Getting Hands On With POWER7

Edit: The wiki link no longer works.

Originally posted May 4, 2010 on AIXchange

If you haven’t had a chance yet to work on POWER7 hardware, I thought I’d pass along something I’ve learned from my introduction to the 750 and 770 models: When selecting the DVD device from the HMC, the controller that it’s connected to is identified as a RAID controller. This surprised me the first time that I saw it, so I wanted to let you know.

Some other observations about working with these new boxes:

* On the 770, it was nice to be able to “float” the DVD between partitions without worrying about which set of disks it was connected to. On this system, the DVD is connected to its own controller and doesn’t share that controller with disk drives. On the 750, however, the DVD stays with the internal disks and controller, as is the case with older gear.

* In the case of the split backplane on the 750, when you select the RAID adapter, you’ll get the DVD and the first set of four disks, while on the 770, you just get the DVD. Again, I was working with a split backplane, so I selected the second SAS controller and set of disks by selecting the PCI SAS adapter in the HMC, as is done with POWER6 gear.

* On the 770, I was able to select the SAS adapters as you’d expect, but I was able to select the RAID controller for my DVD independent of the disk controllers. My PCI Ethernet cards appeared as PCI-to-PCI bridge devices, while my Ethernet and fibre adapters that were in an expansion drawer showed up as expected.

* I also found that the HMC code that I was running (V7R7.1.0.1) had a slightly different layout on the bottom of the screen. I know of others who’ve seen this same behavior, but I’d appreciate more input. So please let me know what you’re seeing when you install the new code. Previously when I’ve made a selection in the HMC, I’d see one column at the bottom left of the screen in the task pad. The new HMC code defaulted to three columns, so that took a little getting used to. You can, though, customize the display so it appears in the familiar one-column format. Customizing the number of columns was actually possible with the older HMC code, but most of the customers I deal with just used the default one-column setting.

As I continue to load more of these systems (coming soon: the 780), I’ll let you know what else I find. Again, I’d like to hear from you, so please share your own experiences with POWER7 systems by posting in Comments.

On an unrelated note, I was recently on a call where the topic was in-depth information about the new POWER7 based blades: the PS700, PS701 and PS702. The presenters mentioned that a new wiki site was going live with POWER Blade links. Check it out and let me know if other links should be included.