Hot News - Administration

Fast Track Your Commands with a Subshell

Anthony English — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:21:00 GMT

One way of leveraging the shell is to run a subshell. That's simply getting a parent process to kick off a child process, wait for the result and do something with it. This tip gives you three examples which I've found handy on the command line. You can probably think of many others.

AIX Product Manager Reveals Method Behind AIX Technology Levels and Service Packs Madness

Chris Maxcer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:39:00 GMT

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?”

How to Understand Big Data in a Flash

Anthony English — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:01:00 GMT

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.

Rough Guide to Built-in AIX Performance Monitoring Tools

Mel Beckman — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:18:00 GMT

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.

Size Up Your Disks in AIX

Anthony English — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:11:00 GMT

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.

How to Assign More Disk to rootvg in AIX

Anthony English — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:53:00 GMT

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.

New Report Pits DB2 9.7 Against Oracle Database 11g for SAP Enterprise Migration

Chris Maxcer — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:29:00 GMT

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.

Workload Simulation Tool Pits POWER Against Commodity Server Architectures

Chris Maxcer — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 03:48:00 GMT

IBM has created a new tool to help reshape the perception of smarter computing, and it uses IBM Power Systems. The online, web-based tool is called the IBM Smarter Computing Workload Simulator, and it shows IT and business leaders how an architecture based on IBM Power Systems can be massively more cost-effective than one that uses commodity servers in a scale-out nightmare architecture strategy.

Bundle a Directory Structure into an ISO Image

Anthony English — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:36:00 GMT

One of the best keep secrets about PowerVM is the ability to create a directory structure in ISO format and share it around using the VIOS Virtual Media Repository. The mkdvd and mkcd commands are better known for creating mksysbs, but you can really use them for any directory structure -- here's how to do it.

Managing Data Centers Much More Than Managing Operating Systems

Chris Maxcer — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 03:20:00 GMT

We’re in for a treat come Thursday when Greg Hintermeister, who happens to be an IBM Master Inventor (coolest title ever), shows us how to manage our Power/AIX environments with IBM Systems Director at our Power IT Pro virtual event.

In the description of his session, he mentions that managing a data center is a lot harder than managing just operating systems -- successful administrators have to manage server hardware, how it's virtualized, how network and storage are integrated, plus the operating systems running the workloads. But Hintermeister will show you how to manage all of these layers by focusing on just five key areas. And what are those areas? I reached out to Hintermeister to find out.