many years, and it represents an excellent example of EasyOptimize capabilities.

Another example you might have heard about is the Performance Adjuster (QPFRADJ), which has been an integrated part of the operating system for more than two decades. It learns how the customer's workloads are using memory and processors and it balances system usage to optimize performance and throughput. Another example, which was made available a couple of years ago, is called IBM i Workload Group support, which allows clients to limit the processing power given to their workloads while still leaving the detailed management of which work runs on which cores to the operating system. Similarly, using a built-in function called Dynamic SMT, the IBM i operating system can recognize when a core does not need to be shared, and allow processes to run in single-threaded mode, automatically improving workload performance. These EasyOptimize autonomic performance capabilities serve the fundamental principle of integrated value in IBM i.

And then of course, we have the integrated DB2 that automates various database operations to optimize system usage based on the precise workload that’s being run. The 7.1 release, for example, delivered Adaptive Query Processing, which can automatically recognize when a frequently run query is taking longer than it has in the past, and optimizes the query to improve performance.

Most of the Dynamic System Optimizer functions within IBM i are integrated for no extra charge. DB2 for i does have some features that fit into the EasyOptimize category, which are available for an additional charge. For example, DB2 Symmetric Multiprocessing (5770SS1 Option 26) is a feature that can spread database work, such as complex queries, across multiple threads and cores automatically. When it was first introduced, only our largest customers were using multiple cores and multiple threads of execution, but with today’s POWER7 and POWER7+ processors, many more clients might get benefit from this capability.

So when you hear people talking about EasyOptimize capabilities in Power, you can be assured that IBM i is playing in that arena, and has been for a long time. Together with the rest of the Power Systems family, we are working together to use the expertise of our scientists and engineers to optimize the way our systems are used, based on the workloads your business requires.

 

 

 

 

POWER7+ I/O and More From Announce Day

Last week I told you this week’s blog would focus a bit on the hardware and I/O that was announced, from the IBM i point of view. To get that perspective, I asked Mark Olson, the IBM Power Systems Product Manager, to make a guest appearance, and he kindly agreed. So, let’s get to it. Here’s Mark.

Tuesday, February 5, we announced some really sweet hardware enhancements to the Power Systems product line. Let me point out the highlights. Continuing with the POWER7+ introduction started late last year with the Power 770 and 780, we carried this POWER7+ refresh into the popular Power 710, 720, 730, 740 and 750. We also created a new model 760. This POWER7+ refresh was the biggest part of the announcement, but there were several other things that added to banquet.

Though you can find IBM i clients using any and all of the Power Systems models and there are significant price performance improvements for all these models, the Power 720 is the model selected by a large percentage of IBM i clients. So let me focus on it as an example. The POWER7+ refresh provides the 720 with faster GHz and up to 2X the maximum memory. The POWER7 720 is a 3 GHz server. The POWER7+ is a 3.6 GHz server. And the POWER7+ chip proves 150% more L3 cache (10MB vs 4MB per core). Combined with some very attractive pricing on the processor features and new memory features, clients are really going to appreciate the price performance improvements.

For those clients who haven't yet stepped up to IBM i 7.1, IBM i 6.1 is supported on the POWER7+ 710/720/730/740/750/760/770/780. But there is a new twist to this support statement. We are announcing a new optional hardware feature code on the POWER7+ 710/720/730/740/770/780 called IBM i 6.1 Native I/O Enablement (#EB34). If ordered, #EB34 generates a VET code that enables the IBM i 6.1 to directly access its I/O with or without using an IBM i 7.1 partition or using VIOS. There is a modest price for #EB34. If you want to run IBM i 6.1 without #EB34 on the POWER7+ server, you can do that. However, in that case all the I/O for the 6.1 partition (disk or SSD or tape or LAN, but not WAN comm adapters) has to be owned by either an IBM i 7.1 partition or VIOS. IBM i 6.1 will be a client only partition with this scenario.

There were some nice solid state drive (SSD) or flash memory enhancements. First, the most powerful, most dense SSD drawer Power Systems has ever introduced was supported on the POWER7+ models. This is the EXP30 Ultra SSD I/O Drawer. It has some impressive headlines: up to 480,000 I/O Operations per Second, up to 11.6 TB capacity in only 1 U of space with zero PCIe slots. Second, we announced IBM i 7.1 TR6 support of this SSD option. It is a very powerful addition to our existing SSD options IBM i clients already enjoy. Finally, we introduced 6-pack and 4-pack SSD features that provide a 20-percent list price reduction and can be ordered with a new server.

