This article explains how to leverage two IBM Power Server features to reduce downtime for maintenance and migrations and unplanned outages. Let’s start by reviewing some important PowerVM features that give customers more flexibility to keep their LPARs up and running for a variety of data center changes.
(more…)Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) allows sharing of processor facilities to run two or more threads of execution at the same time on a single processing core. On POWER7, each processing core supports up to 4 threads of execution. SMT generally increases the performance capacity of a system and can improve the responsiveness of multithreaded applications. Running multiple instruction streams at the same time does not, however, improve the performance of any given task. POWER8 and POWER9 support up to 8 threads per processor core.
(more…)In recent years, more and more IBM i clients are using logical partitioning in their Power Systems environments. IBM has many resources available to you regarding PowerVM and logical partitioning, as well as some excellent white papers on related performance topics. I thought it might be helpful to give a list of some of these resources in case you were not aware of them.
(more…)Beginning with the 6.1 release, if you study the Collection Services database files carefully, you will discover a new field called “Scaled CPU time.”
(more…)This blog reviews a few of the key features of POWER7 that were initially supported in the IBM i 6.1.1 release. While this blog is a bit dated, some of the key concepts of SMT, energy management, and processor frequency remain applicable to current current generations of POWER hardware and IBM i releases. Links have been updated to reference current information on these topics.
(more…)