IBM Power Systems Virtual Server: designed to drive performance, security and automation

The more innovative and modernized enterprises become, the more critical the need is for security that doesn’t compromise performance. In the past year, the market has seen large-scale ransomware attacks make reputable businesses suffer from operational shutdowns, compromised data and even lawsuits — all costing millions of dollars. Worse than taking months to recover financially, these attacks can have lasting impacts on customer perception.

Read More: C2010-825: IBM Rational Team Concert V6

End-to-end security continues to be a key aspect of IBM® Power® servers as well as our latest virtualized offering, IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. In this second installment of our blog series about IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, we’re looking at how large and small businesses that are new to Power solutions can benefit from this robust offering.

Multilayered security and uptime

It’s essential to approach your enterprise’s security with a proactive mindset. For many generations, IBM Power Systems has delivered renowned end-to-end security for on-premises environments, an approach that protects each layer of your IT hardware and software stack from both internal and external threats.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server technology is a continuation of our commitment to deliver the security that today’s enterprises need in an ever-demanding online environment. We combined the security and isolation of an on-premises system with a virtualized environment’s reliability and innovation.

IBM Power System Virtual Server is powered by Power S Class and E Class enterprise systems that run IBM PowerVM® server virtualization which gives users the reliability and resilience that they require. We’ve designed this solution to help enterprises remain operational even during storms and disasters thanks to 14 global data centers across 7 countries, with even more locations coming. By incorporating both reliability and resilience into PowerVM® technology, high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) are on a different level of performance for these virtualized machines. This is most clearly illustrated by the findings in the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). If you search its database for vulnerabilities found in the PowerVM server virtualization feature or PowerVM hypervisor, you’ll get zero results. This is the peace of mind we would like to offer to all our clients.

Develop cloud native applications with Red Hat OpenShift

Containerized workloads are changing the way we develop, deploy and manage applications for enterprises. When you combine this innovation with the power of open-source technology like Red Hat OpenShift, you have a solution designed to deliver game-changing results. We’re excited that our clients can provision Red Hat OpenShift clusters on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, offering robust capabilities for application modernization and cloud native development. Utilizing a combination of tools and helper scripts, we have simplified the User Provisioned Install process to help you get a Red Hat OpenShift cluster up and running on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server in as little as a few hours. Red Hat OpenShift on Power supports a rich ecosystem of applications and middleware, including over 15,000 open-source software packages, Red Hat Application Services, IBM Cloud Pak® and ISV applications.

The obvious choice for SAP workloads

For enterprises with SAP workloads, the clock is ticking. Users must migrate to the SAP S/4 HANA system by 2027. When you consider this deadline alongside the ever-growing need to implement a hybrid strategy, it’s essential to go with IBM Power Systems Virtual Server — the only on-premises and off-premises certified Power solution for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver platform workloads, providing a truly hybrid cloud experience end to end.

Additionally, uptime for SAP workloads is a critical consideration. According to the ITIC 2020 survey, 88% of enterprises indicate that unplanned downtime costs USD 300,000 per hour — or USD 4,998 per minute, per server. Now, users are modernizing their SAP applications, provisioning workloads and maximizing uptime with the help of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server.

Smaller HANA t-shirt sizes will be made available on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server later this year, which means there will be over 50 SAP-certified HANA instances. These smaller instances range from 128GB in memory to 768GB with 4 cores. Power is developed to provide the flexibility to address the needs of our customers.

IBM Cloud connection

We are excited to provide an automated way to connect IBM Power Systems Virtual Server instances to IBM Cloud® resources that include classic and VPC networks. Cloud connections create a Direct Link Connect (2.0) instance to connect your IBM Power Systems Virtual Server instances to IBM Cloud resources. The IBM Power Systems Virtual Server 10Gb/s Direct Link Connect 2.0 is designed to enable access to IBM Cloud resources with much higher performance and in a streamlined, user-friendly way.

Multitenant environments

Achieve high levels of performance without wasting resources. Enterprises can run IBM AIX® and IBM i workloads. On the Linux® side of workloads, our clients have the freedom to provision both SAP SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 and 15 OVA boot images and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.1 and 8.2 capabilities. These workloads can run with as little as a quarter of a core, allowing the ability to scale and to run workloads on-premises and off-premises — lowering cost while increasing application modernization.

