We all like reports.  Reports that include graphs and pie charts are even better!  One thing we don't always consider is how fresh the data in we are looking at is?  In a typical Business Intelligence scenario, the data we can access is normally already a day old.  For long-term planning this is probably acceptable, but nowadays is day old data really enough to be competitive?  What if manufacturing efficiency suddenly drops in your factory or your online sales suddenly boom and threaten your stoke levels?  Do you really want to wait until tomorrow to find that our?  SAP don’t think so.

SAP HANA was developed to plug these gaps in reporting (as well as other ventures in the future).  HANA stands for "High performance ANalytic Appliance".  It uses custom In-Memory computing techniques to offer extremely high query performance.  Unlike BWA, HANA supports SQL and MDX giving it far more flexibility.  However, like BWA, HANA is an appliance, meaning it can only be ordered from and installed by specialist partners like Centiq.

In September 2009 IBM announced the availability of SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator on the BladeCenter S. Now, just over 18 months later, IBM no longer approve this solution for new systems. However, all systems already in the field are still supported.

The BladeCenter S solution bought BWA functionality to users at a much lower price point than the BladeCenter H solution. Although it suffered from limited redundancy and scalability the BladeCenter S did prove a popular choice with Centiq customers. To plug the gap left by this mini BladeCenter IBM submitted the System X x3850 X5 server to SAP for qualification. The system has been tested and approved for use with BWA. So, if you are looking for a small BWA solution at a low price point, then maybe you should be considering the IBM System X x3850 X5.

IBM told the world that the new POWER7 range of servers were going to be fast.  We saw their benchmarks and read their white papers.  But I always reserve judgment until somebody else runs their own benchmark on a new piece of hardware.

Earlier this week IBM announced its range of next generation x86 based servers lovingly named eX5.  The eX5 features a new range of Intel Xeon processors, which I'll cover in more detail after the official announcement by Intel on 20/3/2010.  As we are all well aware, IBM do not have exclusive rights to Intel Xeon processors, so these same processors will be springing up in all of IBM's competitors servers over the next few months.  The question is, what are IBM planning to do different, if anything.

I'm currently writing a script which needs to parse a configuration file and for one reason or another I got in to the situation where I wanted awk to use one of my shell variables.  I had never needed to do this before so I searched for a little while before coming across a guide on Tek-Tips that explains three ways of doing this.

http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=1281

Today Google have announced that they are now offering a global public DNS service.   My first reaction was "Great, Google know what they are doing with all things internet so this is bound to be a great service".  My second reaction was "Google own my browser, my searches and now my DNS, just how much more data can they get on me!?

Google claim that their DNS service focuses on speed, security and validity.  In exchange Google will now be able to know what web sites you visit, even if you didn't use Google's search engine to get there.

For some of us it is exciting when a new computer arrives but quickly we realise that we will need to install all our applications again and then copy all our documents to the new system.  This can be a huge task but once this is done the job is still not complete, we still need to erase the data from the old computer.

When working with clustered nodes you will often want to run the same command on all the nodes in the system.  This may be to copy a file, start or stop a daemon or any type of operation.  On Linux there are many distributed shells that are designed to do just this.  But often I find it easier just run the list of nodes in to a for loop to do much the same thing.

A few months ago I posted a blog about using Trunk Failover with the Cisco Gigabit Switch Module for the IBM BladeCenter.  I have been using Trunk Failover with the Linux Ethernet bonding driver for some time now and it is not without pitfalls.

I find myself shrug apathetically to most technology announcements and the BladeCenter S was no exception.  I remember wondering "Why would anyone want a small IBM BladeCenter with built in SAS storage?".  Most of my experience with the IBM BladeCenter is with larger SAP BWA projects where customers want a large number of blades coupled with enterprise performance storage, so the BladeCenter S just didn't seem useful.