HMC Remote Console Settings (and Remote Control Panel, too !!).    

Frequently we are asked “What are Managed Services?”

In one way this is an easy answer, iTech partners with companies to provide IBM I infrastructure support supplementing the staff employed by the organization. Of course, once we look beyond the sound bite we see more complexity. What this means to our individual customers is as diverse as the teams we partner with.

We are currently managing over 25 customers with about 100 systems being administered. Over 90% of these systems/LPARS are on the customers’ individual hardware with the remainder HA solutions utilizing cloud functionality. Our duties range from PTF application and OS upgrades, issue resolution and monitoring, replication, backups, DR planning and testing, security analysis, large scale project management and IT strategy. It can also drill down to basic tactics such as watching print queues and resolving issues immediately during a busy shipping system. These needs are determined by working closely with companies who use us and creating a team together.

As all IT teams get more resource bound executives need to decide what they need as in-house resource skills versus what is best outsourced. The clearest advantage using iTech as a managed administrator is the very fact customers can time slice some of the most experienced administrators in the industry. The team has collectively over 150 years of experience, and with diverse specialties these are anything but the same year of experience multiple times. As long as I have been here, and as many conversations I have been a part of, I am still amazed at the depth of knowledge our technicians have and their willingness to share with each other and customers.

There is also a great difference in the skill set of our customers’ teams. We have what people would expect; as the employee who performed the administration and operations on the i retires we are engaged to take over their responsibilities. We have seen these companies bring on new talent who becomes highly knowledgeable on the i without the overwhelming responsibility for the mission critical system weighing them down. We also have robust customer teams with advanced knowledge who simply chose to use iTech because it is more cost effective than taking away their star resources for these projects.

So, how do customers come to use iTech? Usually, we are working with them for other projects or have been working with them over time. A new Power system, migration, or maybe replication initiative leads to seeing what our team brings to projects. As customers get to know us partnering feels natural. Working with their account managers we start phase one setting up our administration. During this time we analyze the systems and complexity, organize all projects in play, look at the IT team both IBM i and other, determine who at iTech is the best fit, then think about the industry and other hardware used plus software with an impact. This is not a one-size-fits-all solution to managed services! With all of this information we embark upon On-Boarding. Meeting weekly we put all our practices in place. Decide on meeting schedules, set up monitoring and create reporting and escalation protocols, determine where the system is via PTFs and Health Check and what needs to be addressed. By the end of this time our customers know what we will be handling for them and how and we know who needs to know what in their environment.

There is no single answer to what iTech does as Managed Administration and so many ways similar projects have helped a wide range of customers. In the coming months I am going to look at the services we provide and explain how partnering has saved our customers time, money, and energy.

If you need help managing and administrating your IBM i, then contact iTech Solutions for a discussion on how we can help you.

How much Does a POWER9 Server cost?

By Charles Kaplan

This is an actual customer situation that I worked on this week.  The IBM i customer, who hasn’t upgraded their server in a while, is running an iSeries model 520, 9406-520, with a CPW of 3,300 in the P10 software tier running V7.1.  The customer is currently paying $16,854 per year in maintenance for hardware, software and the V7.1 service extension.  V7.1 is the last OS release supported on Power5 servers.   Let’s see what is would cost the customer to replace this server with a Power9 server.

A Power9 S914 server with these features will cost (list price) $30,050:

• Power9 S914 4-core server with 1 active core, CPW is 13,125
• Solutions Edition
• Rack mounting for customer provided rack
• 32GB memory
• (4) 283GB disk drives with RAID-5 disk protection
• (2) 4-port 1GB Ethernet adapters
• External DVD
• LTO7 Tape Drive, SAS adapter and cable
• IBM i V7.3 DVD’s
• IBM i – 1 processor license (P05) and 25 user licenses
• Transfer of all IBM license programs from the donor server
• IBM PowerVM Enterprise Edition
• IBM Hardware maintenance, 3 years 24×7
• IBM Software maintenance, 3 years, 24×7

It will approximately cost an additional $4,500 to install the new server and perform a system migration to restore the system on the new server and make it operational.  The total cost for the new server, with installation and 3 years of maintenance is $34,550.  If the customer continued to use the model 520 for 3 years the maintenance charges would be $51,723, assuming 5% hardware maintenance increase per year.  This customer can actual save $17,173, over 3 years, by replacing the Power5 server with a Power9 server.  The savings come from:  not having to pay for the V7.1 service extension, going down from the P10 to P05 software tier, and much lower hardware maintenance warranties.

More importantly, the customer will realize these benefits:

• $17,173 maintenance savings over 3 years
• 4x processor performance, 3,300 vs. 13,125
• 8x I/O performance, 1.0 GB/s (PCIe-1) vs. 15.8 GB/s (PCIe-4)
• Faster interactive, batch, backups and IPL’s
• Fully supported OS and ability to go to new releases when available
• More secure environment, many V7.1 cyphers are no longer deemed safe
• PowerVM Enterprise Edition

And I might make a suggestion … use $4,325 of the $17,173 in maintenance savings to replace the spinning (also known as hard disk drives) with solid state drives.  SSD’s are the future of storage and while about 3x the cost of HDD’s, the performance benefits are amazing.

IBM i customers might not understand what PowerVM software provides.  PowerVM is virtualization software for IBM Power servers.  It provides similar function that VMware provides for x86 servers.  PowerVM provides the ability to run multiple instances of IBM i on one server.  Each instance is called a partition.  Even if you do not need to run more than one partition of IBM i, PowerVM can still be a benefit.