Versatile payment options

Pay-as-you-go and savings plan subscription options enable you to pay however best fits your enterprise’s needs. For the pay-as-you-go option, enterprises have the flexibility to use data center capacities and resources as needed. Meanwhile, savings plans offer up to a 30% discount for 1-year commitments and up to 45% discounts for 3-year commitments.

Low infrastructure maintenance

Your focus should be on your mission-critical workloads. That’s why IBM takes the task of infrastructure management and maintenance off our clients’ hands. We can also help you achieve modernization and expansion to hybrid cloud with IBM Systems Lab Services and IBM Garage™.

Developing and testing

We know that the availability of non-production configuration is essential for enterprises as they strive toward innovation. The scalability of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server allows our clients to run multiple sandbox environments simultaneously without larger capital budgets. They can also spin logical partitions (LPARs) up and down as needed, and use bursting capabilities during needed periods.

A look at our roadmap

If you’re new to Power servers, there hasn’t been a more robust offering that will drive change for your business — nor a better time to get started. Here are some things that our clients will experience soon.

◉ Updates focused on ISO27k standards for privacy

◉ SOC 2 amenability

◉ Payment Card Industry (PCI) amenability

◉ Virtual private network as a service (VPNaaS)

◉ IBM Cloud credit management

◉ Network automation features

◉ Backup and restore services

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server in action

A client of ours is one of the largest logistics operators in Spain, Portugal and beyond that delivers goods for clients in verticals, including automotive, pharmaceutical, healthcare and electronics. When the COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in demand on the online shopping front, the client needed an environment that allowed for the drastic scalability it was experiencing without putting more stress on its IT team, which was already struggling with bandwidth. With IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, the client achieved this scalability and easily managed the spike in traffic. The best part — our client can now focus on providing great results for its customers across the globe while we manage its infrastructure.

Source: ibm.com

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Going beyond Women’s History Month: Celebrating & empowering women scientists

We kick off Women’s History Month and look forward to celebrating International Women’s Day on March 8. At IBM, we are committing to the theme of “Women Rising,” which has personal and professional resonance for me as a woman in what unfortunately continues to be predominantly male fields: science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). In fact, although women account for half of the US’s college-educated workforce, they only make up 28 percent of the STEM workforce and 13 percent of inventors.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

And while we have made progress in both hiring and representation for global women and underrepresented minorities in the US over the last three years at IBM, we know we can and must do more to ensure women feel empowered to be their authentic selves, to build their skills, and rise to their full potential.

At IBM Research, we value a diverse and inclusive workforce — and we recognize that we need women researchers and scientists more than ever to solve some of world’s greatest challenges. And we are facing an unprecedented magnitude of complex global issues that can threaten our future if left unchecked. For example, climate change, viruses impacting human health and livelihood, threats to our food supply, and widening inequality are just a few. Through IBM’s advancements — many of which were achieved by women — in hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other science fields, we have a unique opportunity to make important contributions to society through our diverse teams.

In order to create a culture and climate within and outside of IBM Research that embraces, supports, and enables successful careers in STEM, we need to work together every day to hire, empower, and grow women in STEM fields.

The data is clear: Diverse teams are more innovative and solve problems faster. As part of my commitment to tackling the issue of empowering women in science, I’m proud to serve as one of the executive sponsors of the IBM Research Diversity & Inclusion Council, which is responsible for ensuring IBM Research is leveraging our innovation and influence to make meaningful changes in support of diversity, inclusion, and racial justice.

To celebrate Women’s History Month, we will spotlight women researchers and scientists from various disciplines, experiences, and tenures at IBM Research and share their insights about their role at IBM, career journeys, inspirations, and guidance for fellow women in STEM.

Source: ibm.com

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Open source: A catalyst for modernization & innovation

With any true progress there needs to be real collaboration. That adage rings true in most disciplines of sciences and business, and it also defines the use of open source for IT development and innovation.  

In our budding digital era, open source platforms allow for the evolutionary, optimal and secure integration of new tech and new applications into existing infrastructure. Open-source collaboration has many proven advantages including greater engagement by developers, which leads to more productivity, flexibility, and cutting-edge innovation at lower costs. It is all about community. A diverse developer ecosystem, combined with the tenets of open source; open licenses, open governance, and open standards are helping guide the quality, performance and modernization of IT. 

