IBM i 7.1 TR5 Highlights: Navigator, Guardium, DB2 and More

Today IBM has a very large set of announcements. We will be covering many of them over the next weeks in the blogs written by the IBM i team. Today in this blog, I will point out the highlights. Be sure to check out the other blogs, and then when you want to get the details, see the IBM i developerWorks pages and remember to that the features have been incorporated in the IBM i 7.1 Information Center.

First, I am happy to announce that IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 5 (TR5) will be available October 12.  I’ve talked about TRs several times here, and many more times when I’ve been speaking over the past two years. To review, the TR mechanism allows IBM i to deliver important new enhancements in I/O, virtualization and processor technology without requiring a major release or a “point release.”  We are producing these Technology Refreshes twice a year to add important new capabilities in between our major IBM i releases. By the way, to ensure that everyone understands what this means let me make it clear:

There will be more major releases of IBM i. IBM i 7.1 is the most recent major release, which became available in the spring of 2010.  There will be other major releases. There are some enhancements which are simply too large and too pervasive for Technology Refreshes. In fact, our IBM i development team is working on two major releases after 7.1 already. But, in order to reduce the number of times our customers need to plan for and implement release upgrades, we created the TR concept to deliver key functions without releases.

In particular, this TR—IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 5—adds support for the new POWER7+ processors, as well as support for new USB-attached I/O, and allows IBM i partitions to be managed by IBM Systems Director VMControl as part of its “System Pools.”

You also need to know about the software enhancements which are being announced at the same time as TR5. There are many of them in a wide variety of areas. No matter how you use IBM i, you are likely to find something interesting in today’s announcements. Here are some highlights.

IBM Navigator for i: We’re delivering a major revision of the user interface with a dynamic navigation area, tab support, and added DB2 capabilities. Plus, with this browser based solution, initially released as part of IBM i 6.1, there’s no Windows client to manage. See Tim Rowe’s blog for more information.

DB2 capabilities: As usual, our DB2 development team has added new features for self-management, as well as improving performance. In addition, with the announcement of POWER7+ we are highlighting the Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) Option for DB2 for i, because this option can take significant advantage of the multi-core, multiple-threads per core available to improve throughput on index builds, index rebuilds SQL query execution and more. Starting today with the DB2 enhancements, Mike Cain’s blog will look at these topics in more detail.

Guardium support: Do you have a requirement to do secure auditing of your database use? The Guardium product is for you. And it’s even better now, because Guardium can monitor for SQL activity in DB2 for i.  We’ve added extensive filters for allowing you to  select the information you need. An excellent article on this new collaboration between IBM i and Guardium will be available soon on developerWorks.

BRMS Enterprise capabilities: For clients who have several systems, managing backups can be a chore. The new Enterprise features of BRMS, which are part of the BRMS Advanced feature, make it easier to do centralized management in these environments.

These new capabilities are just part of what we’ve announced. Over the next several weeks, I’ll have more to say about other pieces of the announcement. So stay tuned!

Meanwhile, be sure to look for details about your favorite new deliveries in the blogs and in developerWorks.

IBM i Information Strategy

In this week’s “i Can” blog, Dawn May celebrated three years of giving her readers excellent tips and techniques, as she has revealed some of the “hidden gems” from the IBM i operating system.

But it’s more than that. It is a cornerstone of the commitment the IBM i team has to the idea of ensuring our clients can get full value from the platform. As the years have gone by, we’ve adapted our information strategy to include more social media than we ever imagined a few years ago. Today, social media is part of our platform strategy. Since this blog deals with strategic topics, and this week also marks the third anniversary of “You and i,” I decided to share some history and some highlights with you.

In the spring of 2009, several key IBM i people gathered in a conference room here in Rochester to discuss how to get more information out to the IBM i community. We decided we should start two blogs. “You and i” would focus on strategy, customer stories, high-level technology, and new features. “i Can” would be more deeply technical, telling people things they might only find out by going to a conference or playing around with the machine on their own.

I wonder if any of our readers appreciate how startling this decision was. As we sat in that conference room, some of us wondered, “Will they let us start blogs?” The unanimous feeling by the time we left the room was, “We are they – we need to start them, so we will do it.”

Our experience has been overwhelmingly positive. This blog, for example, has more than twice as many hits each month than when we started it. Of course, the growth of social media in general has been tremendous. (Did you know Twitter had only reached its billionth tweet in May of 2009, but by 2011 a billion tweets were happening each month?) IBM has been embracing it companywide, and the IBM i team is glad to have been at the forefront.

Our strategy for getting information to our partners and clients now explicitly involves social media. Of course we still have the Information Center, which will remain the “Technical Reference” for the platform. And, of course, IBM i will continue to have a presence in ibm.com. These are both extremely important reference points. But these days, it’s important for you to understand the role played by blogs and developerWorks.

Blogs: We now have (at least) four IBM i-specific blogs being written by IBMers. (I say “at least” because someone will read this blog a year from now, and it’s possible we’ll have more.)

• “You and i” – Announcements, strategy, customer references
• “i Can” – Tips, techniques and examples
• “Modern-i-zation” – Modern application development
• “DB2fori” – IBM i’s integrated DB2 and related topics

For the most part, the authors of those blogs have discretion over their topics. However, we do coordinate some messages and articles. For example, “You and i” always talks about the highlights of a new release or Technology Refresh, and then we ask Dawn May to pick out a few of the highlights and describe them more deeply. Now that Tim Rowe and Mike Cain have started blogging, if we have a topic that fits best in an application development blog, Tim will write about it and if we have a DB2 topic, Mike will put it in his blog.

developerWorks: For almost a year and a half now, we’ve been working to consolidate many widespread IBM i webpages into a cohesive set of material hosted in IBM’s developerWorks. This information is for everyone, not only for people who think of themselves as “developers.” This, too, is a cornerstone element of our information strategy. The IBM i Technology Updates page in developerWorks is the home for detailed information about the function delivered with each new Technology Refresh, as well as function delivered via other means between releases. It also hosts many forum topics, and links to many articles written by our technical team.

Twitter is another social media tool that I am using fairly extensively to communicate with our users. If you follow @Steve_Will_IBMi on Twitter you’ll get notified whenever this blog has something new, and sometimes I tweet about what’s going on in IBM i development, or I’ll point you to a webcast or article or blog which might be useful. Though Twitter has the reputation for being the medium used to share unimportant details, I can tell you Steve_Will_IBMi I won’t be tweeting about what I had for lunch! I use the @Steve_Will_IBMi account for IBM i-related tweets, or sometimes other IT or IBM topics. After my blog about IBM i strategy work, for example, I used Twitter several times to let you know which technologies had presented their strategic updates, but I also pointed to a couple of articles about clients who are using mobile technology with IBM i.

If you are interested in keeping up with IBM i, you have many more opportunities to do so than you had as recently as three years ago. We hope you find our information useful and interesting. Let us know. We are definitely paying attention!

 

 

Twitter: #ibmi, @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

 

Redbooks and More - Latest IBM i information

The IBM team has been busy producing and/or extensively revising a number of books and papers that contain valuable information about IBM i and its related products.

As I have told almost every audience since last fall, our Technology Refresh strategy involves delivering new capabilities between releases, and this means we need to find methods of getting information about those new capabilities into the hands of our customers. One of those methods is the IBM i portion of the developerWorks site, which I have talked about before. Another method is the well-respected set of Redbooks publications, and lesser-known, but just as valuable Redpapers and Webdocs.

To produce these documents, IBMers from around the world become authors. Usually, these authors are people who work very directly with customers in their “day jobs” but they set aside several weeks to focus on learning how to use the new capabilities we’ve announced. They talk directly with the developers and architects of these functions, and then they sit down to bring the advancements into the real world, explaining in their writing how to take advantage of them. In fact, the final three items on the list – the Webdocs – are programming examples that show how to do specific functions we expect will be helpful to many clients. 

Without further ado, here is the list of recently created or updated IBM i information.

1.  IBM i 7.1 Technical Overview Including Technology Refresh Updates -November 2011   (Redbook)

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg247858.html?Open

2.  PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i Cookbook   (Redbook)

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg247994.html?Open

3. Creating IBM i Client Partitions Using Virtual Partition Manager (Redpaper)  

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4806.html?Open

4. Uncovering Application Runtime Expert - IBM i 7.1 (Redpaper)

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4805.html?Open

5.  New Watch for Event Function for IBM i 7.1: How to Take Advantage of QSYSMSG Message Queue (Webdoc)

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0839.html?Open

6. Retrieve the Network Configuration of the System Manager Attached to Your Server From an IBM i Command Line (Webdoc)

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0840.html?Open

7. How to Determine the Amount of Memory Used By the System Firmware From the IBM i Command Line (Webdoc)

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0841.html?Open

 

The IBM i 7.1 Redbook contains information on the new capabilities we’ve added with Technology Refreshes 1, 2 and 3. For example, it has a discussion of “Suspend/Resume” – the ability to put an IBM i partition to sleep and wake it up again later, which was provided in TR2. The ability to use Virtual Partition Manager to create up to four IBM i partitions, available with TR3 is also covered briefly, but the Redpaper on doing that function contains the specific “how to” information.

 

The PowerHA Redbook: this book replaces an older version, and is in direct reaction to the success of the product and the needs of new PowerHA users. The first version of the Redbook was heavily focused on the concepts, but lacked the kind of “step by step” information many clients wanted from a Redbook.   This time, the team focused its work specifically on helping PowerHA users get up to speed quickly.  I think they did a good job.

Until next time, I hope you have set aside some time to read a good book. Or two.

 

 

Twitter: #ibmi #powerha @Steve_Will_IBMi 

 

Spring Announcements and IBM i in developerWorks

Today, April 12, is a big day for IBM i. First of all, we’re announcing a new set of capabilities. Secondly, the IBM i Technical Topic in developerWorks has been launched. I’ll briefly explain the newly announced functions, then give a bit more time to the new IBM i content in developerWorks (dW).