To sum things up, this is the time to bring your system up-to-date.  You can realize a much faster, more reliable and safer environment while actually saving money.  And IBM Global Financing is offering a 24-month Zero Interest $1 Buyout lease for Power servers and software.  That means that you take the cost of the server ($30,050) and divide it by 24 to get your monthly payment ($1,252.08).  At the end of the 24-month lease, you own the server.  Please contact me or your iTech Solutions rep for a custom price quote or for any follow up questions.

SQL for IBM i System Admins.

Did you know that DB2 for i can be used to achieve better security, improved systems management and much more?  A growing list of DB2 for i “services” have been provided as alternative ways to access IBM i operating system detail. I had the pleasure to sit down with Scott Forstie from IBM Rochester, who is the DB2 for i Business Architect. Scott has been busy the last few years bringing new functionality into IBM i  via Database Group PTFs, and working diligently adding lots of new DB2 features and functions to 7.2 (Row and Column Access Control is one you probably heard of with 7.2). Temporal Support to IBM i 7.3. There are many new features being introduced into IBM i that are very useful for System Administrators.  We usually don’t associate SQL with IBM i admins, but now the operating system is collecting all this great information in tables, that we can query.

Scott shared an example of one just SQL statement, which I can see a use for at every site.  Excess authority, too many users have *ALLOBJ authority.  With IBM i 7.2 and above, DB2 for i has new capabilities to reduce the need to *ALLOBJ (via QIBM_DB_SECADM function usage) and to limit access to data within rows & columns of a database file. Yet, you still need to know just who has *ALLOBJ authority. The following query returns the full set of users who have *ALLOBJ user special authority, either directly in their profile or indirectly through a group profile.

SELECT AUTHORIZATION_NAME, STATUS, NO_PASSWORD_INDICATOR, PREVIOUS_SIGNON, 
TEXT_DESCRIPTION FROM QSYS2.USER_INFO WHERE SPECIAL_AUTHORITIES LIKE  ‘%*ALLOBJ%’  OR AUTHORIZATION_NAME IN ( SELECT USER_PROFILE_NAME FROM QSYS2.GROUP_PROFILE_ENTRIES WHERE GROUP_PROFILE_NAME IN ( SELECT  AUTHORIZATION_NAME FROM QSYS2.USER_INFO WHERE SPECIAL_AUTHORITIES like ‘%*ALLOBJ%’  )  )  ORDER BY AUTHORIZATION_NAME

WOW, that is some query.  This is the kind of information you need to better manage your machine. To execute this, from a command line type STRSQL, and then copy the SQL statement above into the editor and run it.  You will be impressed with the results and hopefully can better lock down your machine.

If you need help getting up to the latest set of PTFs, help managing your IBM i, or upgrading to the latest release, contact iTech Solutions.

Release levels and PTFs

People are always asking me how often they should be performing PTF maintenance, and when is the right time to upgrade their operating system. I updated this article from last month with the current levels of PTFs. Let’s look at PTFs. First, PTFs are Program Temporary Fixes that are created by IBM to fix a problem that has occurred or to possibly prevent a problem from occurring. In addition, some times PTFs add new functionality, security, or improve performance. Therefore, I am always dumbfounded as to why customers do not perform PTF maintenance on their machine at least quarterly. If IBM has come out with a fix for your disk drives, why do you want to wait for your disk drive to fail with that problem, only to be told that there is a fix for that problem, and if you had applied the PTF beforehand, you would have averted the problem. Therefore, I think a quarterly PTF maintenance strategy is a smart move. Many of our customers are on our quarterly PTF maintenance program, and that provides them with the peace of mind of knowing their system is up to date on PTFs. Below is a table of the major group PTFs for the last few releases. This is what we are installing for our customers on iTech Solutions Quarterly Maintenance program.

The easiest way to check your levels is to issue the command WRKPTFGRP. They should all have a status of installed, and you should be up to the latest for all the above, based upon your release. Now there are more groups than the ones listed above, but these are the general ones that most people require. We can help you know which group PTFs you should be installing on your machine based upon your licensed programs. Here is a nice tidbit. The Cumulative PTF package number is broken down as YDDD, where Y is the year and DDD is the day it was released. Therefore, if we look at the cumulative package for 7.3, the ID is 18023. We can determine that it was created on the 23rd day of 2018, which is January 23, 2018. Look at your machine and this will give you a quick indication of just how far out of date in PTFs you may be.

HMCs

If you have a Hardware Management Console (HMC,) you should be running:

If we have a model listed above in the HMC column that is the highest level of firmware that model of the HMC can be upgraded to.

• Note that release 8.8.x does not support any POWER5 servers.
• Version 7.7.9 is not supported as of 12/30/2016 and cannot be installed on HMC models C03, C04 or CR2.
• If an HMC is used to manage any POWER7 processor based server, the HMC must be a model CR3 or later model rack-mount HMC or C05 or later desk side HMC.
• HMC V8R8.1 is supported on rack-mount models CR5, CR6, CR7 and CR8; and on desktop model C08. These listed models meet or exceed the V8R8.1 minimum memory requirement of 2GB however 4GB is recommended.
• If you want to manage a POWER8 machine, you need to be on at least HMC 8.8.1

Some notes on the new HMC release V8R8.6 that just came out:

• Will be the last release to support POWER6.
• Will be the last release to allow ‘classic’ UI login.
• Will be the last release that supports the model CR5, CR6 and C08.
• The HMC must be at version V8 R8.4.0 or later to be upgraded to HMC V8 R8.6.0. This requirement is enforced during installation.

If you have a Flexible Service Processor (FSP) your firmware should be:

If you need help with upgrading your HMC or FSP just give us a call. We will be happy to perform the function for you or assist you in doing it. Contact Pete Massiello.