IBM i

Platform management

Effective platform management can provide you with a competitive advantage. In today's quick moving world, market opportunities, threats, and partner and customer integration are driving increased demands on system availability and control. The ability to effectively manage your platform and your information systems (IS) environment is imperative. Information is the heart of your business and the key to your company's bottom line. That information must be available to you and your customers when needed. Critical decisions and customer loyalties can be impacted when you lose or can't administer the IS resources that supply the information.

The manageable, highly available IBM i is the solution for today's information-driven fast-paced business environment. IBM i can provide your company with a serious competitive advantage over competitors running less stable, less scaleable, less reliable, and less manageable platforms.

Platform manageability is an increasingly important part of the initial buying decision. You don't want to base your business on a platform that can't be managed – particularly with the rapid delivery of new and changing technologies, e-business and Web opportunities, the 24 hour a day services required by your customers, and business decisions. Today's buyers need to ensure that they can manage their platforms and environments in the event of power outages, have the ability to plan for seasonal computational needs or monitor key resources, and the need to be as efficient as possible with their IS staff. This is what IBM i platform manageability is all about – providing a set of solution options to meet the needs of today's business.

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Performance management

Performance management provides the capabilities for customers to understand and manage the performance of their computing environments.

• Real-time monitoring
• History/trends of performance/capacity
• Capacity planning
• Performance tuning controls
• Performance problem isolation
• Workload balancing
• Application
• "Design for Performance" tools

To support these capabilities, products and tools, data collection facilities, and instrumentation are required.

Size and complexity of customer computing environments - client/server, cooperative and distributed applications, distributed data, local and wide area networks, Web/intranet/internet, third-party and home-grown applications, heterogeneous computing resources - all place ongoing demands on the capabilities for understanding and managing performance.

Technologies supporting these capabilities include: GUI, automation, data base, performance data visualization, correlation (establishing the relationship among pieces of data that originate from different sources), decomposition (breaking down a time measurement, e.g. response time, into its components), and standards.

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Storage management

Power System servers are regarded as one of the industry's most scalable and highly integrated servers. IBM i automates a majority of the storage management tasks with state of the art disk storage subsystems, self-managing and easy to use interfaces, and sophisticated software automation such as:

• Backup Recovery Media Services for IBM i
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
• Independent Disk Pools
• IBM PowerHA High Availability Solution
• Virtual I/O Server support
• Copy Services for IBM i

Power Systems IBM i servers are renowned for high volume transaction workloads that are typical in the commercial computing environment. This scalability and performance can be provided by either the self-optimizing integrated storage management architecture of IBM i or through SAN attached storage.

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