There were a number of removable media enhancements. For convenience, IBM i 7.1 TR6 supports USB memory sticks in the USB ports of the POWER7/POWER7+ system units. SAS LTO-6 tape drives are introduced for the half-high bays of the 720/740 and in the 1U 7226 media drawer. An LTO-6 drive provides 2X the capacity and improved performance for a price only slightly higher than the existing LTO-5 drive. For entry save/restore clients, a new 1.5 TB RDX cartridge provides 50 percent more capacity.

Two new high performance PCIe Gen2 adapters were announced. The first is a 2-port 16Gb Fibre Channel adapter. This card can also be used with existing 4 Gb and/or 8 Gb FC switches for clients who already have 16 Gb switches or who prefer to buy an adapter with the flexibility to support larger capacity links in the future We also introduced a 4-port Ethernet card. Two of the ports are 10Gb SR optical and two of the ports are 1 Gb RJ45 ports. It's like having two Ethernet cards but only using one PCIe slot. The 10 Gb ports can run both NIC and FCoE data streams, but IBM i supports just the NIC at this time. IBM i leverages VIOS for support of both of these cards.

The last hardware highlight I'd like to point out is enhanced support of the SVC, V7000 Storewize and V3700. NPIV (N_Port ID Virtualization) is added to the existing VSCSI support of these IBM storage solutions. Plus we shared a statement of direction (SOD) for planned native support of the V3700 with IBM i 7.1.

February 5 was a really good day!

 

 

 

 

 

@Steve_Will_IBMi Twitter Digest Volume 2

A while back, I blogged about some of the things you will find out if you use Twitter to follow news using the #IBMi hashtag, specifically, what you will find me tweeting about. When I asked for reactions to that blog, I was encouraged by several readers to do a “digest” blog now and then, to allow you to catch up, and to keep some information from falling off then end of the Twitter world. So, today, we have Volume 2. I will not repeat all of my tweets, but here are some, in categories which provide some organization to the rather random nature of the Twitter-verse.

Events: As I mentioned a couple of months ago, there are many customer events that have been taking place this fall. In fact, as I write this, I have just finished my presentations at Power Systems Technical University, and I am preparing to go to Japan for a very large conference of customers who use IBM i. #PowerTechU was very energizing, with a larger set of IBM i clients than I have ever seen there before. I’d like to think it was because of the participation of so many good IBM i speakers, but we have to give some credit to the venue, too. Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas is a pretty good draw. Nevertheless, we had some excellent sessions, so if you want to start planning now, you can see from my tweet that next year’s conference will be in Orlando.

At the time I wrote my “Conference Season” blog, I didn’t even have the RPG/DB2 Summit on my itinerary. It was held up in Minneapolis, though, so after running into Jon Paris & Susan Gantner at the OMNI conference in Chicago, we worked out a way for me to drive up from Rochester to give a keynote at the Summit. Great fun.

Some of my customer events are virtual, too. The top tweet in the list represents that sort of event. I was able to talk to a large set of clients of Infor, one of our key IBM i ISVs. We did a webcast with some IBM i information from me and Infor product information from their experts.

Good Reference Material: If you follow the #IBMi hashtag on Twitter, you will encounter many great pieces of information. I try to be one of the sources of that information, so when one of the DB2 team sent me the link to this video which describes how Guardium works with DB2 on i, I just had to share it.

Customer Input: A big part of our job here in the IBM i development labs is listening to customer requirements and responding to them. We had our Large User Group in Rochester for their fall meeting. Most of the week gets spent talking about Power & IBM i technology – current and future. And we always mix in discussions about requirements. The tweet mentions one specific session in which we responded to the most critical requirements this particular advisory board has on its books.

Announcement Material: On announcement day, I am not the only one providing information about IBM i and Power Systems. Far from it! So I try to point my followers to others who give out great tips and descriptions.

Of course, some of those are my fellow IBM i bloggers, but other key pieces of information are in the Information Center, in IBM i developerWorks pages, in the actual announcement letter, and from others who are tweeting as well.

