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IBM Power Systems Technical Symposium in Melbourne and Auckland and Enjoying the Land Down Under

Recently I attended the IBM Power Systems Technical Symposium in Melbourne Australia, followed by a similar conference the next week in Auckland New Zealand. This was my first trip to the southern hemisphere and what a great trip it was! In addition to speaking at the conferences and talking with IBM i clients, I took some vacation and was a tourist for a few days.

This being my first trip to the down-under, I arranged to travel a few days early and spent the weekend prior to the conferences in Sydney. Of course I had to do touristy things – I walked across the Harbor Bridge (no, I didn’t do the bridge climb), wandered around outside the Sydney Opera House and visited the Royal Botanical Gardens. The Opera House is an amazing architectural work and I could write several paragraphs about it. I snapped this picture while on the Harbor Bridge:

Having lived most of my life as a land-locked Midwesterner, I had to venture to the coast. tripadvisor told me that the Bondi to Coogee Beach Coastal Walk was the #3 attraction in Sydney and the beach locations worked well with my limited time in Sydney. Along the walk, I saw surfboarders braving what looked like rather small waves. I pulled out my zoom lens and caught a few shots; when I looked at the pictures on my computer I realized those waves really weren’t that small. I bet that water was far too cold for me!

The time in Sydney was too short and then it was on to Melbourne. They are very different cities. On my first free day in Melbourne I went to the National Gallery of Victoria where the Italian Masterpieces exhibit was on display. It was very impressive, but unfortunately I was not able to appreciate it … I didn’t know it at the time but I was coming down with what I think was the flu and was not feeling well at all. Whatever bug found me made me ill for two days, which was very disappointing since, of course, I got ill on a free day! I recovered quickly enough that I only had to cancel one presentation. I did have one additional free day in Melbourne after the conference where I explored the city. The Royal Botanical Gardens was my destination and, along the way, I visited the Shrine of Remembrance. I took this panoramic photograph of Melbourne from the top of the shrine.

Then it was on to Auckland. I only had one free day in Auckland and I spent the entire day walking around the city – the highlight was Mount Eden. This was discovered entirely by accident, but it was a very pleasant surprise. The 360-degree view of the area was beautiful. Since it is winter there, there were not many fellow tourists. I took the following shot looking across the cone:

Finally, a bit about the conferences (after all, that is why I was on this trip!). Both were rather small conferences with a few hundred people; the one in Melbourne was the larger of the two. Both were Power Systems conferences and had plenty of sessions on POWER, Storage, IBM i, AIX and Linux. I was very pleased by the number of IBM i clients who attended my presentations along with the post-presentation discussions. The IBM Enterprise Conference this fall will be similar, but on a much larger scale.

 

IBM i 7.2 - Batch Model

In the IBM i 7.2 release, there is a new function called “Batch Model”; the 7.2 announcement stated: “The Batch Model has been added, providing the ability to change environment variables, modeling how those changes would impact the batch window.” Batch Model is a utility that can help you understand your batch workloads and can assist in predicting the performance result of hardware changes (processors or disk) or an increasing workload on your batch window.

You will find Batch Model under Sizing within the Performance tasks in Navigator, as the following image shows. You must have the IBM i Performance Tools licensed program product (5770-PT1, option 1) installed in order for these tasks to be available.

Batch model runs over Collection Services data; you identify the timeframe that represents your batch application when creating the batch model. Once the model is created, you may need to calibrate the model; this is needed if the system didn’t create the model as you require. For example, your batch application may consist of several jobs and you must ensure those jobs and linkages (parent/child relationship) are correct.

Once your batch model has been correctly calibrated, you then use the Change Batch Model function to change various configuration components of your batch application. You can change the system model (processor) configuration, the disk configuration and the workload job characteristics (move, copy, delete jobs from the model. Once these changes are made, you analyze your batch model to get the results. Once the analysis is complete, you can investigate the results with the Performance Data Investigator. The Performance Data Investigator has a few ways to look at your modeled results, comparing the measured workload you started with to the results of the modeled workload.

One example is the resource utilization overview, as the following image shows:

You can use Batch Model on Collection Services data from the 6.1 or 7.1 releases. You do need to have a 7.2 partition to access the Navigator interface for Batch Model, but you can save your Collection Services data from 6.1 or 7.1 onto that 7.2 partition and select that older performance data when creating your batch model. This is very handy for sizing exercises if you are planning a HW or SW upgrade. Note: Support for the POWER8 hardware models is not yet available but will be coming soon in a PTF.

