• “VERY VERY satisfied with the instructor and he is very much capable of being an perfect trainer”
  Quotation from student on AU61 HACMP System Administration II: Administration and Problem Determination – Bangalore India
• “The instructor is excellent in delivering the concepts. It really helped a lot to understand the contents of the course. Very satisfied with the instructors presentation of the course”
  Quotation from student on AU61 HACMP System Administration II: Administration and Problem Determination – Bangalore India
• “An enjoyable and interesting course, very well presented by the instructor.”
  Quotation from student on AU78AU System p LPAR and Virtualization II: Implementing Advanced Configurations – Sydney November 2008
• “The instructor was very possibly the best that I have ever had and this comment is from someone who was an IBM trainer for 7 years in Canada (IBM instructor code MACHAFRA), well done and don’t lose this guy!!!!”
  Quotation from student on AU75 System p LPAR and Virtualization III: Virtualization Performance Management course – Melbourne Jun 2008
• “The course and delivery is excellent. Thank you”
  Quotation from Student on AU54 HACMP System Administration I: Planning and Implementation – Malaysia August 2008
• “The presenter was very good”
  Quotation from Student on AU78 System p LPAR and Virtualization II: Implementing Advanced Configurations – Sydney December 2007
• “Paul is very knowledgeable on AIX course and very helpful to provide very good training for us”
  Quotation from Student on Customized Course combining AU73 and AU78 – Japan December 2007
• “Instructor was really technical with lots of practical and theoretical experience”
  Quotation from Student on Customized Course combining AU73 and AU78 – Japan December 2007
• “Paul was a great instructor, his knowledge of the subject matter was exceptionally high. I thoroughly enjoyed the course.”
  Quotation from Student on AU73 System p LPAR and Virtualization I: Planning and Configuration Sydney November 2007
• “Paul provided an excellent environment and delivered the course content very well”“I think Paul demonstrated excellent knowledge of the subject matter and conveyed it well to us.”“The instructor is very skilful and experienced on AIX platform. He had answered all of the technical questions.”
  Quotations from Students on AU73 System p LPAR and Virtualization I: Planning and Configuration Sydney August 2007

You hear a lot about green computing, but what exactly is it, why is it important, and what is IBM’s involvement in green computing? In essence, green computing defines the environmentally responsible way of deploying computer-based resources and technology. But why should you care? The short answer is that as a responsible person or company whose clients are increasingly becoming more eco-friendly and responsible themselves, it is imperative that you start your efforts towards green computing for both indirect and direct reasons. The direct reasons involve the cost of doing business, and the indirect reasons relate to environmental, eco-friendly concerns.

The biggest challenges for implementing green computing revolve around the server, the rack, and the datacenter. IBM has made significant progress in all three areas, much of it around the POWER6. Through various studies, IDC has estimated that for every dollar spent on hardware, another 50 cents is actually spent on energy and that number is expected to increase to 71 cents by 2011. In a typical datacenter, 55% of energy goes to power and cooling, with the remainder going towards server management. In a society with dramatically rising energy costs, where levies are being imposed on carbon production in many countries, it has become a fiscal, legal, and moral imperative to look towards responsible methods of implementing computing technology. Make no mistake, financial penalties already exist in many countries and more are coming. The bottom line is, do you want to be (or work with) a proactive organization that thinks seriously about environmental concerns, or do you want to be reactive and take measures only when threatened with a loss of revenue?

IBM has long been on the forefront of responsible computing. It has had the size, wherewithal, and experience to help themselves and customers implement green computing. For example, between 1990 and 2005, long before green became sexy, IBM’s Global conservation efforts actually reduced carbon consumption by 40% of its 1990 emissions. Chip manufacturers have always been under a tremendous amount of pressure to developer faster, smaller transistors, which usually run hotter and consume more electricity. The rising temperatures add to the consumption of power, which in turn requires additional cooling. Rather than this decreasing the amount of iron needed in the datacenter, the amount of systems in the datacenter has actually increased through the years. This is because users have been taking advantage of these gains to drive applications and databases that require yet more power. Furthermore, some of these small chips allow manufacturers to produce smaller rackable systems that allow even greater computing power to be brought back to the datacenter, again, with even more demands on energy, power, and cooling. While virtualization has certainly helped cut down on the number of physical boxes necessary to support instances, it also has created new demands on IT to become that much more efficient in its ability to deploy new instances. The net is that the better the technology, the more in demand it is, not less. Studies have shown that even with virtualization, the number of servers in datacenters has increased 18%.