Historically, open-source collaboration has led to scalable and more secure applications for computing, especially via Linux (still the choice of most code development), Java, Node.js, and other enterprise platforms. IBM has been a trailblazer when it comes to the use and encouragement of open source. Over the years, IBM has helped create and lead the Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Cloud Foundry, Docker (with Google), Open Stack (infrastructure-as-a-service), OpenWhisk (serverless platform) that have served as vibrant catalysts for the developer community. 

Open-source platforms are also impacting emerging tech practice areas of artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things, deep learning and quantum computing. Looking forward to “Industry 4.0”, IBM has become a force in directing the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (Kubernetes), Hyperledger (blockchain), CODAIT (the Center for Open Source, Data and AI Technology), MAX (Model Asset Exchange for deep learning), MQTT (leading protocol for connecting IoT devices), and Qiskit, an open–source quantum computing framework. The recent acquisition of Red Hat will continue to elevate IBM as a leader in existing and future open-source communities, especially in the areas of microservices and automation. 

Open source as a catalyst for modernization & innovation 

For business, open source is a catalyst for orchestration in an environment where data and applications are often in multiple locations including the cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, and mainframes. Agile open-source platform cocreation enables legacy and new systems to support digital business interface that span the entire IT landscape wherever data and applications may reside. In a nutshell, open source offers the best of on premises to your digital enterprise as a service in the cloud. 

Open-source platforms are made to be inclusive for communities which need shared tools. An open box toolbox can act as an adaptive enabler, allowing IT teams to flourish. An open-source toolbox is fundamental for programmers and IT managers and includes a variety of utilities including technology refreshes, compression algorithms, cryptography libraries, development tools and languages.   

Each year, these toolboxes continue to grow in applications and capabilities stimulated by an active and transparent developer community. This transparency is also helpful to cybersecurity as cocreation in code development can help catch and fix bugs throughout the collaborative process. Developers can analyze every bit of source code that may pose risk and remove it. You have a whole community of eyes watching over security threats that can offer effective cybersecurity tools.   

Over the years, open source has led to seismic improvements in IT planning and decision making. Open source will continue to play an integral role in the future as IT infrastructures are modernized by tomorrow’s investments. Open source is a contributing catalyst for innovation as we address the challenges of the digital era.  

IBM recently hosted am open-source webinar featuring industry experts Bola Rotibi, Research Director at CCS Insight, and Elizabeth Stahl, Distinguished Engineer at IBM Garage. The webinar explores the technologies, processes, and C-Suite budget decisions that are required to build and maintain digital applications, and how they are accelerated through open-source platforms. The webinar also reveals how open-source platforms serve as a value differentiator because they allow for user feedback and rapid integration of improvements. 

Working together, IT teams can deliver less risky products that can often be a competitive advantage to a business or organization. Open-source collaboration removes barriers to innovation, incorporates skill sets and instills trust.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM device paves the way for 5G to reach full potential

5G, the next evolution of wireless communication standards, is already here – but it’s not possible to use it all the time just yet. A portable device and software stack developed by IBM that works with the millimeter-wave band of 5G can change that. The development is a huge step towards enabling 5G-smartphone users to continuously enjoy ultra-high data rates of 1.5 Gbps, and telecommunication service providers to have a much greater overall network throughput.

The IBM Research SDPAR is 20x20cm and weighs just 2kg

To have 5G today, it’s not enough to just buy a 5G-compatible mobile device. Your provider must support the new standard, and you have to be in the parts of those cities that have 5G coverage. And even if you do all that, as soon as you turn a corner, chances are you’ll lose it again – and you’re back to slower 4G.

As coverage expands, 5G-enabled IoT and personal devices will crowd urban spaces. This may result in network congestion due to the interference between devices. To enable multiple connections to coexist, earlier wireless technologies separated connections into two domains: time and frequency.

But millimeter-wave 5G allows separation of wireless links in a third domain – space – enabling the protection, or ‘shading’ of a device from unwanted signals (even those present at the same time and at the same frequency). Making the most out of this third domain is key to realizing the full throughput potential of 5G. This is why we have developed a programmable spatial filter to block all but one of the in-band signals that permeate our wireless space, thus steadily keeping the desired 5G connection.

