In previous columns, I’ve referred to several changes coming up through the Fedora “experimental test” environment into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). One of these affects the initial RAMdisk construction method used to help in the boot process, incorporating a new tool called Dracut. RHEL 6.3 and its derivatives incorporate Dracut, and it changes the operation of a RHEL-based system start-up in several ways…
Operating Systems
Approximately every two years, IBM introduces a new generation of its mainframe architecture—the System z—and August 2012 marked two years since IBM introduced its mainframe z196 and zEnterprise hybrid architectures. The new mainframe has been dubbed the zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12), and it’s clearly focused on running workloads faster than ever before while extending IBM mainframe strength in reliability, availability, and security. …
Ask people about their IT strategy and you often get a long answer. I’ve looked around a bit, and the definition that appeals to me most is one I found on the CioIndex Website at www.cioindex.com: IT strategy is an iterative process to align IT capability with business requirements. The author adds a few extras to clarify this succinct definition:…
Years ago, we recognized the potential of running Linux on System z to reduce costs and improve the infrastructure of our information systems. Coming from a background of z/OS and Windows, we weren’t necessarily prepared to effectively exploit Linux on System z. Eventually, we generated a hit list we needed to work through for Linux on System z. As the penguin is the Linux mascot, it seemed natural to phrase the checklist in penguin terms:…
For decades, we’ve relied on the cast-iron availability and reliability of the mainframe-centric IT environment to support mission-critical applications in the banking and financial services sector. When something does go wrong, we can generally count on sophisticated processes to back out of trouble. When those supporting processes also fail, as they did recently at the Royal Bank of Scotland group in the U.K., the results can be devastating and demonstrate that true resilience depends on a lot more than the choice of hardware or software…
If algorithm-juggling mathematicians are the rock stars of the 21st century Web, then capacity planners may just be the rock stars of the 21st century data center. Equipped with special tools and methods, the capacity planner helps keep the business running by ensuring critical back-end systems (such as order entry) and customer-facing applications (such as Websites) have the capacity they need to provide good performance…
It’s been a busy month in the VM and Linux world. I just returned from the 2012 VM Workshop at the University of Kentucky, which was held June 27 to June 30. For those of you who haven’t encountered the VM Workshop, it’s a revival of an older conference of the same name and purpose; it’s a totally user-driven, two-and a-half day conference organized by a small, grass-roots group of volunteers who talk about and share their knowledge of VM and Linux in the VM environment. The workshop is held on college campuses during the summer months to keep costs low (can you imagine $17 a night housing? Dorm life at it’s finest!), and delivers the same high-quality content you see at larger conferences in a far more intimate setting. For $100 a person, including meals, you can’t beat the price…
Imagine you’re the CIO of a large bank. Your IT department has developed a new service for the bank’s ATM machines that can bring in additional revenues. Unfortunately, once you deploy the service, it creates a larger-than-expected workload increase on the mainframe and on some distributed components. You discover that the service won’t generate enough revenue to justify the cost of adding capacity to support it. If you had known this before you deployed the service, you could have avoided the problem…
POWER7 is unusually well-suited for demanding enterprise systems such as SAP. It presents opportunities to exploit the strengths of its chip architecture in terms of four-way Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT), partitioning, multi-level cache, and more to achieve high levels of throughput and performance through its inherent parallelism…
A definition for IT strategy recently found on CIO Index (www.cioindex.com) says that it’s an iterative process to align IT capability with business requirements. Key is the alignment of business and IT capability. This assumes that business drives IT and not vice versa…