Project Big Green to the rescue

In May of 2007, IBM announced a one-billion dollar investment to increase energy efficiency within their own datacenters and the clients that use them. This defined “Project Big Green,” which targeted datacenters and included a team of engineers of over 800 energy engineers worldwide to work on the initiative. The plan ultimately was to reduce datacenter costs by an average of 42%. The five areas that would be covered included: diagnose (assessment of exiting faculties), build (plan build out of datacenters), virtualization (virtualize infrastructure), manage (using software to manage the process), and cooling (exploitation of liquid cooling resources). Active energy management, which allows for the capability to manage facilities, cooling, and electrical systems within the datacenter, is a big part of this initiative.

One of the primary drivers for Project Big Green was purely operational, meaning that customers had a hard time deploying new servers because of datacenter energy requirements and heating issues. Cost also became a huge factor, as increased reliance on the datacenter and the increase in data capacity also required substantial increase in cooling costs. The social and environmental factors also started coming into play. Without question, customers wanted to put in place more energy-efficient systems. This was in response to pressure from customers, shareholders, and even the government. With a new environmentally conscious administration, this pressure will only increase. IBM has even started a program with its business partners to help develop programs that will provide for more efficiency. As companies increasingly ask to become more eco-responsible, hardware vendors needs to react to that. IBM has been very proactive in this respect.

IBM just started a Big-Green service, where they will work with customers on the five datacenter areas the article already discussed: diagnosis, building, virtualization, managing, and cooling. An important part of this program is IBM’s mobile measurement technology, which can actually measure temperature in datacenters, looking for air leakage and other problems. Along with this, IBM will also provide a thermal analysis for high-density computing that provides additional options for savings.

POWER6

The POWER6 was built on IBM’s 65-nanometer process technology. In essence, it reduced the size of silicon, which allowed engineers to reduce overall processor consumption. At the same time, IBM also was able to increase its performance to 4.7 GHz while not increasing the energy costs at all. IBM did this by keeping the number of pipeline stages static. This is the number of operations that must be completed in a single cycle of clock time. Doubling the performance while using the same thermal envelope is perhaps the most impressive innovation of the POWER6. The design of the chip also itself supports the separation of circuits that have problems supporting low voltages. This further allows the actual power to be reduced on other circuits within the chip.

The clock itself can also be dynamically turned off when no work is being done and then turned back on again when needed. This is due to the PowerSave mode of the POWER6, which provides the means to drop voltage and frequency of the system, enabling power usage savings of approximately 30%. The POWER6 processor actually drops to 35 percent of power consumption when it is idle. Furthermore, memory can also be shut on and off as required to help balance server workloads, which have the effect of further decreasing energy consumption.

Other POWER6 innovations include:

* IBM’s POWER6 JS22 blade (The first POWER6, which was introduced in 2007). IBM’s BladeCenter® was equipped with a shared power infrastructure, which provided more efficient power supplies that could reach peak efficiency even with a minimal load, saving approximately 28% over other power supplies. IBM’s calibrated vector cooling technology further allowed the system to save money by providing for dual paths of air for each component, adding to the longevity of systems and reducing wasteful air movement.
* IBM’s Power 575. To increase the rack density, IBM created a new modular water cooling and distribution system. Part of this system includes a rear door heat exchanger that can extract 60% of the heat generated by the servers themselves. Next generation systems may even be able to extract 100% of server heat generation. Imagine an environment that does not need cooling at all!
* PowerVM™ virtualization front. Live partition mobility (a POWER6 virtualization innovation) provides for the ability of customers to save energy by relocating and consolidation active partitions, which can further free up resources. You can also power down entire servers that are not needed.