You can certainly get some of this information from the blog directly, but some of these sources don’t become available until after “You and i” goes live, so the tweets help with sharing links that are useful for you. It’s my intent to make sure that those of you who can follow Twitter get good useful information as it becomes available.

I hope this has been helpful. I realize Twitter is not for everyone, and some organizations are not using social media quite as much as others are. I recently saw a statistic from B2BOnline, though, that 3 in 5 IT decision makers use social media to learn about new products and technologies. With that in mind, it’s good to have a growing community of people – IBMers and our partners and customers – using social media such as Twitter to talk about the platform which can help those decision makers run their businesses efficiently with state-of-the-art technology.

 

 

You can follow me on Twitter @Steve_Will_IBMi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Live Partition Mobility, TR4 and more - IBM i 7.1

Today is announce day for several items that might be of interest to many of you, and one thing that will certainly affect almost all of you at some point.

Today, IBM is announcing the content of Technology Refresh 4 for IBM i 7.1. (That’s the “one thing.” You’ll all be on 7.1 soon, right? And when you are, you will want the latest TR, so you’ll get TR4.)

Many clients have been waiting for this announcement, anticipating the delivery of one major function enabled by TR4; the one known as “Live Partition Mobility” (LPM).

I actually referred to this function obliquely back in October. I included a roadmap for function that was required in IBM i so that it can be used to provide a PowerVM-based cloud. In October, there was one final step to be completed. It is now complete.

For those of you who might be a little unclear about the concept of Live Partition Mobility, it is simply this: You have a partition running on system A; you tell it to move to system B; it moves – while it's still running! It might take a minute, and often only a few seconds, to move from A to B, but it will move, and there will be no disruption in the running workloads. A few seconds pause to users who are interacting with it, but nothing more. IBM i and PowerVM just pause the work taking place on one system, move it to another, and start it up again.

Customers will use this function in many ways. They can balance work among servers to get the most efficient use of their resources. Or perhaps they need to take one machine down for maintenance – they can move the workload that's running on it to another system for a while, then move it back when the system is ready to go again. And very importantly, clients who want to implement clouds of Power Systems in their organizations will be able to do so, with IBM i participating fully in those clouds.

This is all made possible when you use the Virtual I/O Server to host the I/O for your IBM i partition. There are other technical requirements - POWER7, 7.1 TR4 or beyond, and more, you can find details here www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibmi/techupdates/hw/ilpm. 

Oh, and if you are an ISV, and would like to test your solution in an environment with LPM, the IBM Innovation Centers are available for you.

Still, while the most anticipated feature of the announcement might be LPM, there is much more in the announcement. Java 7 is now available on IBM i 7.1. This has actually been available for a while now, but today’s announcement highlights it, so if you want to ensure you have the PTFs which enable Java 7, go to the developerWorks page for “Java on IBM i” and click either the “News” link or the PTF Groups link. There are also several key DB2 enhancements, as well as a Technology Preview of a new member of the IBM i Access products, which removes the dependence on preinstalled code.

This brings me to a couple of other points I want to mention today.

First, I need to re-emphasize how important it is for the IBM i community to make use of developerWorks (dW) on a regular basis. It is on these dW pages we put details about the newest enhancements and how to get them. You can start at the dW IBM i home page -- https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibmi/ -- and browse for great information. Or you can go to specific pages, such as the Java pages linked above, and subscribe to them so that you get an e-mail each time they are updated.

Second, I want to make sure you understand that some of the enhancements announced at the same time as a Technology Refresh are not actually delivered as part of the TR PTF Group. This is the case with Java, and it’s the case with all of the DB2 enhancements as well. Technology Refreshes, at their most accurate and basic level, are only used to provide function entirely below the Machine Interface, and almost always implement changes in Virtualization (such as LPM), I/O (such as new DASD options) or Processor/Firmware capabilities. When the first TR was shipped, my guest bloggers described TRs in detail, so you might want to re-read the TR Introduction blog. Perhaps even better, the main IBM i Technology Refresh page is very helpful. And if you want to see the content of each of the TRs that have been announced, there is a dW page that links you to that information.

