Re: Rép. : Question of a Newbie to POWER Systems

Mauricio,

I think you've asked enough questions for a full day consulting gig! However if I read it correctly your email address says you're located in Israel? So I'll toss in a few things from afar!

First Patrick makes a good point (below) about VIOS. A PS700 Plade will do well performance wise but no redundancy available to VIOS. VIOS is needed to work with XIV.

When you say it needs capacity which capacity? Does it need Disk storage, CPU capacity, Memory Capacity? Or is the system simply too slow and so it needs 'An Upgrade' generically? I will tell you that my guess is that the latter is the case and in that case my 'Radar' points with laser focus on those three disk units. As you are not familiar with the IBM i architecture you would not be drawn to this. Even the smallest POWER6 or POWER7 machine can swamp those three drives with I/O, even with 9/10ths of it's processor tied behind it's back! This translates generally to poor, even dismal, performance.

I would urge you to review the numbers on WRKSYSSTS and WRKDSKSTS during some 5 minute intervals while the system is very busy. Those numbers can be used to to help focus on what part of the system is under stress.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

P.S. Also your system is FAR newer than iSeries as you have a POWER System and the operating system on your machine is IBM i.

On 3/28/2011 10:39 AM, Patrick Bingham wrote:

You will need VIOS and it is supported with v6.1.1 or higher. There is some I/O concerns with XIV but with only three drives today, I would assume that XIV should be able to handle your workload. Also, I prefer the non-rack Power hardware to blades. This is because of the limitation of a single VIOS instance on a blade but since you have a blade chassis today, you could possibly look at two blades for redundancy.


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-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Denis Robitaille
Sent: Monday, March 28, 2011 9:10 AM
To: 'midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: Rép. : Question of a Newbie to iSeries

2 - Our preferred storage for the task is the XIV. Anyone with experience with it ?
I understand that a virtual I/O server is required for it. Any comments on this ?

Here, we connect our Iseries to a DS8700. when you say "virtual I/O server", you mean using VIOS. This is an AIX partition on the same physical machine that will provide the connectivity between the Iseries partition and your SAN.



Denis Robitaille
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Mauricio Kanter<mkanter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 2011-03-28 09:36>>>

Good morning list.

I'm a newbie to iSeries ... My experience is with zSeries machines ... The company I work for acquired another company and my boss tasked me to check the gathering of info for a new AS/400 ... I apologize if some parts of my question are nonsense ... I just do not know the machine ... I will appreciate also answers to questions that I did not ask but I should have asked :-) Thank you in advance for your help.

The current situation is:

The AS/400 is a Desk Side 8203 - E4A machine running SS1 version 5.4. It has 8 GB memory and a 5364 processor. The processor is a 1Core 4.2GHz Power 6, Capacity CPW 4300/4300. It contains 3 disks of 140 GB - Which are RAID-1 mirrored totalling 420GB effective. It is backed up by an internal 800/1600 LTO4.

The data center landscape follows:

Our data center is based mostly on zSeries (z/OS and zLinux) and xSeries (virtualized blades running mostly ESX/Windoze and a few Linuxes). The blades are IBM BladeCenter Model H. There are MDSes to connect to the SAN fabric. Currently the Windows+Linux Storage is an XIV and the mainframe storage in a DS8700.

The window-linux backups nowadays are done using TSM with 3592 drives on an IBM-3494. They are going to be soon on a Netbackup solution using Clarion disks and two quantum 7000 robots with LTO5 drives. The new solution will be accesed via the SAN fabric.

The z/OS backups are executed today with a 7720 VTL (dasd-only) and a 3953 library manager and a TS3500 robot with 3592 drives. The VTL and the Library manager are accesed via the SAN fabric over FICON links.


Now the problems:

1 - We must upgrade it ASAP due to capacity and other issues.
We are considering either a blade center based PS700 or a rack mounted 8202-04B. Sounds good ?

2 - Our preferred storage for the task is the XIV. Anyone with experience with it ?
I understand that a virtual I/O server is required for it. Any comments on this ?

3 - Any possibility you see how we can backup using our current above mentioned backup equipment ? Any experience backing up the iSeries disks from a different machine ?

4 - Anyone with experience backing up with a TS3100 ? We are short of MDS ports at this time ... Any comments on how to connect a tape drive directly or library directly to a blade center not via the SAN fabric ?

5 - Any good resource for self-education on iSeries ? Links that it is worthwhile to look at ?

6 - Any comments on the migration to the new machine ?


Thank you.