Looking for a candle amidst bright city lights

Transmitting and receiving radio waves in all directions is how cellular communication has always worked, from 1G of the 1980s to today’s much faster 4G. Cellphones and base stations communicate much as light bulbs provide illumination– radiating all around, with no or limited directional capabilities. A mobile phone transmits wireless signals everywhere, with the cellular base station catching just a fraction of the energy the phone sends. And when the phone is receiving, the base station radiates in all directions too, to your entire neighborhood. The result: you receive just a tiny bit of that radiation, and everyone around you receives unwanted interference. It’s like talking in a crowded bar – there’s no way to communicate with only one person without others around hearing you.

Millimeter-wave 5G technology, though, is different. 5G-enabled devices and towers send energy in a specific direction, like a flashlight directs light. And it’s possible to control the beam electronically, with algorithms pointing it exactly where it needs to point. When receiving, 5G phones should be able to block out unwanted signals, electronically shading the device – a process called nulling.

In 2017, together with Ericsson, we developed award-winning chips and antenna-in-package designs (28-GHz phased array antenna module, an industry first) – 5G phased array hardware that produces beams and shades. Ericsson has since integrated the system in its latest base stations, currently on the market. And Verizon is deploying such directional base stations in the US.

Still, these systems don’t block the unwanted interference perfectly. It’s similar to looking up and shading your face, say, only on the left side. There are typically just a few dozens of different options for beam directions or shading settings to sift through to pick the right one – typically 32 or 64 – not enough to achieve a perfect result. It’s like being in the city at night and looking for a candle far away amidst all the bright lights nearby. You’d have to go through about 10180 options to account for every single shading scenario – more than the number of atoms in the universe.

IBM SDPAR to the rescue

We wanted to enable 5G research to go further. Enter SDPAR – a software defined phased array radio, a small portable device that can emulate a 5G-enabled base station or smartphone for research purposes. It weighs just 2kg, consumes less than 100W and can be powered with a small 12V adapter similar to those used for laptops. The device is easy to reconfigure and able to work with more than 10180 beam settings –moving the beam in thousands of directions in a fraction of a second. It can also evaluate link quality in each of these directions, and automatically choose beam settings that provide good connectivity. It needs only two data connections, for beam control and data input/output, and can be operated from a standard laptop.

We have shown that it’s possible to create a very large number of shading options with ease through a high-level application program interface (API). SDPAR enables the development and real-world evaluation of algorithms to navigate through this vast configuration space. In a matter of seconds, the device determines the best directions to shade, rapidly creating specific shading and brightening of areas.

The device can be used for other tests in future, for example to explore and develop 5G mm-wave beamforming and beam-steering algorithms and hybrid beamforming algorithms (paper # Mo4A-2 in https://rfic-ieee.org/technical-program/technical-sessions?date=2020-06-22), perform 28-GHz over the air testing as well as 28-GHz channel characterization, and develop and test custom digital basebands. And it’s possible to use SDPAR beyond 5G, too – for example, to explore and develop radar algorithms for sensing and imaging (paper # Mo3A-1 in https://rfic-ieee.org/technical-program/technical-sessions?date=2020-06-22).

But looking in one direction and trying to shade everything else out is only one way of configuring the array. We can shade better, in specific directions where bright interferers are located. The same applies to forming a beam. SDPAR can access 10180 different settings for beams and shades, creating complex shading patterns – to navigate this vast catalog of choices, we aim to use machine learning-based algorithms to quickly learn a scene and arrive at the best solution. Such AI-assisted beamforming techniques will enable us to take another leap toward fully harnessing the power of millimeter wave 5G – and allow smartphone users to consistently enjoy extremely fast data rates.

The new algorithms and AI-based techniques for 5G that can be developed with SDPAR are key examples of the emerging era of ‘acting on data at the source’ enabled by IBM’s solutions for 5G and edge computing.

Experiment

We set up an experiment at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center to show how SDPAR and beamforming algorithms can overcome communication impediments in an interference-limited scenario.

SDPAR experimental setup in the IBM Research ThinkLab

We use three SDPARs. one configured as transmitter, another one as a receiver, and a third one as an interferer. First, the interferer was turned off so that we could measure received energy (Fig. 1, left) and link quality (Fig. 1, right) for multiple choices of receiver beam direction.