This entry is getting a bit long, so let me give you some pointers to other important places with information about things announced today:

• Dawn May’s “i Can” blog talks about the details of implementing LPM. http://ibmsystemsmag.blogs.com/i_can/2012/04/move-my-i.html 
• The DB2 for i enhancements are too numerous to enumerate, but include XMLTABLE support and extensions to three-part name support. Suffice it to say that there should be something of interest to all you database fans out there. Go here for the scoop: www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibmi/techupdates/db2
• Speaking of DB2, Mike Cain writes a blog called “DB2 for i” and his blog will have some interesting tidbits about today’s announced function, too. http://db2fori.blogspot.com/
• IBM Software Group support for pricing based on Workload Groups is part of today’s IBM i announcement, but I described it back in February.
• A new product is available from Rational, called the Application Management Toolset for i (AMTS), which contains limited versions of two of the most basic tools – PDM and SEU. The description of this new product is in the Rational Announcement letters. I’ll try to post a link in the comments section when I get it.
• Finally, for those of you who are implementing Linux in your environments, IBM Power Linux has a big announcement today, and you will definitely want to check it out before deciding to buy any other hardware platform for Linux workloads. (Again, look in the comments section. If someone finds the link before I do, feel free to post it! I’ll be on webcasts and planes quite a bit over the next couple of days.)

All told, today’s announcements include significant enhancements to your IBM i installations. I hope you will be able to take the time to read about the new ways we are delivering value on this integrated operating environment on Power Systems.

 

 

Twitter: #ibmi, @Steve_Will_IBMi

 

IBM PureSystems and IBM i

Today IBM is announcing IBM PureSystems, and as announcements go, it is a major announcement. It touches all aspects of what IBM offers customers, and all parts of IBM’s business have been involved in creating it, and will continue to be involved in delivering it. In today’s “You and i” I want to give you a very brief overview of IBM PureSystems, from the “i” perspective.

As I mentioned recently, and Alison wrote about last time, the strategic Smarter Planet initiative in IBM has been a driving force behind how we explain IBM technology value for the world today, and in the near future. But Smarter Planet is more than a marketing message – it also provides the framework for designing and creating answers to the questions we know our customers are facing, or will face soon. A key set of technology forming IBM’s answer to those questions has been previewed for the past several months - Expert Integrated Systems. IBM PureSystems is the family of Expert Integrated Systems.

You can find out much more than I have space to describe by visiting the IBM PureSystems website – ibm.com/puresystems – but I thought long-time “i” clients would be interested in a few key aspects on announce day.

Let’s get the biggest question out of the way first: Yes, PureSystems supports IBM i – or IBM i supports PureSystems – however you look at it. You can run IBM i solutions in either of the two PureSystems configurations: a PureFlex system, which is intended to be an infrastructure system in an IT organization, or a PureApplication system, which incorporates ISV solutions into the platform. Now that we know that, let’s get on to other interesting aspects of IBM PureSystems.

You can see the three cornerstone values of PureSystems in the picture above, and those values should sound very, very familiar to the IBM i users among us:

• Integration by Design – Deeply integrating and tuning hardware and software
• Simplified Experience – Reducing the complexity and shortening the amount of time it takes to get value out of your IT
• Built-In Experience – Using the expertise IBM has built up over the years to capture and automate what experts do when deploying a complete IT solution

Those values, of course, are historically the same values IBM i has carried forward from our heritage.

• Integration by Design – The “i” in IBM i stands for integration, after all.
• Simplified Experience –The simplicity of managing our platform has always been a hallmark of IBM i, and it helps drive the world-class Total Cost of Ownership value appreciated by our clients.
• Built-In Experience – From DB2 for i, which automates much of its own “care and feeding,” to using intuitive and automatic means to provide security to protect your data and your system, IBM i has built in experience from our developers and our partners over the years.

With PureSystems, these values are applied to a much larger, more comprehensive portion of the IBM portfolio. As IT shops grow, and become more integral in providing strategic value to their companies, they need their x86-based workloads to work better with their Power technology-based workloads. They need all of those workloads to use virtualization effectively to provide availability and reliability, while using their storage and networking in a optimal ways. PureSystems are designed to address those needs.

Applying traditional IBM i values to enterprise IT requirements as a whole involves every part of IBM, as I mentioned above. In some ways, it’s an evolution of what existed before, but in other ways, it’s quite a change. Take a few minutes and take a look at what has begun today as we take this next big step in the journey into a Smarter Planet.

 

 

 

Twitter: #ibmi, #expertintsystems,#IBMPureSystems @Steve_Will_IBMi