Capacity Planning and Management: Don’t Let the Tank Go Dry
October 8, 2019
IT computing complexes are fluctuating, growing, evolving entities, characterized by continual, erratic growth, intertwined with shifting business volumes. The long-term trend is continual system growth driven by business volumes, as well as new forms of usage. A daunting challenge for most IT operations is to have a “crystal ball” that predicts IT resource demand growth, […]
ArticlesManaging the IT Project Backlog
September 11, 2019
While IT seems to be an exercise in reading the future and transforming it into business processes, IT often misuses its most vital resource—the people that turn hardware, software and networks into business applications that improve productivity, provide new function, and increase employee effectiveness. Analysts are pulled off projects barely halfway complete, designers are reassigned […]
ArticlesGet Started With Go Language on AIX
September 3, 2019
Go toolchain, the self-hosted toolchain of the new high-performance networking and multiprocessing language, is now available on AIX* 7.2 for POWER8*. This toolchain aims to complement the previous port of Go for AIX, which was made within gcc (known as the gccgo toolchain). What Is Go Language? Go is a new imperative language inspired by […]
ArticlesPower Systems Best Practices Doc: The Latest
July 23, 2019
In this AIXchange blog, Technical Editor Rob McNelly recaps a popular presentation by IBMer Fredrik Lundholm.
ArticlesManagement by Intimidation Is a Formula for Failure
July 16, 2019
Over the decades I’ve seen scores of management staff in action, some competent and motivating, others technology savvy yet people ignorant, some just the opposite, some political and back-stabbing, and some truly cost-obsessed. I spent 17 years with IBM and flourished under their management style, then founded an IT consulting firm. Instead of being managed […]
Delivered IBM i RFEs
July 11, 2019
A look at a few RFEs that provide enhancements you may not be aware of.
ArticlesScheduler Resource Allocation Domains or What the Heck is SRAD?
July 2, 2019
Technical expert Mark J. Ray explores the Scheduler Resource Allocation Domain and how it relates to performance structures in Power Systems servers running AIX
ArticlesSLAs Simplify Support
June 17, 2019
Service-level agreements (SLAs) were nearly nonexistent when I started in IT. Those of us involved in online systems implementation were too focused on keeping terminal-based applications operational and tolerably responsive to worry about such things; furthermore, no one had heard of them. There wasn’t much pressure for an SLA either, because end users were infatuated […]
ArticlesApplication Performance and Tuning
May 14, 2019
As the original author of “CICS Performance Bulletin” published by IBM Dallas System Center, and co-author of the subsequent IBM “CICS TS Performance Guide” in conjunction with IBM Hursley CICS TS Development, performance and tuning has been a big part of my job. I’ve performed more CICS performance studies than I can count, and almost […]
ArticlesLet the End User Be Your Guide
April 1, 2019
Although my career has been primarily in OSes, transaction processing, data management/database and network implementation—along with consulting later on—I’ve also participated in application development projects. In my early years, I and an IBM consulting system engineer designed and developed a field developed program called Trend Analysis for CICS/VS, one of the first graphic analysis tools […]