For a peek inside IBM’s thinking around how the company rolls out AIX fixes like Technology Levels and Service Packs, Jay Kruemcke, AIX product manager at IBM for Power Systems, posted an explanation on his
The secret product manager blog site.
Kruemcke says he’s been getting a few questions about the fix and update process, such as, “Why does a new Service Pack come out at the same time as a new Technology Level?”
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If you're wondering what all the “Big Data” buzz is all about, you have to read IBM’s Big Data FlashBook. It's a great explanation about cost-effective solutions to the three Vs that are the characteristics of big data: volume, variety, and velocity.
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AIX has more than the usual suite of performance monitoring tools. You'll find common Unix tools, such as fuser, ps, sar, tcpdump, and the like, as well as many AIX-unique utilities. Here is a rough guide to the tools you should keep near to hand when trouble requires shooting.
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IBM released its 4Q11 financial report last week, and while the company beat Wall Street’s expectations, its Systems & Technology segment offered up mixed results: Power Systems are still throwing devastating upper cuts to HP and Oracle/Sun while the mainframe business took a nap.
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If your AIX environment has disks of different sizes it can be difficult to keep track of just how big each one is. Of course, you can use the lspv command, but only for the Physical Volumes (disks) that are members of active Volume Groups (VGs). If you want to check the size of a disk even if it's not in a VG, use the getconf command.
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IBM has posted a pair of excellent new Power Systems-focused videos. One is about Watson tech for use in other industries than game shows, and the other is about Ersi migrating to IBM Power Systems for PowerVM for SAP applications. Both are worth the few minutes it takes to watch them. Get the sandwich ready and hit "Play."
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IBM has created an area of its site where it does a friendly job of highlighting its special offers and promotions, and this is the key: friendly. IBM’s announcement letters and Business Partner communications were all accurate and specific, but you really had to pay attention to figure out what was available and the basics for how it all worked.
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This tip shows you how to grow the existing disk in rootvg without any outage on the AIX logical partition. It's important to have enough spare disk in rootvg -- the AIX OS volume group -- as it contains critical file systems such as /, /usr, /var and /tmp. rootvg can also be used for paging space and system dump devices, as well as user file systems, so it's helpful to give it some head room. You may just need the extra disk space one day.
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I just saw a new management brief report available from IBM,
“Value Proposition for IBM DB2 9.7: Cost/Benefit Case for SAP Enterprise Migrations,” and wow, it paints a pretty picture in favor of IBM and DB2 over the competition, specifically Oracle Database 11g.
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IBM has announced details of five strategic agreements in the Kenyan financial services sector, with Power Systems among the technology being used to support growth, increase profitability, and launch new services such as mobile and internet banking.
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