The new rPerf document from IBM released on the 17th of Aug contains some big rperf numbers for the POWER7 795, and due to the dramatic leap in processor core count (64 on a 595, to 256 on a 795) they have paid some thought to the way they display the rPerf figures.

I was interviewed the other day by an IT journalist who was posing some interesting questions on the effect of virtualisation on IT staff - do they need to have different skills? do we need more or less of them? usual kind of questions. But as we discussed the ramifications of increasing the level of virtualisation one area I was keen to press home was the need for really good communication and shared objectives between the IT staff that understand the technology and the accountants who count the cost.

POWER7 in the smaller cheaper rack mount options have been announced making the new POWER7  chipset available to the SME market as of Sept. I'm looking forward to doing some costing against x86 solutions in this zone, the prices look competitive, especially if you take OS and virtualisation software into account.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/08/17/ibm_power7_low_high/page2.html 

So the World Cup came and went.  England’s underwhelming campaign was greeted by loud media recriminations. These centred on an ambivalent showing by overpaid and lazy stars or key players jaded after a long domestic season. Worse, wrong formations were blamed for stifling the team’s creativity. It was also being suggested that the team were not being consulted on tactics by a well-resourced but seemingly autocratic team coach. The disciplinarian regime ignored the building of team spirit and failed to deliver the goods in unique and trying tournament conditions. For his part, the manager failed. There is some truth in these criticisms, but perhaps we also need to see the team’s difficulties as part of a wider picture of gradual English football decline with the squeezing out of home-grown players in the top teams and failure to absorb new coaching skills and ideas in the way that more successful countries seem to do.

On the hunt for some tools for managing POWER boxes running multiple (AIX and linux ) LPAR's ? You will find this link useful:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/WikiPtype/Performance+Other+Tools

Is the position of CIO ever the stepping-stone to greater things?

The appointment of Philip Clarke, Tesco’s CIO and head of international development, to the CEO’s job at our most successful retailer last week seems to be the highest profile CIO step up to the top job that anyone in our industry can remember.  So, is this the start of a new age of IT directors truly changing board-level thinking and starting to lead companies?  Or are CIOs forever destined to be the Cinderella of UK business?

So the government has taken its first steps on cutting back public expenditure to address Britain's budget deficit with £6.2 million in savings announced last week.

Perhaps inevitably, the headlines focused on large IT firms such as Capita being deprived of some of their major projects (such as the Child Trust Funds programme) as a long shadow starts to fall on private sector IT providers - but there could be some positives to draw from this situation.

Recently I have seen some strange behaviour with the later levels of firmware (around version 7.10 upwards) whereby a failed drive that has reconstructed to the hot spare does not automatically copyback when a new drive is inserted. The disk appears in storage manager as Optimal and Unassigned and logs indicate it has been picked up without error.

In later versions of IBM Storage Manager (versions 10.10 and up). There is a new function included "Replace Drives" that allows the user to select whether to replace a failed drive with any unassigned drive in the subsystem or the hot spare drive. It should be possible use this function to initiate the copyback. In some cases, I have seen that when the option "Replace Drives" is selected, the message is displayed "no drives available for replacement", despite the fact that unassigned drives are clearly available. In my investigations I have checked that the new drive was inserted correctly (leaving 30 seconds between the pull of the old and insertion of the new). I have seen that the new disk is of exactly the same type and brand and running the same level of firmware and that there do not appear to be any obvious problems within the event log,

The resolution so far has been simply to wait (even up to 2 days), and eventually, the "Replace Drives" option will recognise the available drive(s). So far, the only indication of what has occurred between these times has been that the regular media scan (scrub) has kicked off. Note that if a Storage Subsystem password is set, this is required to authorise the copyback.


The "Replace Drives" function does not appear to be clearly documented in the new Storage Manager client Redbooks so I will blog regards what I know of this function later.

The new Coalition government is quite a novelty for most of us and so unsurprisingly there is plenty of media coverage.  There is a continuing fascination with two political rivals with clear differences co-operating to ensure a workable government.  Whatever labels this approach is given, the parties have, to a degree, been forced to collaborate to avoid the workings of government grinding to a halt and causing a wider financial crisis.

Collaboration between partners who may have differences of viewpoint seems commonplace in many other aspects of government:  many city and county councils are routinely managed by different parties where there is no overall control.  Observers say that in these situations, local politicians tend to bury their differences, address the issues in the interests of their constituents, and develop a coherent programme of activity. 

With today's news, IBM is expanding its portfolio and furthering its investments in information and analytics with: