Smarter Computing and Workload Optimized Infrastructure for IBM i

Today's guest blogger is well-known speaker and IBM i expert, Alison Butterill, IBM i Product Manager.

 

Steve and I have been talking with many clients recently about the IBM Smarter Computing initiative and why IBM i is such a perfect platform for implementing smarter computing projects. It was as the result of some of those conversations that I asked to write a guest blog for Steve.

Many IBM i customers do not recognize Smarter Computing as something that pertains to i as much as, if not more than, to other computing platforms. Smarter Computing is not the playground of just large customers. Smarter Computing means just that – smarter ways of using technology. There is no specific mandate and our i customers make decisions every day about what makes computing smarter for their company and for their customers.

First of all, there are 3 main themes under the broader umbrella called Smarter Computing. The first, data and analytics, was discussed by Steve in a previous blog.

The second and the focus of my discussion is workload optimized infrastructure or tuned to a task. And the third is cloud and the requirements for implementing both public and private clouds. The video for the second theme was recently released. You can find it at bit.ly/IBMiWorkloadOptimized.

As I said, I want to talk about Workload Optimized Infrastructure, using some description and an example.

What differentiates a system that is “tuned for the task”? There are several technology components that make up optimization. Things like performance, consolidation, integration, virtualization, exploiting capabilities of the hardware are just a few of the features that make a system able to handle a specific workload more effectively.

Many of those optimization technologies are built into IBM i – virtualization, reliability and so on. One client who is using these capabilities is Multivac, a packaging equipment manufacturer, from Germany. They have been on a long journey to update their infrastructure, optimizing it to run their manufacturing business more effectively and more efficiently.

In 2003, Multivac examined their existing technology solutions and determined that they needed improvement. They chose a phased plan of action based on “the desire to reduce costs, by optimizing the IT infrastructure and reducing the total cost of ownership and operation for its business-critical applications”.

The next step was to choose the solution. Consolidating their applications into one ERP package and putting it onto a single IBM i server would significantly reduce overhead, and energy consumption, and staffing thereby saving money. Their Lotus Notes collaboration software has moved to the IBM i environment enhancing availability and reliability for their Notes users. They continue to add technology to their infrastructure including adding a PowerHA solution, using High Availability Solutions Manager and Cross Site Mirroring. They have added a SAN solution, externalizing their drives and an IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC).

Multivac is committed to ongoing reviews of their technology and their computing environment. Smarter computing to Multivac is using their technology and their computing environment to the fullest extent possible.

Exploiting the technology that they had, adding key components to satisfy business requirement such as virtualization and availability is what Smarter Computing means to Multivac. You can go to the IBM i website and read their full story. 

Workload Optimized Infrastructure means many things to many people. What does it mean in your company?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

IBM Watson’s Storage Requirements

In my last blog entry, I briefly mentioned a project called “Watson.” Watson is a set of IBM Research technology, running on POWER technology, which will compete in the “Jeapordy!” game against two of that game show’s most celebrated champions. Since my blog, a number of good articles have been written about it, including an excellent overview in Jon & Susan’s blog. If you're not familiar with Watson’s basics, you should probably start there, and then come back here. 

Don’t worry.  I’ll wait.

OK, now that you have the overview, I thought I’d point out one of the technical details of the project, and then discuss implications of such technology on computing in general.

Watson’s cluster of POWER 750s is using two 2 terabyte (TB) I/O nodes, for a total data repository of 4 TB. How impressive does that sound to you? In one sense, that amount of data can sound rather large.  Many businesses do not have 4 TB of data. On the other hand, to compete in a general knowledge quiz show, is that enough? Well, a rule of thumb I once learned is that 1 Terabyte was about as much text information as is contained in 20 volumes from a printed encyclopedia. Now, the encyclopedia I bought more than 20 years ago had 24 volumes, and it added a new volume every year to cover events which happened in that year. So, by that analogy, 4 TB might be enough room to have a full encyclopedia’s worth of general knowledge at your fingertips (or, at the ends of your disk-arms, for Watson) as well as another 16 year’s worth of more specific information.

Somehow, while that sounds like a lot of data, it might still be less data than I think Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter have in their heads. They are veritable founts of knowledge.

And yet, if you listen to this Why Data Matters video on the IBM Watson site, 4 TB is still miniscule, compared to the amount of data being produced. The estimate given in those videos is 15 Petabytes of new data is generated throughout the world each day. That’s right, the new data each day is 4,000 times larger than could be stored in Watson for this challenge. But, for the challenge, the data is specific to a purpose, and that purpose is quite impressive – competing with human beings in knowledge-based answering.

