Last December, I wrote a blog post about big data. In it I mentioned the central role the massive number crunching capability of the new Power8 CPU plays in meeting the demands of today’s big computing tasks. In this post, I want to focus on one of the key components of the Power8 compute solution, which is its ability to make use of hardware based computational accelerators.
Read moreLast month I wrote about IBM’s latest big data solution, this month I want to talk about what’s new for IBM in the cloud. IBM has provided the SmartCloud product offering for some time now, but as the shape of the cloud has evolved, so the shape of that solution has changed too. Today cloud infrastructure architectures are stabilizing, and IBM recently announced a retooling of their cloud offering around OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform currently emerging as a major player in this market. So, what used to be IBM SmartCloud is now IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack.
Read moreOver time, we accumulate data — all sorts of data, and a lot of it. This past year my discussions around storage solution design now routinely use the word petabyte, where, just last year the same discussion would likely have used the word terabyte. Here is a statistic to consider: the amount of data accumulated every 48 hours today is about equal to the sum total of all information in human history generated until the year 2003. Big data, indeed! Like mining for gold, there is valuable information hidden in all that data, but, like gold ore, that data has to be processed for the value to be extracted.
Read moreI’ve been an AIX administrator since the MicroChannel days — my first AIX was version 3 — and I’m not expecting AIX to vanish any time soon, but lately I’m hearing a lot about Linux, and it’s looking more and more like my AIX skill set is going to need to be extended to include Linux skills, too. In this post I’m going to address five questions that seem to me likely to arise during this process.
Read morePermanent data storage normally uses HDD technology originally developed by IBM in the mid 1950s. Today, HDDs are typically aggregated into arrays in storage appliances using various methods to provide redundancy in case of the failure of any single HDD. In this case, the array, or a portion of the storage space in the array, will be presented to a client OS as a logical unit (LUN). This is not yet logical volume management (LVM), however, the LUN still appears to the OS as a single, large-capacity storage device. For LVM purposes, there is no functional difference between a local HDD and a LUN, so we will simply call either type of storage a disk.
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