EnergyScale™

EnergyScale is another important innovation on POWER6, which provides for the ability to control power and cooling, allowing for better facilities planning, energy control, and systems availability. Among other features, it has a power-capping mode, allowing users to actually configure maximum levels of power access across systems. This feature provides datacenter operators with the ability to put caps on the amount of power that certain servers are using, ensuring that the system can never exceed a certain amount of power. By doing so, the operator can free up power across the datacenter for servers that really need the power. This feature is available on all POWER6 systems.

Some other important features of EnergyScale include:

* Power trending. This provides for the collection of power consumption data in real time. The usage itself is displayed by Active Energy Manager, now a component of IBM Systems Director. One can monitor consumption daily, weekly, or even monthly. It’s important to note that for the Power 560 and 570 models, an Intelligent Power Distribution Unit is required, which provides the power to the computer. The other systems have built-in power meters and do not require add-ons.
* Thermal reporting. This innovation allows for the lowering of processor frequency and voltage by a fixed amount. This has the effect of reducing power consumption on the system while still delivering peak performance. Active energy manager actually is the mechanism that enables and disables the powersaver mode. An example of where this can be used is on weekends where workload levels can shift down dramatically.
* Energy-optimized fan control. This works with the firmware on POWER6 systems and allows for an adjustment in fan speed based upon power consumption and temperature, among other variables.
* NAP core. The processor has a low power mode that stops processor execution when there is no work going on. This mode is called nap mode. The way it works is that the OS detects when a thread is idle and then gives control of the hardware back to the hypervisor, which puts the thread into nap mode.
* EnergyScale for I/O. Power Systems can now power-off pluggable, PCI adapter slots that are not being utilized, saving approximately 14 watts per slot. The slot is powered off as soon as it is removed from the partion. All POWER6 processor systems support this mode. This is available for hot-pluggable PCI slots only.
* Processor folding. This is a technique that dynamically adjusts the amount of processors dispatched, which try to match the workload. In essence, it increases the energy savings of the system during low to moderate workloads. The tougher the workload, the greater the amount of processors become available. In a way, this is similar to using logical partitioning changes but with much greater efficiency, because it does not impact the configuration of the partition nor processor utilization of the partition itself.

Active Energy Manager

Active Energy Manager (AEM) is the next generation product to PowerExecutive, which was previously only available on x86 systems. Driven by IBM System Director, it allows you to monitor and manage server requirements. When utilized correctly, AEM will allow you to lower power usage on servers, use less power and cooling on the systems, determine power usage for rack components, and perform power/thermal trending and analysis of energy consumption to help with future capacity planning. Starting with version 4.1, it is now the preferred user interface for EnergyScale functions on POWER6 servers and runs from within IBM Director 6.1. The way this works is that one can connect one instance of Active Energy Manager to many other platforms, including System i®, System p®, System z®, and System x®. There are client agents for each type of environment. Some new features as a result of this integration include the ability to configure events for power, temperature and CPU speed, power-save mode for POWER6 servers, extended power capping ranges, and command-line support. It’s also important to note that the IBM System Director Console for AIX is included as part of AIX 6.1 and all you need is a functioning Web browser in order for it to work.

AIX 6.1 – Workload Partitions (WPARs)

Virtualization unquestionably saves a lot of money on power and cooling. The more partitions you can carve on your existing systems, the better utilization you will have. WPAR, a new innovation of AIX 6.1, allow for operating systems virtualization, outside of traditional hypervisor-based logical partitioning. In essence, it allows you to carve up multiple workload environments inside of one host and OS kernel. So you can now have one single instance of AIX 6.1 and using WPARs you can have four different test environments working within that instance, appearing like separate operating system instances. Prior to WPARs, you would need to carve out separate logical partitions (LPARs) within the physical server.

This new feature of AIX 6.1 has the effect of reducing the amount of physical devices necessary to support your logical environments. Though one can conceivably get by with the bare minimum of physical devices for a logical partition, the WPAR is clearly the most efficient means that you can use when creating a new environment. This is purely an AIX innovation, unrelated to the POWER6. Furthermore, Live Application Mobility, another AIX 6.1 innovation, allows you to relocate running WPARs from one LPAR to another. IBM is the first vendor that allows for this feature without having to shut down the application or partition. This helps promote energy savings by allowing datacenter operators to move around workloads in such a way as to allow physical servers to sleep during non-peak periods. This feature is available on Power5™ servers and even Power4™ as well!