If you’ll recall, we’ve been preparing to be able to announce new virtualization capabilities on a regular basis by creating Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.1. There are several of these in today’s announcements. One of these is the new “virtual tape” capability. It allows a tape drive to be used by one IBM i partition when the tape drive is assigned to a second partition, without the use of PowerVM’s Virtual I/O Server (VIOS).  Another significant new virtualization enhancement is the “Suspend/Resume” enhancement, which works with VIOS to allow an IBM i partition to be temporarily suspended, then started back up again at a later time. Dawn May’s “i Can” blog will cover Suspend/Resume in detail this week, so be sure to read it for all the details.

Technology Refreshes are also used to deliver new I/O capabilities, and there are some interesting new I/O features that will be supported by 7.1 TR2 when it becomes available on May 13. These include a couple of methods for having a higher density of storage: the new 571 GB SAS disk drive, which provides a lower cost per gigabyte and more gigabytes per 2U rack space; and the new EXP24S SFF Gen2-bay drawer, which has a higher physical density, fitting 24 solid-state drives (SSDs) or hard disk drives (HDDs) disks in the space that used to fit just 12.

In addition to the functions provided by TR2, the announcement letter also talks about several new software enhancements. We’re bringing back to IBM i 6.1 some Systems Director Navigator support that was initially made available only in 7.1. We also have a whole set of new DB2 for i enhancements. If you want to see the entire announcement letter, visit the IBM Offering Information Web page and search for the announcement letter numbered 211-108.

We may cover some of these in more detail in future blogs, but you’ll also be able to find out about new support by visiting the new IBM i Technical Topic in dW. 

IBM dW is a free online resource where IBM gathers technical information about many of its technologies to help developers build better software, and to help system administrators find methods for simplifying their jobs. For several years, both AIX and Linux have been featured prominently on dW in the Technical Topics section. (They called these areas “zones,” but I understand that terminology is being phased out.) While we’ve had IBM i content on dW, it hasn’t been in one place nor has it been very easy to find.

I’ve been talking to Linda Grigoleit about this for quite some time, and she says it very well:

“Our main goal is to help make our IBM i technical content easier to find and to improve the integration of IBM i, AIX and Linux technical content in one location for our Power Systems community. We have been hearing from our IBM i community they would like to see technical content in one place and it made perfect sense to us to put it on developerWorks.”

Two people from Rochester, Minn. have been working to gather and organize the technical content: Scott Forstie, who works on our IBM i development team as a DB2 expert; and Kent Milligan, who works in our IBM Lab Services and Training organization, and spends a great deal of time helping ISVs use IBM i technologies.  They’ve done a great job, so I asked Scott to tell me what we can expect to find in the new IBM i Technical Topic.

Here’s what he told me:

People who want to find technical information about IBM i, or want to connect with others in the IBM i community can visit the IBM i technical topic to access a wealth of information contained within these 6 main categories: 

•    New to IBM i
•    Technical Library
•    Forums and Community
•    Technology Updates
•    Tools and Downloads
•    Events

You’ll want to look around at all of these, but I thought I would highlight two of them: the Technical Library and the Technology Updates.

The Technical Library contains new articles on many topics. We’ve written many articles in the past, and this is a great place to gather them as they’re written. We’ll be adding to the library regularly. On launch day we have these articles ready to go:

1.    Next generation RPG documentation
2.    How to boost application performance using Solid State Disk devices
3.    Power HA System Mirror for i: Ready to switch
4.    IBM i Performance Data Investigator: Browser-based viewing of performance data
5.    MERGE ahead: Introducing the DB2 for i SQL MERGE Statement
6.    Revolutionize your application and product support: IBM Application Runtime Expert

You can check back for new technical articles or perhaps you’d prefer to use the dW subscribe capability to see updates as they happen via an RSS feed. I should add that technical articles can be contributed by anyone; it's not limited to IBMers. I encourage you to help others in the IBM i community by sharing your expertise and experiences. Just click on the "Submit an article or idea" link at the bottom of the IBM i technical topic landing page.

In the Technology Updates section we’re providing a centralized location for communicating enhancements made in between major IBM i releases. It’s in these pages where the functions announced for TR2 and the related software enhancements will initially get documented before they find their way into the Information Center permanently.

Just to set expectations, I want you to realize that only part of the information will be in the dW IBM i Technical Topic at the time of the announcement. Other information will be added over time, some of it on or around the availability date (May 13 for most of the functions in the announcement). 

The technology update material has been organized by subject matter and category of enhancement. You can enable self notification of future changes by selecting the "Notify me of Page Changes" option.

By gathering the technical information IBM development and services professionals write, and by allowing the IBM i customer, ISV and business partner community to add their own content, we hope to encourage a more agile, community-oriented method of getting useful information into the hands of those who need it.

I know this blog entry has gotten a bit longer than usual, but I think you can see we have a lot to talk about this week. Thanks for sticking with me for the duration, and please take a look at the RFA and the new IBM i Technical Topic in developerWorks to find out about the new features IBM i is making available.


Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi