Category: Neil Tardy article archives

By Neil Tardy

Originally published by TechChannel May 24, 2021

IBM’s Carl Burnett, Nigel Griffiths, Petra Bührer, Maria Ward and Ann Detjen on how AIX has helped clients navigate the pandemic, and what’s next in the AIX roadmap

From the beginning, IBM AIX was touted for its reliability. That this characteristic has endured was never more evident than over the past year, as IBM clients relied upon the AIX OS and Power Systems hardware to manage their operations through a challenging time.

IBM’s Carl Burnett, Distinguished Engineer, Power Systems software development, believes that AIX/Power platform proved itself in 2020.

“The pandemic stressed customer systems more than ever before. AIX and Power held up to those impacts and stresses, and IBM was there to help,” he says. “We had customers whose transactions grew significantly—some were pushed to their limits—but we helped them grow their system capacity.”

Within IBM’s Lab Services division, this assistance included the establishment of a no-charge services program to assist Power Systems clients that were adversely impacted by the pandemic. Lab Services also enhanced its Power to Cloud rewards program so it could quickly fulfill requests from clients worldwide.

“Many AIX customers—particularly in healthcare, banking and retail—saw their application performance demands spike dramatically as customers shifted to online transactions,” says IBM’s Ann Detjen, worldwide Power Systems practice leader, IBM Lab Services for Systems. “One client said the acceleration of online shopping was like ‘having Black Friday every day.’ “

Lab Services itself transitioned to online delivery of its services last year. “Like everyone in the industry, the switch from on-site to online services delivery posed some initial challenges as far as providing VPN access, for example,” Detjen adds. “But today Lab Services still delivers most of our engagements online. While we expect significant recovery in on-site services, in many cases, our clients are expressing a preference for a new, hybrid model of services delivery.”

Nigel Griffiths, advanced technology support, IBM Power Systems U.K., acknowledged that over the last year, clients learned just how important it is to maintain their systems and keep current on not just hardware and software, but system and adapter firmware as well as commonly deployed tools like the Virtual Input/Output Server (VIOS). “It’s very hard telling customers that the fixes that would have addressed their issue have been in every updated version over the past few years,” he says. Luckily, IBM was able to assist many clients as they embraced dynamic LPAR and other key capabilities to grow their system resources and keep their systems up to date.

Elaborating upon these points, Petra Bührer, global sales leader, IBM Power Systems Germany, notes that numerous clients took advantage of IBM’s Capacity on Demand (COD) and Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 offerings. COD allows clients to activate processor cores and memory units when additional resources are needed on their system. Enterprise Pools provides enhanced multi-system resource sharing and by-the-minute consumption of on-premises compute resources to clients that deploy and manage a private cloud infrastructure.

“AIX on Power clients were able to drive outstanding system utilizations—greater than 90% in some cases. They were also able to manage their environments remotely,” Bührer says. “The reliability and resiliency of their systems gave our clients peace of mind.”

Burnett adds: “During the pandemic our clients have gained an even greater appreciation for AIX and Power. I believe we’ve strengthened our customer loyalty.”

Looking Ahead: The AIX Roadmap 

While helping AIX clients keep their businesses running during the pandemic, IBM also continued to deliver new and enhanced functionality. AIX 7.2 Technology Level (TL) 5 came out in November 2020. Key features include multi-queue N-Port IP virtualization (NPIV) and support for logical volume encryption.

What Burnett describes as NPIV scaling is the result of IBM transforming the control channel that existed between system LPARs and VIOS into a multi-lane architecture. He explains that this change, coupled with path reduction work and improvements in the serialization model, enable a much higher degree of I/O concurrency throughout the NPIV stack. Logical volume encryption provides an easier to administer model for encryption of data at rest based in AIX by leveraging in-core crypto hardware acceleration available in POWER8/9. Multiple key management and storage options are included. The IBM Power Systems Community blog has an introduction to this topic. See IBM’s AIX documentation for an in-depth look.

Though these developments are significant for AIX clients, we now know that much more lies ahead. 2021 began with recognition of AIX’s 35 anniversary and the acknowledgment that IBM’s AIX roadmap now extends into the 2030s. Then in February, IBM released a statement of direction noting its intent to deliver a new version of the OS, AIX 7.3, by the end of this year. 

POWER10 and AIX 7.3 Capabilities 

With still months to go before an official announcement, IBM is unsurprisingly tight-lipped about specifics. However, key pieces of the puzzle are already in place.

“While we’re not yet at a point where we can start discussing it publicly, I would say that 7.3 is the AIX version where we look forward to exploiting and optimizing the features of the next generation of the Power platform based on the POWER10 chip that was introduced last year at the Hot Chips conference,” Burnett says.

IBM has also said it intends to maximize interoperability for clients as they transition to the new OS and new processors. POWER10 is expected to support each of the AIX 7 releases: 7.3, 7.2 and 7.1, while AIX 7.3 is expected to support POWER8, POWER9 and POWER10.

Of course, POWER10 and AIX 7.3 are the most enticing combination. “There are interesting new instructions in POWER10 we are looking to exploit,” Burnett says. “We’re also doing work in the area of continuous computing, including a major new capability around our Live Update technology on the platform. There are interesting capabilities around security and hybrid cloud. We’re exploring deep integration opportunities to get the most from POWER10 with AIX 7.3.”

New and enhanced capabilities in the area of machine learning and inferencing are also expected with the coming release. IBM’s Maria Ward, AIX Product Manager, Power Systems, says that AIX developers and product management teams are working with their IBM counterparts in AI development to determine how to further exploit AI workloads. 

“AIX runs some of the worlds’ most mission-critical, data-intensive workloads for businesses around the world. Businesses today are looking for ways to infuse AI directly into their workstream and leverage their vast amounts of data to unlock valuable insights using AI,” notes Ward. “By colocating transactional workloads running on AIX with existing AI models, business can gain valuable insights from the data they already have residing on their Power Systems without having to move the data off of the system.”

Finally, IBM plans to offer an open beta to allow registered clients to test AIX 7.3 on their existing Power Systems hardware. Ward says that the initial 7.3 images will be available about 8-10 weeks prior to the GA. Details about registration are forthcoming. For more information or to request access, send an email to mrward@us.ibm.com.  

‘Among the Most Reliable and Highly Available OSes in the Industry’ 

At its inception in 1986, AIX was a UNIX workstation-based OS—a desk-side system, in essence—that ran on a single uni-processor computer. Today, AIX runs on enterprise grade hardware that powers critical workloads for major businesses and organizations around the world.

That’s hardly news, but that remarkable transformation is still worth noting. And IBM and AIX clients can look forward to more.

“AIX is among the most reliable and highly available operating systems in the industry,” says Burnett. “Our clients trust AIX and know that it will keep their workloads up and running, and available.”

by Neil Tardy

Originally published by TechChannel February 3, 2020

Mobile development expert Alan Seiden and IBMer Brad Bentley explain how the OS is well-suited for the task.

Cellphones and mobile devices, long a part of our daily lives, have also become essential in the world of business. That’s certainly the case for Alan Seiden.

As head of Seiden Group, a consulting firm specializing in application development and modernization on the IBM i platform, Seiden manages his business from his phone. When traveling to client sites and user events, he checks and updates his schedule using Trello task tracking software. And with Slack, the popular collaborative messaging platform, Seiden and his employees all keep in constant contact.

“The expense tracker in Slack allows you to create receipts by taking photos from your phone. The features our phones have—starting with the camera—allow you to capture data on the spot,” he says.

“We’re all so busy; our to-do lists are too big already,” Seiden adds. “That’s what makes the mobile experience so important. We can handle business even when we’re not at our desks.”

No longer the exclusive domain of retailers, the mobile experience—or mobility, if you prefer—now extends far beyond everyday consumerism. And increasingly, IBM i clients recognize that you don’t need to have something to sell online to benefit from mobile technologies.

Designing the User Experience

Consider a company executive responsible for approving purchase orders. Not that long ago, this person needed a desktop computer or perhaps an emulator to review and sign off on these documents. If she was traveling, the paperwork had to wait. But now, with a phone and access to the company’s mobile application—which provides automated notifications for each new purchase order—there’s no paper. Approvals can be given with the swipe of a thumb, or even registered through a voice application. Everything can be handled from the shop floor or from the road.

Or imagine a supply company that develops its own mobile application. The app connects to the company’s IBM i system, which tracks the status of all orders. With information about deliveries—as well as pending orders and back orders—at his fingertips, the shop manager knows when he needs to schedule contractors to unload incoming cargo.

“So much of the time, we think of mobility as external, as this interface that only our customers interact with,” says Brad Bentley, senior management consultant with IBM Systems Lab Services. “But now we’re seeing people putting their business intelligence, their analytics, into mobility applications for internal use. There’s real impact on utilizations for these producers.”

Seiden believes that understanding the user base is the first step in developing web apps. Identifying your primary users—be they customers or employees—and how they’ll access your application—be it from mobile devices, desktops or some mix of both—is essential to designing a suitable user experience.

Naturally, a company website will be accessed from all devices: phones, tablets and desktops. “Responsive” is the term that describes optimizing the online experience for all users. “It’s very important that all web apps should, at minimum, be responsive,” says Seiden. Responsive apps change their appearance according to the form factor, so they look good and function well on all common device sizes.

The other common option is to develop a native application. These applications are optimized specifically for mobile devices and downloadable from online app stores. Some native apps are widely used (e.g., Google Maps), but some companies develop and maintain their own native apps. “These apps take advantage of all of the features of the phone,” Seiden says. “That takes specialized knowledge, but a native application can potentially provide an enhanced experience.”

Something to Build on or Learn From

While the process of developing and running mobile applications is certainly involved, IBM i businesses can take heart in a couple of factors. One is that you’ve kind of been here before. Over the past several years, many enterprises have launched and completed web enablement projects. Web enablement can be viewed as a precursor to going mobile—and, depending on your experience, it can be something to build on or learn from.

“Mobility is an extension of web enablement,” Bentley says. “And the beauty of it is now, if you re-evaluate and re-architect things the right way, you can post both of these solutions through a single instance and have them perform very well from your server infrastructure.”

The other factor is that IBM i is very well-suited for this task. The platform is designed to connect data and business logic by supporting the latest languages, frameworks and patterns. Through the universal language of web services, and specifically, the implementation of RESTful service layers, mobile applications can interact with IBM i securely while providing scalability. Open-source tools like Bootstrap, which is designed to enhance responsiveness in mobile apps, offer even greater flexibility.

This seems like an appropriate point to note that the “i” does indeed stand for “integration.” “As a mobile developer, I don’t really care what’s on the back end or what I’m talking to. I care about how I talk to it,” says Bentley. “With IBM i hosting the data and serving as the master repository for everything, you can do everything you need to do. IBM i is an amazing platform for mobile applications.” 

By Neil Tardy

Originally published by TechChannel January 2, 2020

Kris Whitney, product architect for Db2 Mirror for i, shares how the continuous availability database solution was created in response to client feedback.

For years, IBM i clients have been asking the company to develop new products or provide enhanced capabilities. There’s even a defined process for these asks with the Request for Enhancement (RFE) program. Partnering with clients to deliver advanced solutions that address complex business problems has been a hallmark of the platform since its inception.

In 2015, Kris Whitney and other members of the IBM i high availability (HA) team were approached by some long-time clients about their need for a continuous availability solution. However, this was no ordinary request. 

It started with a few individual queries, but eventually grew into a chorus of voices. “These were some very important clients, and they all had similar requirements,” says Whitney. “They had calculated their business loss, even for planned maintenance, and concluded that they couldn’t be down at any point.” The message was that simple: These clients literally didn’t have a moment to spare for downtime.

“They wanted a commitment,” he adds. “We’d heard that conversation for a long time about 24-7 and getting to active-active, but now they needed continuous availability to remain on the platform.”

IBM’s commitment resulted in IBM Db2* Mirror for i, a licensed program product (LPP) unveiled in April 2019. The announcement was the culmination of four years of internal development and extensive collaboration with IBM i clients spanning the finance, insurance, pharmaceutical and retail industries worldwide.

This solution’s reception has been impressive. For various reasons—starting with their satisfaction in the overall quality of the products themselves—IBM i clients are generally reluctant to move to new releases or investigate new offerings. But interest in Db2 Mirror has been noticeable since GA in June.

“Yes, our adoption rate is traditionally slow, but we have people who are more motivated than I’ve seen in the past,” says Whitney. “They’re getting into their test environments and trying to get there faster.”

‘Can I Have it in 6 Months?’

In contrast, just getting there was the priority during development. As the product architect for Db2 Mirror, Whitney said that everyone involved understood the challenges of this undertaking.

“We knew full well going in that this was going to be one of those projects that don’t come around very often. As far as the size and the amount of impacts throughout the entire OS, it touched a lot of places and a lot of developers had to be involved,” he says.

While the project followed established IBM design guidelines and principles, participating clients had more opportunities to provide feedback and the ability to do so earlier in the process. That meant more demos and more reviews. Even during the initial stages, a group of stakeholders reviewed the requirements and weighed in on high-level design ideas. An early alpha program, set up more than a year prior to release, allowed participants to access a cloud-like environment to get hands-on with the solution in progress.

“Naturally, there was joking around: ‘Can I have it in six months?’ ” Whitney recalls. “But our clients understood the enormity of this and how it would change the way they wanted to run their IBM i business.”

At this point, clients were running their businesses with PowerHA* System Mirror for IBM i. As a solution that provides storage-based clustering capabilities for HA environments, PowerHA high availability “gets you almost all the way” to continuous availability, as Whitney puts it. Of course, PowerHA high availability continues to fulfill the needs of a substantial number of IBM i clients.

While Db2 Mirror has some broad similarities to PowerHA—both are LPPs that are tightly integrated with the OS, and they share some clustering code—they’re distinct solutions. To accomplish what it does, Db2 Mirror takes advantage of advancements in connectivity technology. Whitney and Mark Anderson, formerly the chief Db2 for i database architect (he retired in 2019), came up with a design for replicating databases using low latency high speed RDMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE: pronounced “rocky”) adapters.

“That was really the turning point, when RoCE technology became a little bit more mainstream,” says Whitney. “These adapters became more common.”

Using RoCE to connect two IBM i instances—which are most likely but not necessarily two physical servers—the two databases are presented as a single database that’s accessible from both systems simultaneously. This is known as an active-active configuration.

From the beginning this capability was specifically sought by some clients.

“In parts of Asia, there are banking requirements. Whether these are formal laws, legislation that will be enacted, or merely suggestions from governments, it’s a little fuzzy. But these clients were very interested in achieving an active-active solution,” says Whitney. “We heard it from multiple companies in that region of the world, so we knew it was critical.”

Another key component of Db2 Mirror is its UI, which is browser-based and runs directly on IBM i. It’s stylistically similar to the well-regarded GUIs present in IBM Storwize* solutions.

Whitney and GUI architect Tim Rowe arrived at the design choice. “Early on, I challenged Tim to do something different from what we’ve done in the past. It’s very straight forward. After some basic training, people get it,” he says. “It’s probably one of our best GUI products to date.”

A Surprising Response 

For the most part, Whitney says the development process for Db2 Mirror was typical. Everyone put in long nights and worked their share of weekends, but the solution came together roughly on schedule and largely as planned.

Since the release, however, some unexpected discoveries have been made. Fortunately, they all fall into the category of pleasant surprises. For starters, Db2 Mirror has proven to be a fit for environments of all sizes. It makes sense when you think of an industry like finance. Small community banks are subject to the same regulations as the big ones, so their availability requirements are just as stringent.

“It’s applicable to a broader set of clients than we ever expected,” says Whitney. “We have—I’ll call it one of the smallest IBM i clients in the world. I mean it’s the smallest machine you can buy with a single core. They’re very interested.”

Clients have also found an additional use for Db2 Mirror: to move data. Say you’re looking to replicate a set of libraries that your users frequently query. By replicating a second system and maintaining the synchronous connection, that set of users—and the system overhead they generate—can be directed to the new node, while the original can be dedicated to production workloads.

