Mobilizing IBM i

When I last wrote, I was at the COMMON Annual Conference. I came away with a long list of topics to discuss so it’s about time I get started. Today’s theme: Mobilizing IBM i. No, not “partition mobility” – that was last time. This time, I’m talking about using mobile devices – such as smartphones and tablets – as the interface device into applications running on IBM i.

If you will pardon the pun, a common theme running through the conference was the use of such devices, and how to make good use of them with IBM i. You could walk around the exposition area and see many vendors showing their capabilities on iPhones, Androids and the like. Particularly exciting were those companies who were making a point of showing how to make RPG applications use such devices. In fact, companies that specialize in helping others improve software assets had great demos and material to show IBM i applications on mobile devices.

This has been a growing trend in the i community over the past couple of years. Most businesses are at least examining the use of mobile devices, and some are mandating that a connected workforce use them. In response, IT shops are figuring out how to use the function IBM i provides, plus additional capabilities of partners and the open-source community, to create interfaces their businesses can use. This is what I call “mobilizing” their applications. (My attempt to use “mobilize” as technical jargon may not catch on, but in my mind, this particular topic deserves its own word, because it is one of the biggest “modernization” trends.)

To drive the mobilizing trend home, consider the following: A fun new session was added to the conference that allowed people to stand up and tell a success story in 5-10 minutes. No prepared presentation was needed – just tell the story. Two of those stories were about adding mobile interfaces to existing RPG applications. In once case, it took a few weeks; in another, a few days. Yes, that’s all!

Using the capabilities of the operating system and the language – and in both instances, building with the Rational tool set – the mobilization took far less time than many people in the community would expect. Yes, the programmers had to learn a few new things, but this was not a multiyear project. To be sure, they did not mobilize every RPG application and interface they have, but they addressed the ones that mattered most to their businesses, and along the way they learned the techniques they can apply elsewhere as the business need arises.

There are some added benefits of this mobilization. First is the smile on IBM i users’ faces when they see their favorite system being used in such a useful, modern way. Another is the thrill IBM i developers get from learning something new that can be applied to make their work applicable, important and cool – all at the same time.

Some mobilizing techniques are only applicable to RPG – for example those that use Rational Open Access: RPG Edition. But others are not. There are often multiple ways to satisfy a requirement, and that’s certainly the case here. It’s one of the reasons people have taken to PHP on IBM i, for example. But since most of the software that has been written for this platform over the years has been written in RPG, it is an important demonstration of the capability and vitality of IBM i as an application platform.

 

Twitter: #ibmi, #commonug #IBMRational @Steve_Will_IBMi

 

PureSystems, Mobility, Friends and Disney

You could pick much worse places to be than Anaheim, California this week.

The COMMON Annual Conference is taking place at the Disneyland Resort. As one would expect from Disney, the location is clean, the employees are friendly and helpful, and the food is very tasty.

But that’s not the reason we’re here, right? OK, right, but it makes a week of technical meetings and presentations that much easier to power through. And that’s what we’ve been doing.

One of the highlights of the conference from my point of view is getting to present new material to the IBM i customer set. I’ve already participated in the IBM i Q&A, and shortly will be giving my “Why IBM i?” presentation for the first of two times this week. Tomorrow, I get to participate in an RPG Open Access session describing the Open Standard for DDS which has been driven by the community. I also have the chance to try out a newly written presentation about IBM i Technology Refreshes, and I will sit down for a chat with the Young i Professionals. Finally, Wednesday I have my biggest day of presenting at the conference, with a repeat of “Why i?” along with “IBM i – Today, Tomorrow & Beyond” which has been extensively reworked this year, and the “IBM i Latest & Greatest” talk which wraps up the conference.

Two of the three technical topics I’ve been discussing most are PureSystems and Live Partition Mobility (LPM) – the topics of my two most recent blogs. I haven’t taken a photo of LPM (though it is being demo-ed) but I do have a couple of pictures of a PureApplication system, which is down in the Expo area.

Here’s the back, with a look at all the pre-cabled components.

And here is a nice photo of the front of the machine.

That’s Patty Clancy with me by the machine. She has been very involved in making all of the magic happen to get the PureFlex server ready for delivery.

The third topic that is coming up most in my discussions is Technology Refreshes. I am happy that I had the opportunity to discuss it with the COMMON Americas Advisory Council before the conference started, so I could make my presentation on TRs better than it would have been. And every time I get asked about TRs, I go back to the charts to make sure I have addressed the question when I give the presentation.

After so many years of participating in this conference, you might think I would know everyone who is here, but I keep meeting new people. The conference is big, and new people come each year. Yes, I have many friends at COMMON now, but I am meeting more people every day. It’s one of the rewarding aspects of face-to-face meetings like this. I am happy to be able to give webcasts, and to write blogs and tweet, but there is something special about developing a relationship with a person over a meal, around an Expo booth, or walking in the warm California sunshine that cannot be replicated online.

I had better stop writing now and prepare for my next session. Whether you are here with me, or reading this from somewhere else in the world, I hope you have a chance to learn something new about IBM i today. And I hope you also have a chance to spend some time with friends. Both pursuits are well worth your time.

 

Twitter: #ibmi, #commonug #PureSystems @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

 

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?