We later set up the interferer to shine a bright signal towards the receiver, making it difficult for the receiver to decode the transmitted data. We found that if we shade all directions but one, the energy comes primarily from the left of the center where the transmitter is radiating – shown by the region of brighter dots that represent higher received energy in Fig. 1. The link quality in different receiver pointing directions is shown on the right side of Fig. 1. The link was good not only when the receiver was pointed in the direction of the radiating transmitter but also when pointed in other directions; the receiver was able to decode the data from the signal bouncing off the walls and ceiling and reaching the receiver. In this test, we only looked in 70 directions to emulate how the best 5G solutions today might work.

Fig. 1: It is very easy to form a beam indoors when there are no interferers

If we turn on the interferer, the situation changes. We now see energy (Fig. 2, left) coming both from the transmitter located towards the left and from the interferer located towards the right. The interferer is a lot stronger than the transmitter and overpowers the receiver. This is clear when we look at the link quality (Fig. 2, right), which is poor in all 70 directions that the SDPAR was configured to try in this case. Unfortunately, current 5G solutions are still vulnerable to some of the interference challenges they were designed to overcome.

Fig. 2: It is difficult to form a beam in the presence of interferers if we can only select from a small catalog of beam configuration options.

Next, we relied on the large control space of our SDPAR to evaluate the link quality in thousands of directions and try to see if there are some directions that allow us to form a link even in the presence of a strong interferer. The results for more than 20,000 directions are shown in Fig. 3.

On the right side of Fig. 3, one can see a few directions where we are able to achieve good link quality. These directions were completely missed earlier in the search through only 70 catalog options.

Fig. 3: Good beam directions exist if we can search through a larger catalog

Is it possible to find the best direction without having to search through every single option? Our early algorithms look promising (Fig. 4) – we use an optimizer to find a direction, among tens of thousands, that achieves a good link by looking in as few directions as possible.

Fig. 4: Using an optimizer, it is possible to find the best direction to look at without needing to go through all the directions.

Source: ibm.com

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Stay true to customer promises during times of uncertainty

Disruptions are nothing new, but today, supply chains are being stressed in multiple ways at the same time. Supply pressures, logistics limitations, dramatic demand mix changes, and overnight shifts from physical to online retail are just some of the challenges companies are facing. As a supply chain professional, how do you manage concurrent supply- and demand-side pressures, handle seismic shifts in fulfillment, adjust for the broader organization’s ability to execute, and still deliver on customer promises?

Managing through disruption will remain an important topic among supply chain leaders for years to come. Already we are seeing valuable lessons emerge as supply chains are tested to their limits and businesses innovate to push beyond. Here are some early observations and takeaways to help manage disruption today and get ahead of events in the future:

Intelligent, end-to-end visibility is the foundation. Companies are acting quickly. For example, pivoting supply out of affected areas into other lines of supply. However, if raw materials are still being produced in the impacted area, the ability to make enough finished goods is hampered. Intelligent, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain – into each source of supply and demand, including details on customers, orders and inventory – helps you identify potential pain points and develop effective contingency plans. With a deep understanding of how your business runs on a daily basis, you can take advantage of a range of approaches to address multi-layered challenges.

Manufacturing giant Parker Hannifin Corporation rolled out a global order orchestration framework, enabling it to receive, ship and accept returned orders from anywhere. Tight integration with the company’s warehouse management environment ensures a seamless, end-to-end ordering process—from purchase to picking and fulfillment.

Overlay transparency and authenticity in communication with partners. As organizations navigate this digital disruption journey, they are looking for new ways to drive efficiencies and increase resilience, while maintaining trust and transparency with suppliers. Technologies like AI and blockchain can help deliver deeper levels of insight to further understand and mitigate points of impact and contention. For example, these insights can be applied to multiple process optimization and transparency across ecosystems, to discover and quickly connect with alternative sources they trust. In turn, companies are able to continue to meet customer expectations despite unprecedented obstacles, and more effectively balance costs and risks. Introducing flexibility in their trading approach with partners – adjusting payment dates, shipping terms, sales and returns policies, and more – fuels collaboration and keeps supply chains moving forward. Those that have reached far into their supply chain and have a partner-minded business can respond faster to an ever-changing world.