By the way, one implication of this information is that Watson is only using data that's stored in its disks. Watson is not connected to the Internet, or any network outside of the clustering network that connects its 750s and its storage. So, don’t assume that Watson is getting some advantage, such as having access to search engines.

This is going to be very important as the DeepQA technology gets applied to real-world applications.  Suppose, for example, you wanted to ask a computer about a fairly complex topic – taxes, for example – and you wanted to get a reasonably reliable answer. The Federal Tax code is pretty complex, but it could be contained on a single set of servers and storage, and you would want your answers to be consistent with the information in those servers. You most certainly would not want to have the QA system pulling data in from blogs on the Internet, written by people who are misinformed about the reality of tax laws.

For many of us in this industry, Watson represents another step toward the kinds of computers we saw on Star Trek. Computers that can understand our meaning, even if we ask a question in a strange way, to turn a question into a query, will make computers more usable in ways we have only dreamed before. Computers that have access to all of the pertinent information and know how to search it will provide extensions to our knowledge which approach artificial intelligence. Computers that not only can give us an answer but can also give an estimate of confidence in that answer will help us make decisions in more informed ways.

 

#ibmwatson

 

 

Storage and IBM i

IBM iQ&A – Storage & IBM i

Do people e-mail you questions? I imagine each of us has this experience – it’s part of the networked life we lead. I frequently receive e-mail from customers, business partners and even other IBMers asking questions about IBM i and Power Systems. I answer what I can and I forward the rest to other people who may know the answers. 

Sometimes a question gets asked often enough I realize I should find a way to get the answer out to a wider audience. Today’s blog topic is one of those questions, along with my answer. The actual details of the question might differ slightly, but the topic in general is one we get asked frequently around here. The topic is storage. I’ll copy the question from the note I most recently received (cutting out details that identify the sender).

IBM iQ: I’ve had a difficult time finding information about IBM’s strategy for i storage.  I’ve heard rumors that all new development is being tested first on SAN storage and second on integrated storage, but I haven’t found an IBM SOD to confirm or deny this rumor. I’m trying to prepare for what’s coming in the future and was wondering if you could provide some insight.

IBM iA: The IBM i strategy relative to storage is to continue to excel in integrated storage while extending into the external storage, which is becoming so prevalent in the industry. The rumor you mention is certainly not true. We test new storage devices as they’re developed, whether integrated or SAN-attached or VIOS-attached. When we develop IBM i support that’s not specifically tied to the capabilities of storage devices, we test on a mix of configurations.

Now, there’s a set of functions that are going to depend on storage that’s managed, in part, outside of IBM i. Some of the high-availability capabilities in the industry, and indeed in PowerHA SystemMirror for i, are tied to the functions that are delegated to SAN controllers (e.g., Flash Copy). Some virtualization capabilities that will be implemented in VIOS, or in certain external-storage boxes, will require those components. VIOS supports NPIV, which allows sharing of devices across partitions in ways that an integrated device couldn’t.

For many of our low-end customers, integrated storage will remain the best option. We continue to invest in making sure it performs well, it’s integrated into our lowest levels of the operating system, and it can provide growth for customers as they move up in generations. For those who are in the middle or high end of our market, cost pressures and the desire to virtualize and share storage will make external storage more attractive.

I hope this helps.
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Let me supplement that answer a little bit. We have some very good SAN (Storage Area Network) technology coming out of IBM. IBM i developers work with the IBM storage development teams, just as AIX and Linux on Power developers do, to ensure we know what features and capabilities they’ll be providing so we can take advantage of them. A SAN may not be the answer for every customer, but when a SAN makes sense, we want the combination of IBM SAN and IBM i to be an excellent solution.

That’s the storage IBM iQ&A. Now, one more note.

I recently asked my Twitter followers to submit questions or topics I could use as subjects for future blogs. (I have received exactly zero responses. Perhaps I should turn up the volume on my tweets?) I'll ask here, too. If you have some suggested topics, or a specific question about IBM i technology that you think is frequently asked, or should be, then send it along. I have several topics coming up this fall that are already scheduled. When I get a few good questions, I’ll schedule another IBM iQ&A. In fact, I have another frequently asked question that I’ll address soon, but it will have to wait for another week or two.