Consolidation and virtualization: Servers and datacenter

Unquestionably, server consolidation and virtualization go hand-in-hand. The bottom line is that server consolidation allow users to scale vertically — by consolidating to fewer more scaleable servers, from larger, more inefficient, and scattered traditional server farms. The way it can do this is through PowerVM, IBM’s Power virtualization product, which supports both AIX and Linux® operating systems. Server consolidation means doing the same or more with fewer hardware resources. Fewer hardware resources mean less money to spend on electrical power and cooling for physical devices. IBM has already released significant case studies around their POWER servers, proving how energy savings and POWER go hand-in-hand.

Pacific Gas and Electric consolidated 300 servers into six POWER servers and estimates are in for an 80% reduction in energy consumption (see Resources). Further, IBM’s Door Heat eXchanger water-cooling technology on POWER servers reduced heat by approximately 60%. PowerVM, through IBM’s hypervisor-based virtualization method, allows you to create as many as 10 logical partitions on one physical core. It also supports Symmetric Multi-Threading (SMT), which allows two separate instruction sets to run on the same physical processor — further increasing throughput by approximately 30%, which allows for the ability to function with less hardware.

There has been a trend in recent years away from distributed systems and toward the datacenter, particular with the rise of servers and datacenter consolidation. In the 1980s and early 1990s, a typical datacenter was usually very light, and there were distributed servers all over the place. When businesses realized this was not efficient — there were all sorts of issues from resiliency, to cost of maintenance, to disaster recovery, to systems not being backed up at all — the pendulum started to swing again. What was the effect of this?

The datacenter itself needed to be equipped to handle this change: power, cooling, and footprint. How much does power does a POWER server consume anyway? An IBM p575 weighs as much as a typical car providing 32 kW per hour, which is enough to heat most family homes. IBM has started to offer preconfigured modular datacenters (500 to 1000 square feet) that can actually be configured in less than four months. So how does datacenter consolidation help Green? The fewer datacenters and servers that you maintain, the lower the datacenter costs. Because the POWER architecture supports AIX and Linux, it further allows for many more consolidation opportunities. This is because it allows you to consolidate Linux operating systems around the POWER architecture and away from those commodity PCs that are never maintained properly. A new innovation around PowerVM is PowerVM Lx86, which allows you to run x86 Linux applications on POWER without needing a native compile. This feature really brings forth the ability to consolidate around the Power architecture in a huge way!

IBM: Big Green innovations

The IBM Big Green team applies science, modeling tools, and business expertise to address environmental management opportunities of all types. Among other areas, they are presently working on Advanced Water Management, Alternative Energy, and Computational modeling. Some recent highlights include:

* In mid-March (2009), IBM announced a new Public Sector Energy and Enviremental Diagnostic consulting server and strategic water information management solutions platform — two new initiatives to try to help the environment.
* IBM has just started the strategic carbon management service, a consulting arm that helps business formulate plans around smarter consumption of carbon. It does this by helping companies outline strategic goals around how to reduce energy use and carbon emissions, along with reduced cost. IBM’s goal is to bring emission savings to 50%. Rising energy prices are obviously a big factor. Lastly it has been shown that carbon, a major cause of greenhouse gas, is also a cause of climate change in terms of global warming.

Summary

For years, green computing has been a staple of IBM’s overall datacenter strategy. In recent years, through a myriad of innovations on the midrange, IBM has now brought green computing to Power Systems and AIX. The POWER6 and AIX 6.1 has been the impetus from which IBM has been able to provide many of the green computing initiatives through the past several years. IBM has also integrated technologies such as EnergyScale into their POWER architecture, which further has allowed for green opportunities. Datacenter and server consolidation projects have also been a driving factor towards green computing, as these projects easily leverage many of the benefits of green computing. These benefits include cost savings as well as environmental factors and regulatory drivers. IBM clearly has positioned themselves to continue to be on the forefront of innovation around green computing.

Systems Director 6.1 allows for automation that drives operational agility by increasing responsiveness and the ability to scale quickly and efficiently.

