August 2010

iTech Solutions because IBM i (AS/400, iSeries) didn't come with aSystem Administrator.

In This Issue

Do you have the right stufffor a restore?

New Power7 machines

Hold Job Scheduler entries

Upcoming Events

Release levels and PTFs

Quick Links More About Us

Upcoming Events

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Last Month's

Newsletter

More About Us

Common ConnectArticle on V6R1

How to make your

Transition to IBM i

Greetings! Some of you have told me that when itcomes to dealing with upgrades, PTFs, anddoing Systems Management you wouldrather be like Steven Slater, the flightattendant on JetBlue: and just grab twobeers, pull the rip-cord, and bolt down theemergency slide to get away from it all.They said he had unruly passengers. Perhaps you have unruly users, have out-of-control performance issues, are unsure whatyou are really backing up, require PTFs, orare looking at an insurmountable V6R1upgrade? We can keep you on the plane andaway from the slide! This is why you shouldcall iTech Solutions when you have aproblem on your IBM i (AS/400, iSeries, i5). We can help you with those annoyingupgrades, handling your PTFs by getting youon our quarterly maintenance program,performing a health-check, remoteadministration, remote hosting, replication,or anything else in the Systems Managementor Administration area. We have theexperience, the expertise, and theknowledge to help you. Well we have certainly been busy with newmachine installs, i5/OS upgrades, and other

Transition to IBM i6.1 easier

projects this summer. Although, I have tosay everyone at iTech Solutions hasmanaged to take some vacation time thissummer to refresh our batteries. We hopeyou have as well. August was a huge monthfor IBM i, with the refresh of the productline with low end Power7 servers. Let metell you there is nothing low-end aboutthese servers, and I will share some insightinto these announcements from the time Ispent at Power Systems Champions class inAustin, Texas a few weeks ago. We have packed a lot of information intothis newsletter, and I hope that you findthis useful. This issue of our newsletter hasfive articles. In the first, I want to discusssome things you need to think about forrestoring your system. The second article ison the August 17th Power7 announcements.The third article is Hold Job ScheduleEntries. The fourth article is a list ofupcoming events we will be participatingin. The last article is for your referencewith updated PTF information. iTech Solutions can help you improveperformance, upgrade i5/OS, performsecurity audits, implement a HighAvailability solution, Health Checks, SystemsManagement, Remote Administration, PTFmanagement, Blade installations, iSCSIConfigurations, Backup/Recovery, upgradean existing machine, or upgrade to a newmachine. If you are thinking of LPAR orHMC, then think iTech Solutions. We havethe skills to help you get the most out ofyour System i. For more information on any of the articlesbelow please visit us at on the web at iTech

Solutions or email iTech Solutions. We

would love for you to let us know any

articles that you wish for the future, or if

you enjoy any of the articles in the current

newsletters.

Do you have the right

stuff: Saving and

Restoring

your system.

This article isn't about John Glenn. It's

about backup and recovery. I am writing

this article after doing six recoveries over

the last three weeks for clients. Now none

of these recoveries were due to losing the

primary system. They were all test

recoveries. That's the start of the good

news, and probably the end of the good

news as well. In two of them, we restored

a Save 21 (Full System Save) to their backup

machine. Now I will argue this is useless in

testing your DR plan, unless you are doing a

Save 21 each and every night. You can't

perform a special save of your data for the

express purpose of doing a restore with that

save. That doesn't test anything out at all;well perhaps it tests that you are able toput a tape in the drive, enter GO SAVE on acommand line, and then select option 21and hit enter twice. These customersweren't doing a Save 21 each night, so thatmeans this isn't a real test. What it was is acheck-off on the auditors list of have youtested your recovery. You can tell from mywriting that I wasn't happy doing this,because I feel we are providing false hopein a customer's ability to restore theirsystem. When you are really serious about testingyour backup strategy, then you have to takeyour current backups (no matter how out ofdate or what) and use all the tapes to re-create the system as it was. This is whythey call it a T-E-S-T. This is no small featfor some people when I look at how theyare doing their backup, but it is arequirement. As an aside, please, if you areunsure, have us come in for a four-hourhealth check, and we will analyze yourbackup strategy during that engagementand let you know if you are missinglibraries/objects or if the recovery is socomplex you are just fooling yourself. Thisis serious stuff, and as you read this youneed to realize that if you are the personresponsible for the machine and thebackups, failure to properly protect thecompany could result in your termination(and failure of the company to recover froma disaster). First, let's start with how often are youdoing a full system backup? I would highlyrecommend weekly if possible, and monthlyif you had to. The least recommendation is

