IBM have issued the following bulletin for POWER6 systems with 12X I/O PCIe drawers attached. If you need some help checking/updating your system please get in touch.

System Firmware Recommendation for Power 6 Systems with F/C 5802 or 5877 drawer (in a 19" rack), or F/C 5803 or 5873 drawer (in a 24"rack), attached

"With POWER7  you get twice the performance, use half the power and four times the virtual capacity for the same price as POWER6".  IBM 08 Feb 2010.

We all know the pitch, consolidate your storage, virtualise your servers and share the infrastructure where possible  through use of a blade based solution for the best possible TCO.  Why would anyone do anything else? We are all agreed. OK lets look at some prices to back up our cost busting claims. I have used list prices throughout. Discounts will vary according to customer, vendor and the time of year.

Example 1

Customer has been buying HP-UX servers and storage for one application and IBM AIX servers and storage for another application that often sit together in the same rack. Would it make sense for both systems to use the same storage? Of course it will. OK what's is the price? The HP storage being used is an MSA60 SAS attached with 9 disks....

Asynchronous I/O is handled differently under AIX 6.1.

I have been trying find the substance behind the 'cloud' for a few months now. The following model introduced at a NetApp conference the other week really helped me get the point.

NetApp consider there to be 4 different cloud markets

I'm not sure what "Nodal Scope Speculative Coherence Broadcast" means but I understand 4 threads per core, 1000 partitions per system and up to 256-way SMP system. See the below for lots of information on POWER7
http://bit.ly/2le8t1

According to the below report AIX on POWER is still statistically the best OS for maximum uptime. I think that the comparison of the UNIX based operating systems are fair as these servers are likely to be doing similar jobs. The Windows results however are heavily skewed by the number of security patches that have had to be applied to the frontline servers. Is this a measure of the OS or a reflection on the position of the servers in the application stack/network layer?

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98475/windows-server-the-new-king-of-downtime.html

I would be really interested in a report that compared similar applications (e.g. ERP or database systems) running on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and windows. 
Relative performance comparisons and benchmarking different systems is something that can be done in a finite amount of time with a lab full of kit. But uptime comparisons rely on surveys and user reports over an extended period of time, and never seem to be from well grouped application categories.
If anyone has seen better stats that make more detailed comparison of OS uptime please let me know.

Ever come across this issue? you sort and skip a column with the +1, but don't quite get the result you are after. You might, like me, expect the sorted list to below to start with the "hdb / /dev/hd8" line

#cat /tmp/myfile|sort +1

hdx /admin /dev/hd8
hdb / /dev/hd8
hd11 /home /dev/hd8
hda /usr /dev/hd8
hdc /var /dev/hd8

confusing, but it is because treats everything after the second field as a single sort field. So you have to tell it to stop at the second field by adding "-2"

#cat /tmp/myfile|sort +1 -2

SSD (Solid State Disk) integrated support for IBM's SVC annouced.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/news/press/20091014.html

Seems like the most logical way to make best use of an expensive resource like SSD's  - keep the performance where it counts by handling it in a virtual storage layer.

I hear they are going to get really clever eventually and move the intensive workloads to the SSD's automatically based on load calculations. - v.cool.

Here's a great 2 page cheat sheet for AIX, paste it on your office wall and you'll always have the command you need staring you in the face.

http://www.tablespace.net/quicksheet/aix-quicksheet.pdf