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.

I heard some interesting stats from the AIX-6 beta thats going on at the moment. Apparently there have been some 3,500 license accepts and more than 6,500 downloads. Given the normal beta only gets to less than 100 of our core accounts, this one should generate some interesting useage statistics and hopefully make the final product more useable, more quickly.

If you have not seen the details, they can be found on this page. But in summary some excellent new function is included:

• Workload Partitions
  A new, software based, virtualization approach that complements the existing IBM System Logical Partitions by reducing the number of operating system images that have to be managed when consolidating workloads.
• Role Based Access Control
  Provides improved security and manageability by allowing administrators to grant authorization for management of specific AIX resources to users other than root by associating those resources with a role that is then associated with a particular system user.
• AIX Security Expert enhancements
  The AIX Security Expert has been enhanced to provide an option to store security templates directly in a Lightweight Directory Protocol (LDAP) directory—simplifying implementation of a consistent security across an entire enterprise.
• Name Resolver Caching Daemon
  The Name Resolver Caching Daemon is a new facility to cache host lookup information locally which can improve the performance of applications that access this type of information multiple times.
• probevue dynamic tracing
  probevue is a new dynamic tracing tool that can simplify debugging complex system or application code. This tool allows a developer or system administrator to dynamically insert trace breakpoints in existing code without having to recompile the code.
• System Director Console for AIX
  This new facility provides direct access to the System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) in a Web browser. The System Director Console for AIX is included with AIX 6 and does not require any other Web server or other software.

AIX-6 beta runs on POWER6™, POWER5™, POWER4™ or PPC970 processors including the IBM System p™, IBM System p5™, IBM eServer™ p5, IBM eServer pSeries® server product lines, as well as IBM BladeCenter® JS21 blades and IntelliStation® POWER™ workstations.

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’