quarterly if you have a hard time finding awindow large enough to do the backup. Isthat window caused by your tape drivesbeing too slow? What tape technology areyou using? You need to match the tapetechnology with the amount of your data ondisk, as well as the time constraints of howlong the backup takes. LTO is probably thepreferred technology in that it is costeffective, fast, and can hold a lot ofinformation. Some of the things to be aware of if you areon V5R4 and later are you backing up spoolfiles. Will your users require their spoolfiles during a recovery? Are you able torecreate these spool files if they weren'tavailable? Do you have logical files in libraries that areover physical files in different libraries,where the library name of the logical filecomes before (alphabetically) the libraryname of the based upon physical file? Thisis fixed in V6R1, with using the restoredeferred (parameter or command). Are your journals in libraries that getrestored after your physical files arerestored? If that is the case, then none ofyour files will be journaled on the restore?

Do you know how long a restore takes?When was the last time you tried to doone? How much disk space are youcurrently using and do you have multipleASPs? Will you have to have your I_BASE_01 CDavailable for a restore?

Are you ending the right jobs andsubsystems each night so that you aregetting all the objects you think you arebacking up. When objects are exclusivelylocked, you won't get them on your nightlybackup. I had one account that had a customized CLfor backing up their libraries. Well, no onehas changed that CL for the last few years,and they had a few new programmers jointhe company as well as changing the versionof their ERP software. Guess whathappened during the restore? We found outthat those programmers libraries and someof the new libraries for their ERPapplication weren't getting backed up. Adisaster? No, because we tested this out,found the problems, and made thechanges. This company is now in a bettersituation because they did a test and madechanges based upon their findings. These are just some of the questions youneed to be thinking about. If you don't havea system to which you can restore (if youonly have one machine), we can bring amachine to your office, or you can just sendus the tapes and we can restore it in ouroffice. One of the services that we offer isthe ability to test your recovery on one ofour machines. We can also host yourenvironment on one of our machines as wellif you are looking at doing off-sitereplication. If you haven't done a test this year, youreally have no idea the issues that youmight have, or the items that may havechanged from year to year in how you

perform your backup strategy. I urge you to

review your backups, contact us if you need

help, but most importantly test out your

restore.

New Power7

machines.

On August 17th, IBM announced thecompletion of their Power7 line of servers,with the low end 710, 720, 730, and 740models, along with the high-powered 795. These models complete the Power Systemslineup of servers with POWER7 chipsinside of them. If you remember, themiddle of the product set was announced inFebruary of this year, see the iTechSolutions February newsletter. These new low end machines have an

amazing amount of horsepower (CPW). An

absolute amazing amount of CPW! I was in

Austin Texas at the end of July to learn and

play with the machines. I was extremely

impressed by their performance, energy

savings, small footprint, as well as their

cost. The 710 and 730 are small 2U rack

mounted machines, but are probably more

oriented to the AIX market. I believe mostof the IBM i customers will be mostlyinterested in the 720 and 740 machines. The 720 is 4U high (Rack mounted or deskside) with 1 Socket that can have 4, 6 or 8cores. A maximum memory of 128 GB (ontwo riser cards), 4 PCIe card slots and anoptional 4 low profile card slots. You canattach external I/O drawers and externaldisk ONLY on the 6 & 8-core machines. Each core is capable of 10 virtual partitions(or as IBM likes to now call them virtualservers). The electrical power is 100 to240V. The 740 is 4U high (rack or desk side)with 2 Sockets that can have combined 4, 6,8, 12, or 16 cores. A maximum memory of256 GB (on 4 riser cards), 4 PCIe card slotsand an optional 4 low profile card slots. Youcan attach external I/O drawers andexternal disk on all models of the 740. Each core is capable of 10 virtualpartitions. The power is 200 to 240V.Some items to note:

