For many years, IBM i has provided a means for the system to detect and report problems. What started as hardware problem detection and reporting via a product called Service Director (SD), has grown to include software problem reporting, with inventory and performance data sent using Electronic Service Agent (ESA), which is integrated into the operating system.
(more…)As a member of the PASE development team, inquiries from the IBM i community regarding PASE often come to me. In one such recent email, the following phrase caught my eye:
To most, including me, it (PASE) is just “the other side I rarely use.”
E-x-a-c-t-l-y!
(more…)When the System/38 was being architected, it was recognized that underlying hardware technology was subject to unpredictable change. While it didn’t take a crystal ball to understand that change would be inevitable, having one to forecast the future of storage technology sure would have been nice. But as we all know, there is no crystal ball. This reality led to the development of Single Level Store. A key feature of Single Level Storage (SLS) architecture is that it insulates the upper-level code from the specifics of the storage technology it uses. Along with the Technology Independent Machine Interface, TIMI, SLS is a fundamental element of the design that has allowed IBM i to continue to take advantage of new capabilities seamlessly.
(more…)For those of you with larger environments where you may have hundreds to thousands of users on a single partition, you’re probably aware of the old recommendation to spread the allocation of those devices across multiple subsystems by using workstation entries or communications device entries. The IBM-documented recommendation was no more than 250-300 devices per subsystem. The communications-device issue has generally resolved itself since fewer shops are using SNA today, and TCP/IP communications support doesn’t use communications devices.
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