IBM iSeries Technical Update 2005

IBM iSeries Technical Update was held in Brisbane in mid November

The two day technical training was packed with useful information and attending was certainly time well spent.

With the ever increasing ability of the iSeries to support a large variety of operating systems (like Windows, Linux or AIX) running in partitions on the same machine, most of the presentations focused on how these systems can best be managed and monitored. The presentations also looked at:

• how the storage and backup requirements of the different systems can be integrated into a common storage pool, and
• how the development of the next generation processor allows sophisticated processor sharing across the different platforms.

It is clear that IBM are aiming at a seamless integration of the many different systems a company has to manage nowadays

Examples of this include the introduction of its new Power 5 processor and the enhanced capabilities to create and manage logical partitions for the iSeries operating system via the Hardware Management Console (HMC), or through its Virtualisation Engine for smaller iSeries servers without HMC to control Linux partitions.

In conjunction with enhanced DB2 facilities and the potential to utilize some of the external storage solutions to suit Linux and AIX data storage requirements as well, IBM offers a variety of hardware and software combinations for the iSeries, and at the same time tries to provide ease of use through its development of highly sophisticated system management tools.

Amongst the many important hardware planning statements by IBM there were some which we think might be of particular interest:

i5/OS has short term and mid term support plans for SDLC, SNA, X.25 and Frame Relay

• IBM plans to continue providing i5/OS support for SDLC, SNA, X.25 and Frame Relay in V5R3 and in the release after V5R3
• IBM recommends that customers start moving off these protocols prior to IBM’s eventual withdrawal of support
• i5/OS releases introduced after mid-2007 may not include support for these protocols
• Even though i5/OS will support these protocols for some time, the new WAN and LAN adapters announced starting in 2005 will not support SDLC, SNA, X.25 and Frame Relay protocols
• Either OEM protocol converters or earlier generation IBM WAN and LAN adapters may have to be obtained by the customer if these protocols are important to the customer
• For example, you may not be able to continue to purchase new WAN and LAN adapters from IBM that would allow you to attach 5250 remote controllers such as a 5294, 5394, 5494 which use the SDLC or X.25 protocol

Continued i5/OS support of Token Ring Network (TRN) adapters

• Mid 2006 withdraw from marketing the sale of new TRN adapters
• Other platforms have already stopped selling TRN adapters
• Technology essentially already replaced by Ethernet

Continued i5/OS support of twinax controller

• Mid 2006 withdraw from marketing the sale of new twinax controllers
• Twinax devices supported via existing controllers or OEM protocol converter boxes
• No known impact to application programs using the 5250 data stream

Larger load source required for i5/OS or Licensed Machine Code (LMC)/Licensed Internal Code (LIC) following V5R3M0

• Minimum i5/OS load source space growing to 17GB (currently 8GB)
• Load source must be on one disk drive. Therefore load source disk drive must be 17GB or larger
• Suggest customers move to a 17GB or larger load source disk drive today to ease future software upgrades
• Potential disk space and performance planning considerations if the customer has 8GB drives and adds 35GB drives to same ASP