IBM i References

I like birthdays, even as the numbers get larger. I’ll admit that I like to get birthday presents; I like to give them too. This week marks the 4th year of the “i Can” blog, so this week’s blog is a gift of reading material.

The reference material in this blog is a bit dated, but I left it in place as some of these links are still useful. I will write a 2020 version at some point.

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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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