Plan for contingencies so you can still deliver value. Disruptions are inevitable. But getting your customers what they need – when and where they need it – has never been more critical. It is possible to manage through complexity and preserve business continuity, while leaning in to cost optimization. When physical storefronts are no longer a channel to fulfill customer demand, your online presence becomes an integral part of your business – not just for revenue, but meeting customer expectations. Companies that are bold in their business continuity planning are the ones thinking creatively in the face of multi-layered challenges. They adapt to the unimaginable and are prepared to make tradeoffs between costs and risks to maximize responsiveness and keep more customer promises.

Eileen Fisher built a central inventory, order-promising and fulfillment hub — enabling true omnichannel retail capabilities and differentiated customer experiences — allowing them to build a solid foundation to drive growth.

Massive disruption to the supply chain requires a range of approaches. As times of complexity continue, supply chain leaders will keep learning and refining what works to satisfy customer demand. Strong leadership – recognizing the severity and impact of disruption on people’s lives, making bold moves and standing up for your values as a brand – is what customers expect in whatever market you serve. And this, perhaps, is the most important commitment you can make right now.

Source: ibm.com

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Identifying potential storage infrastructure problems

Whenever I talk with infrastructure management teams about concerns and pain points they have with their storage management system, I get these questions:

◈ How can we maintain high availability and avoid system downtime?
◈ Is there any way to proactively identify a potential problem?
◈ How do we ensure maximum storage performance and efficiency?
◈ How do we prepare management for performance or capacity limitations?

To answer these questions and more, I recommend they take a storage infrastructure health assessment.

Many organizations have deployed an infrastructure monitoring platform for their storage health, but a storage health regular assessment is still recommended. That’s because storage infrastructure involves a lot of assets from different parties, which are growing and changing constantly. These changes can cause performance inconsistency, error and even unplanned outages. But with regular storage assessments, these issues can be proactively identified and avoided.

What’s covered in a storage assessment?

A typical storage health assessment includes:

◈ Health check: Validate the functional integrity of related systems
◈ Configuration: Validate whether the current configurations of related systems follow best practices and identify any potential impact to performance or availability
◈ Firmware: Check whether the current firmware is exposed to known issues, vulnerabilities that may cause an incident or security compliance violation
◈ Interoperability: Validate whether various systems and tools in the storage environment are certified to work together
◈ Capacity and performance evaluation: Based on the current peak capacity and performance results, identify performance bottlenecks and evaluate whether the storage system will reach its capacity or performance limit in the near future

What systems are assessed?

A storage health assessment should cover the following systems:

◈ Storage systems such as SAN disk storage, network-attached storage (NAS) gateway/appliance, storage virtualization (for example, SAN Volume Controller), tape library and drives
◈ SAN devices: SAN director, SAN switch, FCIP router
◈ Servers attached to storage: UNIX and x86 servers running various operating systems (only devices and configurations related to storage)

Ready to start your storage health assessment?

IBM Systems Lab Services offers storage infrastructure health assessment services to IBM storage clients to ensure their storage environments are healthy and running according to IBM best practices. We perform storage health assessments in three phases:

The service time (shown at the bottom of the preceding chart) depends on the size of your storage environment. We recommend that you run it at least once per year.

IBM Systems Lab Services also offers a Storage Infrastructure Optimization (SIO) service, which provides tactical and strategic recommendations for improvements to storage infrastructures.

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Get a health check for your SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

Are you confident your SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems are getting optimal performance?

SAP HANA has been available on IBM Power Systems for a few years, and many organizations have migrated to it, bringing numerous advantages such as flexibility, efficient resource utilization, server consolidation and reduction in costs. As a Tailored Data Center Integration (TDI) model, an SAP-certified person is required to install and configure HANA. During deployment, a certified HANA engineer sets up the system following IBM Power server and SAP HANA best practices and runs an SAP HANA Hardware Configuration Check Tool (HWCCT), which ensures the environment has been configured for HANA prerequisites and for hardware performance to meet HANA KPIs.

After deployment, however, organizations will eventually need to make changes to their workloads and infrastructure. The monitoring tools you use might not capture deviations from best practices. Some components of your system might require periodic checks like firmware updates, patches, backups, cluster operations and so on. Hence the need arises for a periodic health check for SAP HANA on Power Systems. Without periodic health checks, you might not be getting the best availability and performance from your systems, and you could be at greater risk for an unplanned outage.

