RE: HMC - FSP Upgrade

Does not have to be twinax. Let's say your UPS blows a fuse and shuts down your iSeries and your HMC. The HMC cannot spin up it's Hard Drive. You need to get your iSeries up ASAP to support your business. Now what do you do?
(Yes you have IBM maintenance with 24x7 4hour onsite response for your HMC, right?)

Yes the HMC is independent of the HW it supports and it can support multiple systems. BUT the HMC still is dependent on the FSP. If you are a smaller shop with one iSeries, why do you want that second box to control it if you can web into the FSP and have your Console. I love the HMC and have Two, one in Chicago and one in California. I have 4 production iSeries, one is still a power 4 820 with a twinax console. ( A real IBM 3476 that refuses to die. ) I hate having to drive in to work with that box. I love the HMC but if it was to run inside of the iSeries when it is powered off, as the FSP currently does, why have the additional hardware? Especially since it is dependent on the FSP.


Chris Bipes
Director of Information Services
CrossCheck, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Lukas Beeler
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2010 9:15 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: HMC - FSP Upgrade

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 17:53, Chris Bipes <chris.bipes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In my environment it makes sense as I have one partition running i5/OS
and it is set to auto start when the machine starts. ÂIf the HMC is
down, I can use the twinax console for DST or restricted state saves.

Why would you want to do that? Twinax is finally dead with Power 7
hardware. So that's good. With Power 6 it was mostly-dead, since it
required an expansion unit.

Hopefully someday the HMC will be integrated into the FSP instead of a
separate box. ÂSuch as our Dell and Compaq servers with their DRAC and
ILO cards. Â(Yes the iSeries is much more complex but it is just
software and my cell phone can probably run the HMC software...;-)

The whole point of the HMC is that it's independent from the systems it manages.

But yes, a sensible default console for non-LPARed systems would make
sense. The only option right now is LAN attached Operations Console,
which isn't very good. The ThinConsole idea was very nice, but it died
when HP bought Neoware.