Qualifying Customer Pain-points
• Increased Cost Recurring IT costs for training and maintaining multiple tools in absence of a single interface for managing virtual and physical systems.
• IT Management Complexity and Performance Complex operations results in poor performance and delayed data access. A heterogeneous server and storage environment can lead to increased complexity, costs, low efficiency and inefficient capacity usage.

Why IBM Director
• Reduces the complexity of virtualisation through understanding and communicating the relationship of physical servers to virtual servers
• Reduces the time associated with analysing unavailable systems by providing topology graph views to show relationships between virtual and physical systems and their manageable components to simplify troubleshooting
• Enhances productivity through a simplified easy to use Web-based user interface for management of virtual and physical systems
• Protects IT investments by utilising an open standards-based design that facilitates the management of IBM multisystems environments and select non-IBM systems
• Seamlessly integrates with enterprise management products from IBM Tivoli and other software vendors
• Improves IT efficiency by easily integrating with single system platform management products for AIX, IBM i, System z, System x and even Solaris (!)
• Reduces IT costs for training and maintaining multiple tools by providing one easy to use interface for management of virtual and physical systems
• Reduces systems maintenance window churn by supporting currency for physical and virtual servers as well as operating systems
• Reduces human error by providing automated support of VMware’s Motion based upon physical hardware status information.

The IBM Power™ 550 Express delivers the outstanding performance of the POWER6™ processor—the world’s fastest chip. The performance and virtualization capabilities of the Power 550 Express make it an ideal system as a mid-size database or application server. The Power 550 delivers the performance to run applications faster and more efficiently, which can result in business advantages.

For mid-size database servers, the Power 550 Express provides outstanding performance, capacity and near-continuous application availability. Mid-sized companies can access data faster, keep their applications running around the clock, and focus attention on growing their business.

The Power 550 Express supports an extensive portfolio of proven solutions by supporting multiple operating systems: AIX®, IBM i, Linux for Power and x86 Linux applications. This flexibility in operating environments lets you deploy the applications your business demands.

As a consolidation server, the Power 550 Express provides the flexibility to use leading-edge AIX, IBM i, Linux for Power and x86 Linux applications all on the same system. PowerVM™ Editions offers comprehensive virtualization technologies designed to aggregate and manage resources while helping to simplify and optimize your IT infrastructure and reduce server sprawl.

For a scalable, complete integrated business system, the Power 550 Express allows the mid-sized company seeking simplicity to avoid increased spending and staffing requirements while becoming more responsive to their customers, improving their productivity and keeping their data secure.

The Power 550 Express is a 2-, 4-, 6- or 8-core entry server utilizing 3.5, 4.2 or 5.0 GHz processors and includes tremendous configuration flexibility to meet most capacity and growth requirements. The Power 550 Express offers a choice of operating environments in either a deskside or 4U rack-mount form factor. The platform is designed to deliver outstanding business value to medium-sized businesses with the leadership performance of POWER6 processors, choice of operating systems, proven virtualization capabilities of PowerVM, and support for innovative energy management technologies to help conserve energy and reduce costs. Whether you need a scalable complete business system with integrated database and application server, reliable and efficient server consolidation platform or a high performing system for application or database serving, the Power 550 Express server can fulfill your requirements with the AIX, IBM i or Linux operating systems.

* For distributed UNIX®, IBM i (formerly known as i5/OS®) and Linux® ERP/CRM application servers
* For small database servers
* For small scale consolidation servers for UNIX, IBM i and Linux workloads
* For a complete business system with an integrated database and application server

As a distributed application server, the IBM Power™ 520 Express provides near-continuous application availability at a compelling low price. This allows more work to be processed with less operational disruption for branch office and in-store applications.

As a small database server, the Power 520 Express offers the outstanding performance of the IBM POWER6™ processor—the world’s fastest chip. This leadership performance makes it possible for applications to run faster and be more responsive which can result in significant advantages for your business.

As a small scale consolidation server, the 520 Express provides the flexibility to use leading-edge AIX®, IBM i, Linux for Power and x86 Linux applications all on the same system. IBM PowerVM™ Editions offer comprehensive virtualization technologies designed to aggregate and manage resources while helping to simplify and optimize your IT infrastructure and reduce server sprawl.