What is an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check?

A health check involves inspecting your system in several key areas, such as:

◈ Ensuring up-to-date software levels
◈ Examining the adequacy of hardware resources
◈ Looking at system tuning based on your current workload pattern
◈ Doing checks for best practices in virtualization
◈ Checking the feasibility of adopting newly released features in the Power server/OS/HANA

Your HANA configuration, error logs, high availability and backup policies are also validated.

Minimum checks that needs to be carried out as a part of an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check

The following chart shows a list of the minimum checks that must be covered as a part of an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check. This is only a high-level list; additional checks based on your results may be needed.

Benefits of an SAP HANA system health check

An SAP HANA on Power Systems health check offers numerous benefits:

◈ Helps you identify any single point of failure and fix it

◈ Helps prepare you for handling unexpected downtime

◈ Demonstrates current hardware utilization and growth trends, thus helping you plan for future growth or release a portion of your hardware for other workloads, thus saving on budget for any additional workloads

◈ Helps you get better support by staying up-to-date with software versions

◈ Helps you better manage your IT budget by knowing growth trends

◈ Helps you know new technologies that could be applied to your environment

◈ Improves productivity, improves your confidence and may reduce the cost of acquiring additional hardware for new workloads

Who can perform an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check?

An SAP HANA on Power Systems health check can be done by anyone who has good knowledge of IBM Power Systems, Linux and HANA. You may do it yourself or engage a team of experienced consultants like IBM Systems Lab Services. Lab Services helps organizations build and optimize SAP HANA solutions with Linux on Power Systems with a tailored data center infrastructure strategy, and health checks are among the many services we offer to help clients optimize their SAP HANA environments.

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The Future of Metals Industry – Mobility of Everything

Today mobile devices touch each individual. You can find an app for almost everything personal. Enterprises have been slow to adopt mobile applications at workplaces. We still see paper log sheets being filled by pen on shop floor of a traditional steel company. At best an operator reports shift wise tonnages, pieces on a computer terminal. Metals industry has been a slow adopter of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and machine integration is primitive. In this blog I provide insights on how mobile apps at workplace combined with Internet of Things (IOT) will transform this centuries old industry.

Initial use of mobile apps was limited to approvals, alerts, reports, associated workflows using mobile devices. Examples include leave approval, purchase approval, shipment alerts, daily production report.

Today we see sales reps are using mobile apps for customer, account information, capture lead, opportunity, view product catalog, quote price, see movement of metals on commodity markets, report order status, invoice payments etc.

In mills use of handhelds is limited to bar code readers typically for warehouse operations.

IOT refers to connect objects (machines; equipment – furnace, mill; products – coils, slabs, plates) over the internet by providing them with a unique identify. These objects can then sense and respond to environment and share data amongst themselves. Recently we have seen the emergence of low cost, low power single chip micro controllers with built in Wi-Fi, giving us the possibility to develop an entire application on a single chip. Enterprise applications have been fast to adopt and integrate with IOT devices. IBM Bluemix and SAP HANA platform device connector are offering developers the possibility to develop custom applications that interact with enterprise applications.

When we combine mobile applications with IOT devices we get an ever connected world. Sensors on mobile (camera, GPS, accelerometer, barometer) can interact with sensors on equipment’s, products (furnace, mill, plates, coils) and provide a seamless data flow between operator, equipment’s and products. Every computer terminal can be replaced with mobile devices where operators can directly record data like quality parameters, send instructions to machines for corrections, confirm yield, execute logistic movements, identify coils / plates, record visual inspection, trigger maintenance orders etc.

In future each machine will be an IOT device with people fulfilling their roles through apps on their mobile devices. Mobile apps will facilitate ways of working for an individual, role and can even act as the MES system integrating to IOT devices, machines with appropriately developed logic. Let us take one use case from plate mill operations.

Fig 1 – Role wise mobile application in plate mill

Fig 2 – Role played by production in-charge

Let us take another example of coil tracking. It has been difficult to deploy RFID tags since steel interferes with RF signals. Using IOT, we can now attach a single chip to coil for accurate identification – improves placement & retrieval in logistics & warehouse applications. A recent use case shown by SAP, included parrot drone being flown for visual inspection for difficult to reach areas and send GPS, sensory data back to enterprise application.

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