IBM Navigator for i – Rebuild Data on Failed Disk Unit in Parity Set

As I have written in the past few blogs, Navigator for i has been enhanced significantly with the latest updates. Read the Navigator for i EnhancementsIFS Enhancements to Navigator for i, and Performance Data Investigator – Better than Ever blogs if you haven’t read them already.

This week, I’ll continue the review of Navigator enhancements by sharing a few details on one of the enhancements to Disk Management.

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Navigator for i Enhancements

Navigator for i has had many enhancements over several years. IBM has not been the best at documenting the details of these enhancements; often the only place the details could be found would be in PTF cover letters. For example, if you review the PTF cover letter of the IBM Navigator for i service pack update SI47573, you will find the details of functions delivered in later 2012.

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Planning for Solid State Drives

IBM i has supported Solid State Drives (SSDs) for quite some time now. The operating system has built-in support for optimizing the use of SSDs as well as commands and parameters that you can use to control data placement on SSDs versus spinning disks. Support for SSDs started with the 5.4 release and has been enhanced in both 6.1 and 7.1, This blog isn’t going to go into the details of those capabilities, but rather will talk about how you can determine whether SSDs can provide you with performance advantages.

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Encrypt Your Data on Disk

In the IBM i 6.1 release, the ability to encrypt data on disk was introduced. This support allows you to encrypt your data on user and independent disk pools (“disk pools” is the term used in the graphical user interface; if you typically use green screen interfaces, auxiliary storage pools (ASPs) may be more familiar terminology.)

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