For a complete integrated business system, the Power 520 Express allows the small or mid-sized company seeking simplicity to avoid increased spending and staffing requirements while becoming more responsive to their customers, improving their productivity and keeping their data secure. The Power 520 Express—i Edition integrates features to simplify your IT environment and delivers a complete, cost-effective business system that can grow with a business.

The IBM Power 520 Express is a 1-, 2- or 4-core entry server utilizing 4.2 GHz or 4.7 GHz POWER6 processors designed to deliver outstanding business value to smaller and mid-sized businesses while meeting the needs of many mission-critical applications. It offers outstanding price/performance in a commercial IT environment; a breadth of available applications; superior reliability, availability, serviceability (RAS) characteristics architected to avoid, detect and recover from errors to achieve near-continuous availability; EnergyScale™ technologies and software tools to measure energy use and direct policies toward the energy-efficient operation of the server; and outstanding PowerVM virtualization to help achieve increased system utilization. This highly flexible, available and easy to manage server enables companies to spend more time running their business utilizing a proven solution from thousands of ISVs that support the AIX, IBM i and Linux operating systems.

* Easily set dozens of AIX security configuration settings to match external compliance standards
* Includes profiles with recommended system settings for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and the US Department of Defense Security Technical Implementation Guide
* Simple command line interface minimizes training requirements and administrative workload
* Reports that simplify demonstrating compliance
* Support for AIX 6 and AIX V5.3

Insuring system compliance with third party security standards is often a labor intensive and time consuming process.

Compliance standards are typically long, complex documents that are difficult to translate into the appro-priate AIX operating system settings.

And, since standards often encom-pass many different area of operating system configuration, an admin-istrator frequently had to use several different administrative interfaces to configure a system to support standards compliance. The IBM Compliance Expert Ex-press Edition is designed to simplify the administrative effort associated with complying with two common ex-ternal standards.

The Compliance Expert Express Edition consists of a simple com-mand line interface and preconfig-ured compliance profiles for the Payment Card Industry Data Secu-rity Standard Version 2 (PCI DSS) and the US Department of Defense Security Technical Implementation Guide for UNIX (DoD STIG) stan-dards.

Administrators can use the IBM Compliance Expert Express Edition to set all relevant system parame-ters required by these standards.

The profiles include recommended settings for several areas of AIX configuration, including aspects such as minimum password length, password reuse, number of unsuc-cessful login attempts before lockout and other configuration aspects.

The administrator can run reports that show whether the system is configured to be compliant. These reports can alert the administrator to unauthorized parameter changes and to provide a foundation for compliance audits.

All external security standards in-clude aspects outside the realm of system configuration settings. The use of a tool like the IBM Compli-ance Expert Express Edition will not, by itself, insure standards compli-ance. The Compliance Expert is de-signed to simplify the management of systems configuration setting, al-lowing the administrators to focus on the other aspects of standards com-pliance.

Contact Spectrum for further information…

* Monitoring functions include power trending, thermal trending, IBM and non-IBM PDU support, support for facility providers, and energy and environment thresholds.
* Management functions include power capping and power savings modes.

Active Energy Manager is an IBM Systems Director plug-in available for Linux® on System z®, Linux on POWER®, Linux on System x®, AIX®, and Microsoft® Windows® operating systems.

Provides support for:

* IBM BladeCenter®, Power Systems, System x, and System z servers.
* IBM storage systems and non-IBM systems can be monitored through IBM or non-IBM (Raritan, Eaton, APC, Rittal and Avocent) Power Distribution Units (PDU).
* Collecting information from select facility providers including Liebert SiteScan from Emerson Network Power, APC’s InfraStruXture Central from Schneider Electric, and PowerXpert and Forseer from Eaton Corporation.
* Retrieving environmental information via sensors from SynapSense, iButtonLink LLC, Sensatronics, and Arch Rock.
* Power monitoring of SmartWorks SmartWatt meters and SmartWorks SmartSense TH sensors.

