Wednesday, July 11, 2012

IBM I 7.1 released, having innovative Live Partition Mobility Feature

By Carrie Haley


The Technology Refresh update that IBM scheduled for the IBM i Operating-system has at last been released. At this point IBM i OS will have a comparable disk partition live migration function as seen on Linux on Power and AIX. There are several other improvements that have been provided together with the Tech Refresh update for the DB2 database which is integrated with IBM i. The DB2 Web Query Application is now repackaged together with other minor changes including XML changes. All these improvements come in pretty handy and an XML training curriculum is helpful for understanding the full capabilities of all those new features. This Refresh that IBM has provided with i 7.1 is fairly just like the technology refreshes it has for AIX OS.

Aim Of The Technology Refresh

The primary objective of the refresh would be to change things which are below the machine interface layer. Meaning providing support for a NIC or a new central processing unit not having needing a qualification cycle or even a major OS release. From a technical perspective, some of the advancements made by IBM will not be part of a technology refresh but instead regular updates for IBM i. Live Partition mobility is one of the key parts of IBM i OS with the PowerVM hypervisor. The software enables you to move a logical partition which can be working on one machine to the other. Considering the numerous parts of IBM i and OS/400 for building individual storage level with respect to main memory space, live migration setup hasn't been very simple. In addition, IBM hadn't used live migration in IBM i until now as it assumed customers did not need it.

XML tweaks

There are several requirements for using the particular Live Partition Mobility element you ought to be provided with when you move forward. The Technology Release update also provides support for solid state drives (SSDs), 4 port ethernet, and also a DAT160 tape drive which is connected using an USB. The XML improvements include a XML table function which will allow users to query the XML data that is used in DB2 for i. The important part is that end users will not have to shred the concerned document into host variables or DB tables. To help make yourself accustomed to the XML improvements, it would be a good idea to look at XML training courses.

Difference in costs

Pricing has been adjusted so that it is now similar to how AIX, IBM i, plus system software programs such as PowerVM are usually priced. Previously you had to pay for a number of different end users and options and this was very challenging for IBM i including IBM vendors. Besides that, IBM has also announced a software Management Toolset for the operating system that is a reaction to requests brought up by COMMON and other major IBM i stores. The DB2 Web Query tool was split into two different packages - standard and enterprise.

Workload Group pricing

The IBM I OS comes with Workload Group pricing which reflects the fact that IBM recognizes the uniqueness of this OS. Now a certain number of CPU cores could be tied to a application that is in a IBM i system. Thus, end users could buy the software portfolio depending upon the number of CPUs which are being utilized in the subsystem. This is often a good choice for those organizations which use a mixture of software applications for their logical partition. Previously they would have had to license this software depending on the total core number even though each of them were not utilized. But with the update releasing on May 18, many organizations would be able to save lots of money.




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