December 2013 Newsletter

iTech Solutions was at the North Pole last month doing a few upgrades. We upgraded Santa’s POWER5 520, from V5R4M5 to 7.1 Technology Refresh7, and then his Power7 720 from 6.1 to 7.1 TR7 as well.  Santa Claus called iTech Solutions because he wanted someone with experience to do the operating system upgrades and he wanted the upgrades done right.

We all know this is a busy time at the North Pole, and Santa couldn’t afford for any application issues after the upgrade.  Santa used the iTech Solutions Upgrade Assurance program, and iTech Solutions brought one of their machines up to the North Pole. We restored the XMAS-01 partition running V5R4 to the iTech machine and upgraded that to 7.1.  We were able to test all of Santa’s applications on IBM i 7.1 and when the big guy himself signed off that everything was working fine on the iTech machine, we upgraded Santa’s machine XMAS-01. There was no worry if his applications would or wouldn’t work. We pre-tested everything on the iTech Solutions loaner machine. Who else would Santa call for an IBM i upgrade, but iTech Solutions?

You know it is just amazing how big Santa’s database is on his IBM i.  Santa runs a standard ERP package to deal with all the vendors that the Elves purchase their raw goods inventory for making the toys. He has a cool application that figures out how to reverse pack the sleigh on Christmas eve so that the elves load the presents onto the sleigh in the reverse order that Santa delivers them.   He had a Websphere Reindeer health application, and a JAVA Weather application to know where the sleigh would catch some air turbulence. He said most of the Elves run green screen applications, as they require a lot of speed.  We talked about extending some of those applications with a GUI interface using RPG Open Access, and how that might help him extend some RPG applications with some iPhone & iPad Air devices he was looking at installing. Mobile applications are a must from the sleigh, and Santa needs to keep in constant communications with the North Pole on Dec 24th.  In fact, iTech Solutions recently did some performance tuning on Santa’s machines at the North Pole.  The previous business partner didn’t understand logical partitions, and had the processors dedicated to the partitions.  So, on Christmas eve when the production partition XMAS-01 was running at 100%, the other partitions on the machine were completely idle.  We set up shared processors and uncapped partitions on his machine, and the XMAS-01 partition was now running at 350%, and the work was flying through.  Santa, said he was able to save an upgrade and spend that money on additional toys for girls and boys throughout the world, all because in his words “iTech Solutions understands how to leverage my investment in IBM i to get the most out of the machine.  No one else has the knowledge to get my machine running as iTech Solutions”.  Thanks for the kind words, Santa.

There were these two customer files, both of which had billions of records in them.  One file was called Naughty and the other one called Nice.  Santa told me that he had many people move from the naughty list to the nice list this year, but that now the naughty file still had a lot of deleted records in it.  This was causing a problem as the batch “Coal” job was taking a real long time to run, and it was messing up the second-shift elves in coal fabrication.  Santa said with a belly laugh, we tried to reorganize the file, but it’s always locked. The elves are always working.  iTech Solutions showed Santa how to use the Reorganize While Active function in IBM i so that Santa didn’t require exclusive access during the reorganization process. That allowed the naughty file to be reorganized and all the deleted records to be removed.  The batch “Coal” job ran in half the time afterwards. I think that means more coal for naughty boys and girls?

Santa was telling me that we still needed better performance on his Power7 720 that we installed last year.  He was saying that as the population of the world increases, the sizes of his files were just getting huge.  Some of his jobs were running all night. We looked at the performance of the machine, and discovered the amount of I/O on that machine was extremely high.  So, we installed some new PCIe 5913 Large Cache disk controllers with some solid state drives. Wow, did that do the trick.  Those same jobs which were so I/O intensive ran very quickly with the new large cache disk controllers and the solid state drives.  This really made a difference in the performance of the machine, and allowed the mapping software which determines the route that Santa is to take on Christmas eve, stopping at every house to drop off the presents to run in just an hour compared to days.  If your system seems to not be running how you want, why not have iTech Solutions come in and do a performance review?

Our next performance issue had to do with some ODBC jobs & Queries that the Elves had created out in the shop.  The elves have created more queries than you can imagine. Every time they ran these ODBC jobs and Queries, the system would just grind to a halt.  iTech Solutions ran the Index Advisor, and determined that a couple of indexes (logical files) needed to be created over the toy file. With a mouse click, we created the required logical files for Santa. Now those jobs the elves were running are done in a snap. Santa said “It was like a new machine, having iTech Solutions come in for the day and investigate the system”. We performed our standard Health Check. Perhaps this is something you might want to put on your list for Christmas or even next year?

During my visit, I was in the office next to the computer room at the North Pole, when out in the computer room there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter.

Away from my Windows7 laptop I flew like a flash,

Tore up the ramp and threw open the sash.

And what to my wondering eyes did appear,

but a miniature sleigh filled with hundreds of tapes, and eight tiny reindeer;

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,

I knew in a moment it must be Saint Nick.

