India’s Council of Agricultural Research has made the jump from paper-based processes to an Oracle-on-Power ERP system supporting well over 100 sites. The ambitious project is something of a coup for IBM’s Global Business Services division. Partly funded by the World Bank, it is one of the first national ERP implementations by central government in […]
Ethiopia gets 21st century banking
Ethiopia’s biggest bank has undertaken a huge expansion and modernisation programme based on model 795 and 770 Power Systems. Founded in 1942 and headquartered in Addis Ababa (pictured), Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) has more than eight million account holders and annual revenues equivalent to $586 million. It now operates 868 branches across Ethiopia and […]
HelpSystems improves BI and security tools
HelpSystems‘ ShowCase division has released a new version of its eponymous IBM i BI tool. ShowCase10 includes new executive dashboards, dynamic drill-down analysis, improved reporting and a redesigned interface. Its creators say that a new ShowCase Deployment Bundle expands basic ShowCase into an ideal data access tool for both technical and end users. With a […]
Masterclass: how to monitor VIOS vSCSI disk performance
In my previous article I showed how you can use nmon in VIOS to display the performance statistics of hdisks that are mapped to client LPARs. This is achieved by creating a file which nmon reads and then displays the relevant performance data. Let’s look at a script I created to automatically generate the file […]
Is the new HMC interface enhanced or not?
IBM has rather quietly brought out a new interface to its Hardware Management Console (HMC). This became an option in V8R8.1 Service Pack1 of the HMC. IBM has called it the enhanced interface and you will have an option to select it at log in. Don’t worry, you’ll know it when you see it. Before […]
Opinion: IBM needs more focus on Power
Call me biased, but isn’t one of the primary messages from IBM’s latest disappointing quarterly figures simply that it needs to sell more Power Systems? Big Blue certainly made no bones about fingering its Systems and Technology server and storage division for some of its failings in its earnings announcement on Monday. Revenues from Power […]
AIX tech tip: which HMC does this LPAR belong to?
In a large Power environment where you have multiple Power Systems and perhaps hundreds of LPARs, there may well be multiple Hardware Management Consoles. When the environment is spread across several sites, it can be a challenge even identifying which HMC to log onto to manage a particular LPAR. I recently had this situation. I […]
German engineer revs up SAP with BLU Acceleration
A German electronics firm has chosen DB2 with BLU Acceleration over SAP HANA or SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator in a bid to speed up data delivery. Headquartered in Neuhausen, Balluff is a world-leading manufacturer of sensor solutions, employing around 2,750 people in 50 countries. The firm runs its operation on Power p and, as part […]
IBM’s AIX made the most money from Unix in Q2
IBM made the most cash from Unix servers in this year’s second quarter but Oracle sold the most machines. That’s according to an erudite analysis of the latest figures from Gartner by Timothy Prickett Morgan on EnterpriseTech. Prickett Morgan’s reading of the Gartner ‘s latest worldwide quarterly server stats has Oracle down as shipping 11,108 […]
Time-saving tips for AIX device configuration
When you have a one-off command to run on AIX, you just type it in. If you have to do it hundreds of times, you are better off if you script it. But what if the scripting still isn’t fast enough? I recently had to remove hundreds of virtual SCSI (vSCSI) devices from a Virtual […]