IBM i 25: Virtualization

The IBMi25 celebration continues today with the topic Virtualization. Read the vignette on Facebook at bit.ly/ibmi25 after you’ve read today’s post from our guest blogger, Dave Wiseman, Director of IT Infrastructure at Connectria. Dave leads the team that is responsible for engineering and operations of their IBM i systems.

As a managed service provider, we continually push the limits of technology and implement solutions as they become available. One of Connectria's core competencies is our hosting and managing of OS/400, i5/OS and IBM i systems. I have always kind of taken virtualization for granted because so much of it was there from the beginning with IBM i and, honestly, the buzzword virtualization did not even exist. It was just the way we did things. Then as other operating environments started to develop this new fancy virtualization stuff, I was thinking, “Well, glad to see you’re finally catching up to us!” 

Today, we are using a mix of virtualization technologies for supporting IBM i solutions. The most common is to configure a logical partition where the I/O, processor and memory allocated to the partition are dedicated to it. We have also deployed virtualized solutions with IBM i hosting other IBM i partitions, where the host partition serves up disk storage to client partitions. And lastly, we are using VIOS (Virtual I/O Server) to host IBM i client partitions, where VIOS owns the I/O.

VIOS is a core building block for Power Systems hardware and PowerVM virtualization software. With it, we are positioned to utilize new virtualization technology as IBM delivers it. One of those key technologies is rapid deployment of logical partitions, or virtual machines as many would call them. By capturing a golden image, client partitions can be deployed in minutes rather than hours or days. The images that are deployed are consistent from a configuration perspective and are ready to run customer workloads instantly without manual intervention. This same technology is available in the new IBM PureSystems product line for the Power compute nodes.

One of the challenges that we face on any platform we support is multi-tenancy. If maintenance requiring downtime has to be performed on any piece of hardware that is supporting multiple customer workloads, scheduling that maintenance window is a challenge. When IBM announced support for Live Partition Mobility on IBM i, it paved the way for us to venture into the world of multi-tenant cloud environments. We now have the capability to migrate running customer workloads to other Power Systems hardware in our data center, making it easy to perform maintenance activities without disrupting our customers. Prior to this, the majority of our solutions needed to be on hardware that was dedicated to individual customers. This has led to lower cost, better asset utilization and greater flexibility in deploying new customer workloads.

With 25 years of delivering excellent technology solutions centered around virtualization, I can’t wait to see what the next 25 years brings!

 

 

 

How Sharp is Your IBM Business Partner?

This blog entry was written by Alan Seiden, an authority on PHP development with IBM i, who helps his clients achieve best practices and top performance when combining PHP, Zend Framework, IBM i, RPG and DB2. An award-winning speaker, Alan is project manager of Zend's open-source PHP Toolkit for IBM i and owner of Alan Seiden Consulting, Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J. You can reach him at http://www.alanseiden.com, [email protected], or @alanseiden.

At this year's COMMON conference, an IT director told me that his IBM i remained stalled at release 6.1. “I wanted to move to 7.1 two years ago,” he said, “but my business partner didn't know enough about it.”

The same partner had made costly errors, he said, but the IT director couldn't find anyone better in his city. I said, “There are experts all over, and they travel. Why not consider [name of expert]?”

Sound harsh? Not so; it's an IBM Business Partner's mandate to help customers manage IT's speed of change. Rochester provides the tools. IBM i offers unique, industry-leading functionality for reliability, work management, security and performance, available to companies large and small. Ignorance and laziness are the only barriers to wider use of this treasure. 

Does your business partner:

1. Stay up to date by attending COMMON and other conferences?
2. Tell you about the benefits of new releases and encourage you to upgrade, as appropriate?
3. Cultivate relationships with industry experts to ensure that you receive effective advice in all areas of your IT operation?
4. Let you know when a 7.1 Technology Refresh (TR) would make your life easier?
5. Share relevant articles from IBMers and industry experts that could save you money and time?

If not, consider finding a business partner that does. Change today is rapid and constant. Unless we adopt progressive practices, we'll find ourselves forced to use systems that may be heavily promoted, but that are capable of less than IBM i. 

And the IT director attending the COMMON conference? Upon hearing my suggestion, he brightened. “I'm calling [name of expert] tomorrow.”

IBM i at 25 and User Groups

This PowerUp blog entry is written by Pete Massiello of iTech Solutions and past president of COMMON. You can reach Pete at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at @petem59.

Twenty-five years! Wow, it seems like only yesterday that the AS/400 was announced, and in retrospect, it is amazing how far we have actually come. As the world around us has changed, so too has the machine we all first fell in love with. You have probably heard by now that IBM is celebrating the 25th birthday of the platform, and they are introducing 25 topics on Facebook (bit.ly/ibmi25). IBM asked me to talk about the second of those topics: User Groups. 
While the folks in Rochester have done an absolutely fantastic job in keeping the machine up-to-date with all the latest technology, new features, functions and improvements; they have also worked very closely to the entire user community to understand their needs and requirements.

User groups have been a backbone of the AS/400 and now IBM i community over these last 25 years—whether it is a local user group or the national user group COMMON. Go to any user group meeting and you immediately see the camaraderie that exists in this community. The user group members, the platform, the IBMers—they all mesh together. We all seem to know one another, and we value each other’s opinion. Yes, I really mean each other’s opinion. It isn’t a one-way relationship. IBM has been a good partner for the user groups, for COMMON and for the individuals in the community. Perhaps it is like a good marriage, where each side understands one another, they listen to each other, they help one another, and they are there for one another. I believe the rest of IBM is properly envious of the relationship that Rochester has with its users.

Remember, 25 years ago there was no Internet. People relied on user groups to get all their information. Everything was face-to-face meetings. Times have changed, technology has changed, our world around us has changed. Yet, today I am at the COMMON conference in Austin, Texas, with the largest concentration of IBM i users on the planet. As I walk around the conference, inside of sessions, in labs, in the hallways, in the expo, I can feel the excitement. I can feel the buzz. This is a great example of the community, user groups and IBM coming together and working together. There is so much value in coming to a user group meeting. The education, the networking, the interaction with other users—it’s priceless. As a member of the community, I have seen that not only do the individuals learn at these events, but so does IBM. This is why I believe it is a reciprocal relationship, even mutually beneficial relationship. The COMMON America’s Advisory Council (CAAC) is a good example of the relationship between both the users of the community and IBM receiving value from this user-group relationship. If you don’t know, the CAAC works with the community to collect requirements from the users and then prioritizes their importance. Then with the IBM Rochester development team, they work to get these requirements into future releases of IBM i. Over the past few years, more than 64 percent of the community’s requirements have been incorporated into 6.1 and 7.1, with additional requirements scheduled to be included into future releases of IBM i. As you can see, user groups aren’t just about individuals coming to listen to what IBM is saying; yes, there is that, but there is also IBM listening to the needs of the users, and then delivering.

Last year, as president of COMMON during the opening session, I talked about COMMON’s strategic partner, IBM. I know that COMMON couldn’t ask for a better partner, and I hope that IBM feels the same way. Over the years each organization has worked together, supported each other and worked very closely for the benefit of the entire community. I think we as the community are extremely grateful for the work that they have both done for us.

IBM has proven over the years they aren’t just the vendor, but a trusted and valued member of the IBM i community. I am amazed at how fast the first 25 years have passed, and I am looking forward to the next 25 years. Put on your sunglasses because from where I am standing, the future of IBM i looks pretty bright.