Adventures in systems land

One of the things I pushed for when I first joined Power Systems(then System p) was for the IBM redbooks to focus more on software stacks, and to relate how the Power Systems hardware can be exploited to deliver a more extensive, and easier to use and more efficient hardware stack than many scale out solutions.

Scott Vetter, ITSO Austin project lead, who I first worked with back in probably 1992 in Poughkeepsie, and the Austin based ITSO team, including Monte Poppe from our System Test team, who has recently been focusing on SAP configurations, have just published a new IBM Redbook.

The Redbook, Power Systems and SOA Synergy, SG24-7607, is available free for download from the redbooks abstract page here.

The book was written by systems people, and will be useful to systems people. It contains as useful summary and overview of SOA applications, ESB’s, WebSphere etc. as well as some examples of how and what you can use Power Systems for, including things like WPARs in AIX.

In September and October 2007, the IBM Software Group Competitive Project office put on a short series of roadshows in North America and India to show some of the best aspects of IBM Middleware running on Power Systems. It’s not an out and out marketing event, but one designed and presented by some solid technical folks.

They’ve announced the first set of dates for 2008, and the events start next week. Strangely the workshop is listed on the Software/Linux web page but definitely covers AIX and Linux implementations. Here are the dates and locations, hope some of you new to Power or interested in IBM Middleware exploitation on Power can make it along.

It’s not very often these days I get to escape my bunker in IBM Austin. On December the 6th I was asked to speak at the NCOIC Conference and work group in St Petersburg, Florida.

The invitation came in a roundabout way, via Massimo Re Ferre from IBM Italy, and Bob Marcus at SRI. The agenda and speakers looked interesting, and so I decided to take the opportunity and go run some of the current thinking by an influential audience. Speaking right before me was Roger Smith, CTO of the US Army PEO STRI division, and he gave a fascinating talk on warefare simulation and training.

I decided to talk about the evolution of Grid, On Demand, SOA and the Blue Cloud implementation of a Service Oriented Infrastructure. We had a useful discussion on what could be done now, net answer, pretty much all of it. You can’t buy it as a product or solution, but you can build it from either IBM or open standards/source parts now.

What’s made the difference is the ability to build around a common, composite infrastructure for management. Previously we’d tried to build and deliver this everywhere, now it’s much more focussed on platform by platform based implementation. Get it right in one place, move it to another.

I’ve posted the slides on slideshare.net here and I’ve also put the PDF on wordpress for download, here.

Colin Renouf from Lloyds TSB bank in London and one of the more active and vocal AIX Technical Collaboration Center members, just wrote me an email with a proposal for a joint work effort on patterns for SOA. It’s a great idea.

While we are fleshing that out, I thought I’d highlight the fact that Steve and Tommy, with Johns project management, have been solidly delivering on the System p configurations for SOA Entry points.

There are currently five papers and an overview in the series. You can find the launch page here. The papers are

Process:

IBM System p Planning & Configuration Guide for SOA Entry Point — Process
IBM System p Reference Architecture for SOA Entry Point — Process

People:

IBM System p Planning and Configuration Guide for SOA Entry Point — People
IBM System p Reference Architecture for SOA Entry Point — People

Reuse:
IBM System p Reference Architecture for SOA Entry Point – Reuse

One of my first posts in this blog, was on the subject of complexity. James Governor of Redmonk weighed in today on complexity with a trackback post called “What SOA needs to learn from Ruby On Rails“.

I noted, that while our software, and often our systems were complex, that was because our customers are, not because we design them to be complex. Our customers run a vast array of machines, in widely different environments, supporting a broad range of applications. Of course, this is chicken and egg, and is a difficult tightrope for established solutions to walk. We could just remove most of the configuration options and in a generation or two the complexity would have gone, but what about the customers?

Forced into a straightjacket of “our way or the highway”, would you take the later?

It’s easy for the new kid, in this case Ruby on Rails to come out and offer little or no configuration options, side files etc. It doesn’t have to, it has never made a significant change it what or how it does things. The same isn’t true for the old-timers. Comparing SOA to Ruby, is like comparing a transport system to a footpath.

It is a subject important to me though. At the moment I’m carefully trying to marshal the merger of the function in the System p Hardware Management Console with that of IBM Systems Director and Director console. My desire is to make one simple management platform that acts both as the local platform director, managing configuration, hardware and service management etc. and at the same time providing a set of programmable, function services based interfaces to provide both remote access, and remote management.

So, I’m all for simplicity but it has to be thought through. We are doing this with the System p Configurations for SOA Entry Points. The original SOA Entry points were pure software plays divided into five categories, People, Process, Information, Connectivity, and Reuse. We are taking the entry points one step further and mapping the software onto System p removing another layer of complexity by showing how they work, how you can configure them and testing them as a total solution.

You can read the System p Configurations for SOA Entry Points overview here, via FTP

John Lennon once sang “It’s been too long since we took the time, No-one’s to blame, I know time flies so quickly” … “It’ll be just like starting over, starting over”.

Well the wagon has wheels, one of the first visible results of the work I’ve been involved in System p was announced last week via press release.

The “System p Configurations for SOA Entry Points” are a collection of reference architectures, installation, system setup, configuration guides, as well as certification of the Software stack on System p, common integration patterns, best practices for problem prevention, role specific documentation, answers to common operational questions and appropriate customer-use cases. [BonusPak anyone?]

For me the benefit of a virtualised infrastructure to SOA and web services always seemed obvious and not just by virtualising at the middleware layer. Continue reading ‘System p Entry Points for SOA’

A recent discussion on the value of infrastructure virtualization for SOA and SOA based middleware and related security issues was one worth posting on.

It seems to be a commonly held view that we really won’t get true Internet, Web security isolation for servers until we get the next generation of Intel hardware and related software updates from Linux and Microsoft and a protected kernal or nexus.

That overlooks the fact that System p already delivers features that enable hardware isolation that can protect software running in one logical partition from a). being hacked and b). if it is hacked, being able to compromise other partitions either directly or indirectly.[1] Continue reading ‘Security in Power5 LPARs’