There is no attachment of any IOP (I/OProcessor), or any I/O Adapter that uses anIOP. Therefore, there is absolutely no Twinaxwhat so ever on these boxes.Items that can't move from Power6 to Power7: o RIO/HSL I/O drawerso SCSI disk smaller than 69GB or SCSI drivesslower than 15k rpmo QIC tape driveso Adapters: 2749, 5702, 5712, 2757, 5581,5591, 2790, 5580, 5590, 5704, 5761, 2787,5760, 4801, 4805, 3709, 4746, 4812, 4813o Older LAN adapters: #5707, 1984, 5718,1981, 5719, 1982o Older SCSI adapters: #5776, 5583, 5777All Power7 machines require V6R1M1 or V7R1.If using one of the new machines announcedthis month, then V7R1 must have theTechnology Refresh PTFs. If you are still onV5R4, you are really going to start to miss the

boat. See last month's article on upgrading toV6R1. These machines come with a 3 year warranty.The 4 core 720 is a P05 group for software. That is an insane amount of CPW in a P05group machine. The 6 and 8 core 720machines are in the P10 group, and 740machine is in the P20 tier.

Ok, so why did I say the 720/740 models arebetter for IBM i customers than the 710/730models: you can have more internal storage(disk drives), internal tape drive, twice theamount of memory due to the size of thememory riser cards, and four full-height 4PCIe slots (710/730 models have no full-height cards).

Remember, there are no upgrades fromPower5 to Power7 machines. If you have aPower5 machine, you would have toupgrade that first to a Power6 machine, andthen to a power7 machine. So, if you areon a Power5 machine you should contactGlenn to find out what your options arenow, before that upgrade path goes away. Also, if you are still on V5R4, your onlyoption is to go to Power 6.

It's a great time to be an IBM i customerwith this announcement. Great newtechnology that is easy to take advantageof. With all the good, there is alwayssomething bad. These machines operate atsuch amazing speeds, and when you havefast CPUs they generate a lot of heat. Wellto move the heat, IBM had to put in hugefans that require a very tight seal toproperly move the air past the CPUs (this iswhat moves the heat away from the CPU). The drawback is that IBM doesn't allow forconcurrent maintenance for the PCIe cards

now. If you or the CE were to open themachine up (as you have been able to do inthe past), you would cause the machine toimmediately lose power. Yes, immediatelylose power. This is due to the need forairflow. When the cover is opened, thesystem shuts off to prevent overheating. What this means for us, is less concurrentmaintenance. I give this an "F" in thedesign, because for a few dollars more IBMcould have put a hinge in the cover thatwould have allowed access to the PCIeslots, but kept the seal over the CPUs forproper airflow. For speed, performance,versatility, energy efficiency, I give themachines an "A+". What this all means isyou had better watch your colors. Orangetabs mean concurrent maintenance. Bluetabs mean maintenance must be performedwhen the machine is powered down.

For a review of your machine upgrades, orto see exactly how inexpensive moving tothis new hardware or even Power6 can be,contact Glenn via email or by phone at 718-898-9805.

HLDJOBSCDEcommand

I love visiting customers because I learnsomething new every shop that I go visit. Have you ever wanted to hold every job inthe job scheduler? Well, I just found outthat there is a command that can do thisfor you. I used to do a WRKJOBSCDE, andthen put each job in the scheduler on hold. I do this when I am going to do an i5/OSupgrade, and we don't want the jobs to

start after the upgrade until we have doneconversions or any other post installationactivity. The Hold Job Scheduler Entry command,HLDJOBSCDE, allows you to hold an entry,all entries, or a set of entries in the jobschedule. Each job schedule entrycontains the information needed toautomatically submit a job to be run onceor at a regularly scheduled interval. Alljobs once held will be held untilreleased. When the job is held and thenreleased it will then pick up at the "next"scheduled interval, and not submit for aninterval during which it was held. Of course, there is a Release Job SchedulerEntry command that does the exactopposite, releasing any job scheduler entrywhich was held. You do need to be carefulwhen using these commands with the *ALLor generic job names, as you are affectingmultiple jobs at once. You should look overthe job scheduler before executing any ofthese commands, to determine if there areany jobs already on hold or review jobs youmight not want to release.