The main new features of Active Energy Manager 4.2 include:

* Energy management of updated firmware levels for POWER6™ servers and POWER technology-based server support to aid in power on and off.
* Enhanced facility provider support with APC, Eaton, and Emerson Network Power, enabling energy monitoring of equipment supporting IBM systems.
* Support for users to manually create relationships from systems to cooling and power units in data centers. Power and cooling topologies can now be viewed.
* Enhanced PDU support that enables users to disable and enable outlets on a PDU to help an administrator better control what can be plugged into racks.
* Ability to monitor energy and environment data from PDUs and sensors available from APC, Arch Rock, Avocent, and Rittal.

Active Energy Manager also provides a source of energy management data that can be exploited by Tivoli enterprise solutions such as IBM Tivoli Monitoring. Active Energy Manager is a key component of IBM’s energy-efficient technologies and services and is required for a dynamic infrastructure strategy.
What we offer

Active Energy Manager monitors and manages power consumption and environment data (temperature, humidity, etc) to allow better utilization of available energy resources and facilities equipment. The application software enables you to trend actual power consumption and corresponding environment data on systems running applications in your data center

IBM’s energy management provides an integrated approach across the entire energy spectrum with products that align with your needs.

IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager:

* Increases visibility through additional support of sensors and meters into what systems are supported by what power equipment and flexibility in pre-empting problems
* Communicates with facility management applications that control all power and cooling equipment in a data center, enabling IT administrators to better monitor power issues in real time
* Offers the data and real-time capabilities required to effectively control energy consumption, which helps to reduce costs, and increases reliability in a dynamic infrastructure

Benefits:

* Potential to reduce IT costs
* More efficient planning of new data center construction or modification
* Ability to retrieve environment and power data via wireless and TH sensors
* Support for monitoring temperature and humidity from one-wire sensors, power and thermal sensors
* Ability to collect alerts, events, and data from facility providers related to power and cooling equipment
* Monitor energy usage for non-IBM and legacy systems through IBM and Non-IBM PDU
* Lower power usage on select IBM systems
* Determine power usage for all components of a rack
* Accurate power input sizing based on physical systems
* Justification of incremental hardware purchases based on available input power capacity
* Better utilization of existing resources
* Ability to set thresholds so that alerts can be surfaced when user-specified power or environment values are reached. Automated actions could take place based on those alerts
* Ability to set a power cap for a group of systems
* Plan for the future by viewing trends of power and environment data over time

Call Spectrum today to find out how to reduce costs with Active Energy Manager

Use IBM Systems Director along with IBM Tivoli Software, to help reduce datacenter management headaches and expense.

IBM Systems Director is the next generation platform management solution of IBM Director. It can improve the total cost of ownership and decrease management costs by eliminating the need to maintain multiple tools and improving the utilization of existing IT resources. With IBM Systems Director® 6.1, you can optimize the utilization of the heterogeneous hardware and systems software in your datacenter. This includes IBM Power Systems®, System x™, IBM System z®, and IBM BladeCenter® to IBM Storage Systems® and select non-IBM servers – as well as PowerVM™ to VMWare® to zVM®, from AIX® and IBM i® and Linux® to Microsoft Windows®™.

IBM® Systems Director 6.1 is the systems management foundation that streamlines the way physical and virtual systems are managed across a multi-system environment. IBM Systems Director 6.1 is an easy to use, point and click, simplified management solution. Through a single user interface, IBM Systems Director provides consistent views for visualizing managed systems, determining how these systems relate to one another while showing their individual status. This helps you to correlate technical resources with your business needs.

A key feature of IBM Systems Director is IBM® Systems Director VMControl V2.2. VMControl represents a transformation from managing virtualization to using virtualization to better manage your IT infrastructure. VMControl V2.2 simplifies the management of virtual environments across multiple virtualization technologies and hardware platforms, freeing you from ‘silos of virtualization’ and delivering enterprise-wide visibility and control. A leading multi-platform virtualization management solution, VMControl is now available in three Editions (Express, Standard or Enterprise) to best match your virtualized environment.