“That’s completely valid,” says Whitney, “even if it wasn’t what we originally intended to solve.”

To better serve the entire client base, IBM is working to provide the capability to utilize internal storage with Db2 Mirror. In October, IBM issued a statement of direction pointing to support for direct attached internal storage in the near future. The company had previously made known its intent to support non-volatile memory express (NVMe) storage adapters.

As you can see, the work of bringing continuous availability to the IBM i platform is ongoing.

“I don’t see revolutionary changes to the product, but there are little things we can do to make it easier for applications to take advantage of active-active as well as enhancements we can make to the types of objects we replicate,” Whitney says. “We’re continuing a strong roadmap for a few years—and a lot of that, again, is based on what we’re hearing from people using the product.” 

By Neil Tardy

Originally published by TechChannel September 3 2019

Jesse Gorzinski, business architect for open source on IBM i, explains the rise of the open-source revolution.

If you ask Jesse Gorzinski how he knows that open source on IBM i is a big deal, he simply pulls up his planner. 

“Even two years ago it was an occasional thing; I’d go talk about open source at two, maybe three conferences a year,” he says. “By May of this year, I was booked up for all of 2019 in terms of travel and engagement.”

As the business architect for open source on IBM i, Gorzinski has searched company-wide for helping hands because it’s no longer possible for him or members of his core team to respond to every inquiry or accept every request to speak at a user group meeting or IBM client briefing.

“We have folks who aren’t historically IBM i people that we’ve brought in to cover some of these topics because so many IBM i clients are approaching us and wanting to learn about this stuff.

“It’s fun,” he adds, “but it’s also overwhelming.”

That’s quite an admission for Gorzinski, who obviously loves
to talk about open source and everything it enables IBM i clients to do.

“Open source has always been something I was very excited and passionate about,” says Gorzinski, who initially worked in finance on the then iSeries platform before joining IBM in 2006. “It’s really thrilling right now, bringing this technology to IBM i.”

Of course, open-source options have provided added value for IBM i clients for years. The Apache web server has been around about as long as there’s been a public internet. The Zend PHP server debuted back in 2006, while support for the Node.js JavaScript* runtime and Python programming language arrived in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

“I started getting directly involved with our new open-source mission in 2014,” says Gorzinski. “That was when we were starting to look at Node.js and even then, we recognized that this was something we needed to be ahead of the game on.”

While all of these innovations were significant, the interest and excitement around open source on IBM i still feels new. Over the past 12-18 months, it seems everything has come together to make open source a vehicle for doing innovative, but also solidly business-critical, tasks.

Lining Up the Pieces

Within IBM i development, 2018 was an eventful year. With a Jenkins-based continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment (CI/CD) system in place, the number of open-source packages available for IBM i soared. Gorzinski estimates nearly 300 such packages are currently available. Availability of the newest long-term support (LTS) version of Node.js was one of numerous changes and enhancements in that area.

“When we switched to the new toolset, a lot of solutions just started working,” says Gorzinski. “Things that were previously unfathomable quickly became standard, or easily doable.”

Perhaps most significant was the transition to RPM, which represented a radical departure from the initial foray into IBM-delivered open source, OPS. Created in 2014, this licensed program (5733-OPS, Open Source for IBM i) was a well-intentioned initiative to provide IBM i users with a familiar operating environment. While that had its benefits, Gorzinski admits there were also problems for both the user base and IBM’s development team.

“We made it familiar to those who knew classic IBM i administration,” he says, “but a lot of people had difficulty finding OPS on our downloads site. And because we were doing PTF installs, sometimes these downloads would pull in dependencies upon dependencies of other PTFs. You could spend an afternoon downloading gigabytes of PTFs if your system wasn’t up to date.”

With a lack of automation on the development side, providing timely updates was its own challenge for IBM.

“It was a lot of work for us as well, and that didn’t serve anybody,” says Gorzinski. “RPM allows us to do automated testing and automated deployment. Now we can meet client needs much more efficiently.”

With its roots in Red Hat Linux* (at its inception, “RPM” stood for “Red Hat Package Manager,” though it’s now a redundant acronym), RPM has essentially replaced OPS, which is in deprecation and set for end of life in December. While IBM relies on RPM to deliver open-source software, it, of course, offers benefits to IBM i clients as well.