Upcoming events

Here is a list of upcoming events that iTechSolutions will be partisipating in or thatPete Massiello will be speaking at:

October 3 to 6 COMMON Fall Conferencewww.common.org San Antonio, TX Topics:1) Upgrading to IBM i 6.1 & 7.12) HMC, FSP, IBM i: You need to know whatthese do.3) Performance tuning tricks4) Creating Virtual IBM i LPARs on hostedIBM i. October 20 - Long Island Systems User Group(LISUG), www.lisug.org Woodbury NY October 21 - North Eastern SystemTechnology Users Group (NESTU),www.nestu.com Fairfield NJ. Topic:Upgrading to IBM i 6.1 & 7.1 November 15 to 17 iSeries Dev Connwww.iseriesdevcon2010.com Las Vegas, NVTopics:1) Everything you need to know to upgradeIBM i (i5/OS) to IBM i 6.1 or 7.1 2) Building virtual i partitions hosted by IBMi - no additional hardware required!3) Putting the pieces together:Understanding your options with HMC, FSP,and firmware on the IBM i4) Tips and tricks to improve systemperformance and save disk space5) Everything you need to know to getstarted with the new Systems DirectorNavigator ConsoleApril 11 to 13 Northeast User Groupswww.neugc.org Framingham, MA

Release levels and PTFs People are alwaysasking me how oftenthey should be

performing PTF

maintenance, and when is the

right time to upgrade their

operating system. I updated this

article from last month with the

current levels of PTFs. Let's look

at PTFs. First, PTFs are Program

Temporary Fixes that are created

by IBM to fix a problem that has

occurred or to possibly prevent a

problem from occurring. In

addition, some times PTFs add

new functionality, security, or

improve performance. Therefore,

I am always dumbfounded as to

why customers do not perform PTF

maintenance on their machine at

least quarterly. If IBM has come

out with a fix for your disk drives,

why do you want to wait for your

disk drive to fail with that

problem, only to be told that

there is a fix for that problem, and

if you had applied the PTF

beforehand, you would have

averted the problem. Therefore, I

think a quarterly PTF maintenance

strategy is a smart move. Many of

our customers are on our quarterly

PTF maintenance program, and

that provides them with the peace

of mind of knowing their system is

up to date on PTFs. Below is a

table of the major group PTFs for

the last few releases. This is

what we are installing for our

customers on iTech Solutions

Quarterly Maintenance program.

Releases

7.1 6.1 V5R4 V5R3

Cumul. Pack 10096 10215 10117 8267 Grp Hipers 10 69 134 169 DB Group 2 14 27 24 Java Group 3 13 24 23 Print Group - 18 41 20 Backup/Recov. 3 16 34 33 Security Group 3 18 15 7 Blade/IXA/IXS 2 16 14 - Http 2 14 24 17

The easiest way to check yourlevels is to issue the commandWRKPTFGRP. They should all havea status of installed, and youshould be up to the latest for allthe above, based upon yourrelease. Now there are moregroups than the ones listed above,but these are the general onesthat most people require. We canhelp you know which group PTFsyou should be installing on yourmachine based upon your licensedprograms. Here is a nice tidbit. The Cumulative PTF packagenumber is broken down as YDDD,where Y is the year and DDD is theday it was released. Therefore, ifwe look at the cumulative packagefor V5R4, the ID is 9104. We candetermine that it was created onthe 104th day of 2009, which isApril 14, 2009. Look at yourmachine and this will give you aquick indication of just how farout of date in PTFs you may be. Ileft V5R1 off the list, because ifyou are on V5R1, you don't need to

be worrying about PTFs, you reallyneed to be upgrading youroperating system. The same canbe said for V5R2 and V5R3, butthere are still customers who areon those releases.

If you have an HMC, you should berunning V7R7.1 If your HMC is aC03, then it should stay at V7R3.2SP1. For your Flexible Service Processor(FSP) that is inside your Power 5 orPower5+ (520, 515, 525, 550, 570),the code level of the FSP shouldbe 01_SF240_382. Power 6 (940xM15, M25, & M50 machines, and8203-E4A & 8204-E4A) customersshould be running EL350_071. ForPower6 (MMA, 560, and 570machines) your FSP should beat EM350_071. If you have aPower6 595 (9119-FMA) then youshould be on EH350_071. POWER7the firmware level is AL710_086 orAM710_086 depending on yourmodel. If you need help with upgradingyour HMC or FSP just give us acall. We will be happy to performthe function for you or assist youin doing it. Contact Pete Massiello.

We have the skills to help you get the most out ofyour System i. For more information on any of thearticles please contact us at info@itechsol.com . Wewould also like to know what you think of thisnewsletter and any items you would like us todiscuss in future issues.

Our staff of Certified i5/OS professionals can helpyou get more out of your machines. Remember, i want everything to work. i want control. i want an i i need iTech Solutions. Sincerely,

Pete MassielloiTech Solutions

www.itechsol.com

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