On Thursday 22 July 2010, IBM announced not just their latest mainframe – the zEnterprise – but also a roadmap of how data centres should be – unified, in a single box, and controlled by the best equipped platform in that box. Once code-named Gryphon (you know, the mythical creature with an eagle’s head and lion’s body), IBM’s new hybrid machine (although in the UK you might hear it referred to as a coalition!) brings together the latest mainframe technology with POWER7 and x86 IBM blade systems, giving potential users z/OS, AIX, and Linux all on the one box. And all this is controlled from the mainframe console by the new Unified Resource Manager. You might like to think of this new mainframe as a virtualization hub that manages other workloads in the data centre. Three platforms in one box.
IBM’s view is that data centres are running more than one lot of hardware, and sites are experiencing problems with space for the hardware, keeping control of these different systems, and even communicating between them – so integrating them seems like the obvious answer. And that’s what they’ve done.
But more has come out of the $1.5 billion spent on research and development. The zEnterprise 196 (IBM's name for the two-rack mainframe) includes 96 5.2GHz (up from 4.4GHz on the z10) quad processors (80 of which are used by the client, and the rest are used by the machine itself) and up to 3TB of memory (double the z10s). The new microprocessors offer 100 new mainframe machine code instructions.
In terms of performance, the zEnterprise can handle 50 billion instructions per second, providing a 40-60% performance increase over the z10 without using any more power. A water cooling option, could help reduce energy consumption by up to 12 percent by removing air heat. It also includes the first implementation of RAID memory, which is like RAID for disks, and could be used to increase uptime to beyond the 99.999 availability of current mainframe technology.
The zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX) operates as a tightly-coupled extension to the mainframe through a high-performance private network. The users then add POWER7 or System x blades to four racks. IBM says that POWER7 blades will be available by the end of this year, with System x blades scheduled to ship in the first half of 2011. The new Unified Resource Manager will allow users to install, monitor, manage, optimize, diagnose, and service resources and workloads from a single console across the entire infrastructure.
The new machine includes a DB2 accelerator, called the Smart Analytics Optimzer, which is able to routes database queries either to the mainframe DB2 system or a specialist blade server optimized for smart analytics. IBM estimates that complex database queries can experience up to a ten-fold performance improvement in this environment.
Can you afford it? IBM suggests using zEnterprise will reduce cost of ownership by 55% – but didn’t disclose the actual price. They did say that its price relative to capacity would be lower than for the z10!
Showing posts with label Manager. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Manager. Show all posts
Friday, 23 July 2010
Sunday, 14 February 2010
Eye-Fi card – review
We’ve all taken digital photos on our digital cameras and then got to our laptops to upload them and thought there must be a better way than faffing around getting the card out of the camera and sticking it in the card reader slot or even worse connecting a cable to download the pictures. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just put your camera near your laptop and the photos would automatically copy across. Well, that’s exactly what an Eye-Fi card does.
Installation is very straightforward. You open the box and the Eye-Fi card is already in the USB reader. You simply plug this into a USB slot on the laptop and wait while your computer recognizes the card reader. After a little while a dialogue box appears asking what you want to do with the contents of the new drive. There’s one that looks like a coloured pebble with radar waves coming out of it. That unflattering description is the Eye-Fi icon – and it says “Free Your Memories” on the menu next to the icon. It’s usually pre-selected, so all you need do is press the “OK” button. The software then installs.
At the end of the installation, the Eye-Fi Manager set-up wizard launches. You simply press the “Next” button. The instructions that appear onscreen are perfectly straightforward and these need to be followed to complete the Eye-Fi registration process.
After that stage completes, you are asked to remove the Eye-Fi card from the card reader and put it into a camera. And that’s really all there is to set up. Perhaps obviously you need to have wifi set up for it to work, and you’ll need to enter your WPA key during set up.
As long as the camera is powered on, bring in near the computer allows photos and videos to upload to your laptop without any effort. Once they’ve all arrived, turn off your camera – to conserve battery power.
You can associate the card with a different computer, and you can associate the card with multiple access points (although you need to run the Eye-Fi Manager software again and put the card back in the card reader).
One of the great features – if you want to use it – is, in Eye-Fi Manager, to choose the to have your photos automatically uploaded to online sharing sites like Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and many others. I chose not to do this – so there’s no link to my online pictures, you’ll be pleased to know!
The upload was incredibly easy, we just had the camera in the same room as the computer the Eye-Fi Manager software was installed on. In future, we might see what the maximum distance away we could be and still get it to work. It uploaded AVIs, MOVs, and JPGs.
We tried that card in three different cameras that we had around and it worked perfectly in all of them. However, some people have reported problems with some cameras.
The pictures are also geotagged – which means that they’re tagged to show where they were taken. If they’re uploaded to Flickr or iPhoto, they become searchable in Places, or on a map by city or country. There’s even an iPhone app now!
We were using Eye-Fi Pro, which also allows RAW camera files to be uploaded to the computer.
And our verdict? It’s brilliant. Get an Eye-Fi card, you’ll love it.
You can find more details at www.eye.fi/products/sharevideo.
Installation is very straightforward. You open the box and the Eye-Fi card is already in the USB reader. You simply plug this into a USB slot on the laptop and wait while your computer recognizes the card reader. After a little while a dialogue box appears asking what you want to do with the contents of the new drive. There’s one that looks like a coloured pebble with radar waves coming out of it. That unflattering description is the Eye-Fi icon – and it says “Free Your Memories” on the menu next to the icon. It’s usually pre-selected, so all you need do is press the “OK” button. The software then installs.
At the end of the installation, the Eye-Fi Manager set-up wizard launches. You simply press the “Next” button. The instructions that appear onscreen are perfectly straightforward and these need to be followed to complete the Eye-Fi registration process.
After that stage completes, you are asked to remove the Eye-Fi card from the card reader and put it into a camera. And that’s really all there is to set up. Perhaps obviously you need to have wifi set up for it to work, and you’ll need to enter your WPA key during set up.
As long as the camera is powered on, bring in near the computer allows photos and videos to upload to your laptop without any effort. Once they’ve all arrived, turn off your camera – to conserve battery power.
You can associate the card with a different computer, and you can associate the card with multiple access points (although you need to run the Eye-Fi Manager software again and put the card back in the card reader).
One of the great features – if you want to use it – is, in Eye-Fi Manager, to choose the to have your photos automatically uploaded to online sharing sites like Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and many others. I chose not to do this – so there’s no link to my online pictures, you’ll be pleased to know!
The upload was incredibly easy, we just had the camera in the same room as the computer the Eye-Fi Manager software was installed on. In future, we might see what the maximum distance away we could be and still get it to work. It uploaded AVIs, MOVs, and JPGs.
We tried that card in three different cameras that we had around and it worked perfectly in all of them. However, some people have reported problems with some cameras.
The pictures are also geotagged – which means that they’re tagged to show where they were taken. If they’re uploaded to Flickr or iPhoto, they become searchable in Places, or on a map by city or country. There’s even an iPhone app now!
We were using Eye-Fi Pro, which also allows RAW camera files to be uploaded to the computer.
And our verdict? It’s brilliant. Get an Eye-Fi card, you’ll love it.
You can find more details at www.eye.fi/products/sharevideo.
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