IBM Systems Director provides the base function needed for platform management. Advanced platform management functions can be seamlessly added to IBM Systems Director as they are required. Based upon industry standards, IBM Systems Director can report results to other tools. IBM provides solutions and enhanced system and service management integration to drive greater operational, virtualization and energy efficiency for a dynamic infrastructure. Together, IBM Systems Director and Tivoli can deliver a set of unified offerings that help companies manage and align virtual systems, servers and storage resources needed for cloud computing.

IBM Systems Director 6.1 is being enhanced with new functions including support for programming interfaces which provides a comprehensive Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to manage your data center. By utilizing REST API interfaces, IBM Systems Director resource monitoring/management and events are supported across multiple platforms providing a ecosystem around IBM Systems Director platform management capabilities.

Key features of IBM Systems Director 6.1:

* Unifies the management of IBM systems, delivering a consistent look and feel for common management tasks.
* Integrates IBM’s best-of-breed virtualization capabilities to provide new and radically improved ways to simplify the management of physical and virtual platform resources
* Provides essential platform management support for all IBM servers, storage and network devices (discovery, inventory, health, maintenance updates, configuration, automation, remote control, etc.)
* Includes an extendable and modular foundation to advance the core systems management capabilities with additional plug-ins
* Enables seamless integration of IBM systems with the total infrastructure
* Facilitates reduced training cost by providing a consistent and unified platform management foundation and user interface
* Manages non-IBM x86-based systems through a dedicated agent
* Enables integration of IBM Systems into data center management tools from Tivoli and other 3rd parties
* REST web services for application integration with Systems Director

This IBM® Redpaper™ is a comprehensive guide covering the Power 550 server. The goal of this paper is to introduce the innovative Power 550. It introduces major hardware offerings and discusses their prominent functions, including: o The POWER6 processor available at frequencies of 3.5 GHz, 4.2 GHz, and 5.0 GHz. o The specialized POWER6 DDR2 memory that provides greater bandwidth, capacity, and reliability. o The 1 Gb or 10 Gb Integrated Virtual Ethernet adapter that brings native hardware virtualization to this server o EnergyScale technology that provides features such as power trending, power-saving, capping of power, and thermal measurement o PowerVM Live Partition Mobility o Mainframe continuous availability brought to the UNIX environment This Redpaper expands the current set of IBM System p documentation by providing a desktop reference that offers a detailed technical description of the 550 system. This Redpaper does not replace the latest marketing materials and tools. It is intended as an additional source of information that, together with existing sources, may be used to enhance your knowledge of IBM server solutions.

• Redpaper – IBM Power 520 Technical Overview

This IBM Redpaper publication is a comprehensive guide covering the IBM Power 520 server, machine type model 8203-E4A. The goal of this paper is to introduce this innovative server that includes IBM System i and IBM System p and new hardware technologies. The major hardware offerings include: – The POWER6 processor, available at frequencies of 4.2 GHz and 4.7 GHz. – Specialized POWER6 DDR2 memory that provides greater bandwidth, capacity, and reliability. – The 1 Gb or 10 Gb Integrated Virtual Ethernet adapter that brings native hardware virtualization to this server. – EnergyScale technology that provides features such as power trending, power-saving, capping of power, and thermal measurement. – PowerVM virtualization technology. – Mainframe continuous availability brought to the entry server environment. This Redpaper expands the current set of IBM Power System documentation by providing a desktop reference that offers a detailed technical description of the Power 520 system. This Redpaper does not replace the latest marketing materials and tools. It is intended as an additional source of information that, together with existing sources, can be used to enhance your knowledge of IBM server solutions.

IBM offers a wide range of technical education in the IT industry in Australia, as well as flexible
delivery options to meet your scheduling and budgeting needs. Curriculum & delivery – classroom or
remote lab instructor can be tailored to fit the requirements of your organisation. Below is a summary
of IBM’s curriculum & delivery options.

Curriculum & Delivery Options
IBM Training has three categories of formal education offering:

* Classroom based training

Open Enrolment Courses
Open Enrolment Courses On Demand

Dedicated Courses
Customised Courses

* E-learning – screen based, browser delivered, self paced education

* Instructor Led Online (ILO) Courses.

Contact Spectrum Consulting for further information (09) 826 5588

IBM Training Schedule Jan-Jul 2010