Recent IBM i Redbook Roundup

January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Say what you will about IBM, but it puts out a lot of technical information compared to its peers in the systems business, and always has. The techies at Big Blue and its many business partners expend a great deal of effort to put good technical information about Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform out there to help people better understand, run, and manage their applications and systems.

It can be hard to keep up with it all, so we perused the IBM Redbook library on your behalf and now present to you a roundup of the most recent Redbooks and Redpapers that relate to the IBM i platform and/or the underlying Power Systems or storage hardware.

With the entry and midrange Power10 machines coming out later this year, perhaps in May or June if the rumor mill is correct, it is a good time to review of the Power10 processor and the capabilities of the “Denali” Power E1080 and make your own assessment of the feeds, speeds, slots, watts, and such and start thinking about the Power10 iron you might need to cover your capacity needs for the next five or six years. Along with our coverage, the IBM Power E1080 Technical Overview and Introduction, is a very good place to start. And know that when the new entry and midrange Power10 machines are announced later this year, you can bet your last dollar that IBM will have Redbooks out covering the Power S1021, Power S1022, Power S1024, and Power E1050 servers with one, two, and four sockets, respectively. (Why “50” on the four socket and “80” for a 16-socket? Sometimes, I really don’t understand IBM’s naming conventions.)

Two weeks ago, IBM put out a draft of an upcoming Redbook called High Availability and Disaster Recovery Options for IBM Power Systems: Cloud and On-Premises, which does exactly what the name suggests and covers the resiliency options for IBM i, AIX, and Linux, using both server and storage replication and archiving techniques. Since 80 percent of the Power Systems base does not have HA software and many have dubious DR practices, this is a good place to start if you are thinking of covering your, er, assets in 2022.

For those of you thinking of moving some or all of your IBM i applications to the cloud, then check out the IBM Power Systems Virtual Server Guide for IBM i, which is a draft Redbook that was published on January 4. This one describes IBM’s cloud variant of the Power Systems platform and goes over how to migrate application to Big Blue’s Power cloud, set up networks for applications running on there, set up disaster recovery to the cloud as well as architectural decisions and licensing considerations for running IBM i on the cloud.

For those of you with external storage, and particularly the kind of high-end storage that is used on midrange and high-end machinery, there are a bunch of useful Redbooks. Check out:

IBM DS8900F Performance Best Practices and Monitoring, from December 17, 2021
IBM SAN Volume Controller Best Practices and Performance Guidelines for IBM Spectrum Virtualize Version 8.4.2, from December 9, 2021
IBM FlashSystem Best Practices and Performance Guidelines for IBM Spectrum Virtualize Version 8.4.2, from November 25, 2021
IBM SAN Volume Controller Best Practices and Performance Guidelines, from November 22, 2021
IBM FlashSystem Best Practices and Performance Guidelines, from October 13, 2021

We will keep an eye on the Redbook and Redpaper library to keep you up to date on what is happening as it relates to IBM i.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search