Back To The Future

The IBM 1401 Series was IBM’s first Midrange computer to deploy over 10,000 units.
The 1400 series was replaced by System/360 and IBM System 3, and subsequently the System/32, System/34, System/36, System/38 , AS/400, iSeries, and Power Systems.

IBM PowerHA & Linux Increase Availability and Lower Cost

Client: Distributors of plastic sheet, rod, tube, film and related materials with 60 locations throughout North America.

Issue: The client dramatically increased their Information Availability, reduced cost, reduced risk and reduced complexity.  Their core Oracle JDE ERP software application runs on IBM’s OS/400 operating system on a single 550 machine.  The Disaster Recovery Plan in place was a subscription service which replaces the machine after the time of disaster with similar IBM equipment, load tapes, restore, and rebuild data connectivity to their many remote office locations.  They felt the plan was antiquated and could be improved with more current methods of technology.
 
Solution: The cost to continue running the single system combined with the equipment replacement service turned out to be more expensive than two new IBM Power 7 servers linked together constantly replicating data with IBM’s PowerHA solution. The additional system also allowed them to create a development environment separate from the main production system, which is a “best practices” method. Not ready to put the entire project to rest, their IT Director decided to create some native Linux environments virtually on the Power System in place of purchasing separate physical hardware servers, once again lowering their total cost of ownership.

MSSi: Providing Solutions Today for Yesterday's (and Tomorrow's) Problems

Flash Backup

A few blasts from the past showing what people did back in the day to back up their information

Click to enlarge

Resolve to Optimize your SAP on IBM i Landscape in 2012!

IBM Systems Lab Services and Training is home to the SAP on IBM i Center of Excellence (CoE.) IBM’s team of specialists, skilled in Power Systems, IBM i and SAP NetWeaver, can’t stress enough that it’s within reach to have a well optimized SAP on IBM i solution. If it’s a live production system and administrators are constantly dealing with issues, or if it’s a pre go-live scenario and risk needs to be reduced before moving into production; you and your clients can benefit from the CoE’s SAP on IBM i Health Check service offering. IBM’s assessment provides a custom and detailed analysis of the landscape running on IBM® Power Systems™ technologies. It includes focus areas such as:

IT Strategy 
IT organizational framework and the processes that support it, including data resiliency, periodic maintenance, change control and application availability.

• Power Systems Servers 
Hardware partitioning, allocation and virtualization at the processor, memory, and disk levels.
• Operating System and Database 
Configuration elements that can affect SAP workloads, such as system values, backup and recovery, software currency and memory pool configurations.
• SAP NetWeaver 
Architecture and configuration of SAP NetWeaver and its IBM i level interfaces including kernel, file-system and tuning.

At the assessment conclusion IBM will present an executive summary highlighting concerns and also deliver a comprehensive report of assessment findings, typical best-practices, and recommendations for a more efficient and optimized environment. This in turn becomes a roadmap for gap closure. Leverage years of SAP on IBM i experience and optimize your SAP on IBM i solution in 2012.

Learn more about the SAP on IBM i Health Check

For more information on the SAP on IBM i Center of Excellence

Single Sign On (SSO) Services for IBM i

In a typical customer environment clients are challenged with multiple user registries creating a large administrative challenge. Single Sign On (SSO) Services for the IBM i platform offers administrators and application developers an inexpensive solution for easier management of multiple user registries and user identities. Using Enterprise Identity Mapping (EIM), a system of identity mappings, called associations, is created between various user identities in various user registries. It provides a common interface across platforms to look up relationships between user identities. In a typical services engagement the IBM Lab Services team can provide the following services to support SSO:

• Configure the IBM i operating system to participate with a customer's Windows 2003+ Domain/Active Directory authentication environment.
• Configure one instance of an EIM domain to be used by up to four instances of the IBM i operating system,
• Enable up 5 people to use the password elimination/SSO environment,
• Analyze other critical customer applications for the ability and the effort required to allow it to participate in the password elimination/SSO environment.
• Optionally the customer may purchase the custom EIM Populator utility for use in automating the loading of identity mapping information into EIM