The development team that worked on creating Batch Model has provided an article, “How to use the Batch Model performance tool” on developerWorks, where you can find a more in-depth review of this tool.

Some of you may be familiar a tool called Batch/400. Batch/400 was a utility written many years ago as an as-is tool to help predict the impact of changes on a batch application; it had a command called BCHMDL. While I was writing this article, I thought perhaps I might be able to find some historical references for the Batch/400 utility. It turned out to be a bit difficult to find much documentation about it. An Internet search on “Batch/400” revealed “Batch 400 American Stout brewed by Swamp Head Brewery.” An Internet search on “BCHMDL” told me about the British Columbia Hockey League … with a couple results more along the line of what I was really looking for.

 

New IBM i 7.2 TCP/IP Configuration Information Commands

Two new commands have been provided in IBM i 7.2 to assist clients with handling TCP/IP configuration information.

The new Retrieve TCP/IP Information (RTVTCPINF) command will gather related TCP/IP configuration items (DB files, data areas, validation lists, environment variables, IFS files, etc.) for the systems TCP/IP processing as well as supported TCP/IP servers. 

A full system backup of this information is still recommended by using the Save System (SAVSYS) command. The RTVTCPINF command will take a snapshot that ensures all related TCP/IP configuration items are saved together as a single “working set.” This helps to avoid problems where items that must be processed together as a single unit get out of sync, something that can easily happen when related items reside in multiple places on the system. The RTVTCPINF command is automatically run and saved into the QUSRSYS library before the QUSRSYS library is saved, similar to the Save System Information (SAVSYSINF) command.

The Update TCP/IP Information (UPDTCPINF) command is available to restore the selected type of TCP/IP configuration information. This can be used to recover from problems that are reported against some TCP/IP configuration item, or to quickly back out a TCP/IP configuration change to a last known working configuration. It can also be useful to transport a working TCP/IP configuration to another system.

For more details, read the article, “New TCP/IP Configuration Recovery Enhancements.” 

 

About Writing “i Can”

This week marks the 5^th year of “i Can” - five years already?! When I review the long list of blogs that have been published, only a small number have content that’s dated – most of the blogs are as applicable as when they were first written. New readers of this blog might want to review the older articles.

My biggest challenge with the blogs is “What am I going to write about this week?” I still have a long list of topics to write about, particularly now that 7.2 is available … but there’s also the time factor that comes into play. This blog is an extra piece of work I do each week and is not really part of my regular job. Some weeks it’s not a problem to spend a few hours writing, but some weeks I can hardly find a few minutes to spare. Some weeks a guest author is immensely appreciated! Often the topics I pick are simply based upon how much time I have to write. I try hard to write something each week; occasionally I miss a week, but not too often.

This week, I’m going to diverge from the usual technical topics to share a little about my writing (and speaking) background. My English skills were rather poor in high school – both written and verbal. I attribute it to growing up in a meager, rural environment. I’m old enough (although I don’t like to admit it!) that there were no computers at the time. My high school writing projects were always done in long hand (I didn’t even have a typewriter until I went to college); I didn’t know how to think through my sentences prior to writing them down and rewriting was tedious. C’s were a typical grade on written papers. Although my English skills were poor, I was a wiz at math and went to college for a degree in Mathematics and picked up a degree in Computer Science as well.

Then two things happened – I got a job at IBM where I was surrounded by really smart people all the time, and I had access to computers. Being around really smart people helped my English skills improve dramatically – although some people were so smart I couldn’t understand what they were talking about! Although my English skills improved, my speaking and writing style remained somewhat basic – but this has been to my advantage as I’ve often been told that my style makes me easy to understand. Using a computer for writing is a huge benefit – I can easily cut/paste/copy/edit/rewrite – and rewrite I do! I rarely write a sentence correctly the first time.

The experience of going from poor language skills to writing a blog and public speaking has been unexpected, but very exciting. When I was 17, if someone would have told me that I would write often and be comfortable speaking in front of an audience, I would never have believed it. You can overcome handicaps and even let them work to your advantage.