Most simply, RPM is designed to simplify the process of downloading and deploying open-source software. An RPM is typically used with the YUM package manager. YUM—which can be traced to another Linux variant known as Yellow Dog Linux—offers an extra administrative layer to handle things like dependency management. If, for example, you want to install the popular open-source web server NGINX, YUM will issue a prompt, letting you know that NGINX requires SSL libraries to function. Then you can download those libraries.

“There’s a reason we invested in YUM; it provides the simplification,” Gorzinski says. “It automatically figures out all those dependencies. Fetch them all and it will install them in the right order in just minutes or even seconds. YUM allows administrators to do point and click or single command installs. Say you want to install Active MQ: just click ‘install.’ If you want to check for updates, if you want to update packages, it’s a single command. That’s the value of YUM.”

The Open-Source on IBM i Revolution Begins

Gorzinski believes that with RPM and YUM as the centerpieces, IBM’s technology is now aligned with the open-source world. “Folks are coming to us after looking at their two-year roadmap or whatever planning cycle they use and saying: ‘In two years, we want to get here.’ And I’m able to say: ‘We already have that technology for you.’ We’re seeing more engagements where we have what people are looking for, even before they realize they need it,” he says. 

At the same time, Gorzinski can scan download numbers and other internal data and find himself surprised by the rate of adoption and the breadth of things IBM i clients are already accomplishing with open source.

“In some cases, we were delivering technology thinking it’d power production workloads a couple of years from now, only to find customers deploying it just a few months later,” he says. “I was expecting a slow but steady rise in open-source software being deployed on the platform, but this is an explosion.”

There’s a reason Gorzinski calls it the open-source revolution. The changes clients are seeing are groundbreaking—and even chaotic. With that in mind, he has advice for IBM i clients, whether you’re just getting started or are already open source-savvy.

Understand everything you can do with RPMs. For instance, classic IBM i admins may not know about RPM repositories. This software, downloadable from IBM, provides even greater flexibility. As a self-contained directory, an RPM repository can be cloned or backed up, or hosted internally. By creating snapshots, distinct repositories can serve development, QA and production environments. In addition, a repository can be used to sync 20 or more LPARs to the same versions of open-source software.

Understand that open source is enterprise-ready—and IBM is ready to provide support. Even as open source goes mainstream, a misconception persists about what Gorzinski calls the enterprise-readiness of open-source software. However, open-source solutions are secure, functional and reliable. On top of that, support is available from IBM Technology Support Services (TSS) division.

“A lot of people think open source is a use-at-your-own-risk-type of thing, but you can pay for top-notch support from IBM,” says Gorzinski. “The TSS offering is there to help you through your whole software development lifecycle.”

Recognize that open source meets practical business needs. Start with something that remains an ongoing need for many enterprises: application modernization. Open source and IBM i can get you moving forward. Node.js is uniquely suited to provide web-based interfaces while handling the latest JavaScript frameworks, all while delivering fast response times and reducing memory usage.

Or think of the industries that have long relied on the IBM i: manufacturing, retail, healthcare, logistics. It turns out that open source has much to offer in these areas. Gorzinski points to Internet of Things (IoT) software, which basically describes an array of internet-connected physical devices and appliances such as thermostats and heart monitors.

“IBM i now, thanks to open source, has IoT capabilities,” he says. “In the industries where IBM i has a strong footprint, the use of IoT will continue to grow, and IBM i will be the main storage point for all of that data.”

Embracing Open Source

The open-source revolution is indeed upon us—and the revolution is ongoing. Early this year, IBM demoed the IBM Q System One, which is designed to be the first quantum computing system for commercial use. With IBM i capable of integrating with the IBM Q* Experience to run computations or emulate the technology, quantum’s potential uses in areas ranging from chemistry to finance is already capturing the imaginations of the user base.

“One day, I tweeted about doing quantum on IBM i, and that tweet generated more direct messages than anything I’ve ever tweeted,” Gorzinski says. “People are coming out of the woodwork and saying ‘Yes! We want to hear more.’”