I said “Santa, what is going on?”  Santa said “We are all going to do our DR test, and we had to get all the tapes for our IBM i restoration”.  I said, “Santa we spoke about this during the summer, why not just replicate to one of our IBM I (Power Systems) machines at iTech Solutions, and then not only would you have a Hot site available all the time, if you had a real disaster your DR machine would be immediately available and you wouldn’t be stumbling with all these tapes.   Remember we were talking about this whole Cloud Computing concept with the Easter Bunny, and you thought he had been drinking a little too much carrot juice.”  Cloud Computing is not computers in the clouds, it’s a service that iTech Solutions offers that allows you to host your machines at our locations or even just use one of our machines and carve out a virtual LPAR.  Santa said, “he had a lot on his mind at the time we had that discussion in August, as with all these new Power7 machines being produced it was creating supply problems for the XBox 360 which uses a Power processor.” We agreed to look into hosting his replication with iTech Solutions in January. I said to Santa, you know while we are at it, you should really look at either our Cloud based backup solution, where you back your data directly up to our cloud, fully encrytped and compressed.  Your backup is immediately available off-site, and you can rest assured that the data is fully encrypted.  In addition, we can always put a virtual backup appliance in the data center, and perform backups to the Virtual Tape Library so that you aren’t handing tapes.  Santa was interested in further looking at both solutions.   Are you still playing with tapes? Think about that for the new year.

Next, I asked Santa if there was anything else on his list?  He said, “there were three more things.  First, he said, Mrs. Claus gets so annoyed at him every month when he has to go into the office to do a Full System Backup”.  I looked at Santa, and said to him, “I have been asking you for years to get rid of that Twin-ax Console and upgrade to Operations LAN Console.  You kept telling me that you liked Twin-ax.  I said last quarter when we were doing the iTech Solutions quarterly PTF maintenance to bring all your PTFs up to date, that I could hardly see that screen, as that twin-ax device is so old. If you had Operations LAN console, you, iTech Solutions, or any of the elves could remotely connect from home via VPN right to the console, and do the backup without having to come into the office”.  iTech Solutions installed and configured Operations LAN Console, so that Santa could spend a little more quality time with Mrs. Claus.  Mrs. Claus was so happy she told Santa to put everyone at iTech Solutions on the Nice list, no matter what.  Whew, that was certainly lucky for me.

Secondly, he said “from time to time the elves are developing new modules and programs and it would be nice if he could get them off the production XMAS01 machine”.  I said, “well that isn’t a problem, lets create a virtual partition on that new Power7 plus machine, and put the development environment on that partition”.  He asked, how could we do that?  I said, “remember when we brought that new Power7 machine in, now that we are running IBM i 7.1 we can do more virtualization and create virtual partitions”.  Santa said to me, “but I only have one disk controller on XMAS01”. I said, “no problem, we are going to virtualize the disks and DVD drive, and then share the SAS tape drive between partitions. Since we have an HMC, we won’t need any additional hardware on your Power6 520, or your new Power7 720”. I told him that iTech Solutions can do this in one day for him. Santa was like a little kid at Christmas, and said “well that is another thing I want from iTech Solutions”.

Thirdly, he asked if there was anything we could do, as IBM had assigned him twelve different customer numbers for the North Pole, each reindeer had their own IBM customer number, and a few of the elves had IBM customer numbers. Santa said, “it was confusing when we have to call IBM, and they ask us for a customer number, I don’t know which one to give him.”  I laughed, and said “sorry, even iTech Solutions can’t help untangle IBM customer numbers”.  I think you could hear his belly laugh all the way down at the South pole.

We were just about at the end of the day, and it was so quiet in the computer room not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.  Santa whispered in my ear, that he was so happy to have iTech Solutions on his team, that he was making sure we were all on the Nice list.  I in turn asked Santa, “What are the people on the Naughty List getting for Christmas besides Coal?”.  He said, “because they have been so bad, I am giving them Windows Servers.  After all the crashes, problems, and headaches they will have with those Windows Servers, they will think twice about being naughty again.”  I shook my head in agreement.

Then Santa said, “you know the last time you were here you told me that I should backup the system and move my tapes to the South Pole.  Well, I am a little concerned that if we lost our tapes, then everyone would know who is on the Naughty and Nice list.”  I said, not to worry, you have two options.  We can do software encryption now that you are on 6.1 with BRMS, or we can do Hardware Encryption with that fancy new Fibre attached LTO-5 tape drive we installed last spring on the 720, and the SAS attached LTO-4 tape drive on the new 720.  I could see Santa was very happy as there was a sparkle in his eye. We planned to do the hardware based Tape Encryption using TKLM in February.  If your tapes are not encrypted what would happen if you lost a tape?  Who would have your data?  Let iTech Solutions Encrypt your tapes.

Now, Santa was starting to look a little tired and I asked him what the problem was?  He said, he needs a little more help managing and operating his IBM i.  He said it was so much better now that iTech Solutions is handling his PTFs and i5/OS upgrades, but he just wishes that iTech Solutions could help him with things like Technical Support, remote support, or keep a set of “eyes and ears” on his systems, as well as question and answers.  I told him that for a fixed monthly fee, he could have telephone access to iTech Solution’s Certified Expert Engineers 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, including holidays like Christmas. Santa said “I thought Santa was the only person who works on Christmas”.  Support includes assistance, consultation advice on technical matters, how-to questions for the elves, and that we could also use tools like VPN to remotely access his machine to determine the problem and work with his staff to resolve the issue. Santa said, that was what he wanted for Christmas.  If Santa wants iTech Solutions for his support, then shouldn’t you?

So, I am glad to report that iTech Solutions is what Santa wants for Christmas.