Spectrum adds value through Power Systems Audit
15 September 2009
The technical team at Spectrum Consulting recently finished a Power Systems Audit of a large publicly listed company in NZ. The audit looked at the Power Systems Hardware, Virtualization, AIX Logical Partitions, and the attached IBM SAN / Storage Servers. The environment was absolutely mission-critical to the business, running the core business applications.
The customer didn’t have the skills to implement the SAP on IBM Power Systems solution. They had simply trusted a NZ ‘Tier 1 Reseller’ to implement the solution correctly. After the implementation the customer was not provided with any documentation and therefore had a poor understanding of their environment simply believing it to be setup correct.
During the audit Spectrum discovered three separate configuration errors (Single Points of Failure) in the implementation which could have resulted in major disruption and huge losses for the entire company.
1.) The Virtual I/O server which provided the Operating System disks for the production LPARS had not been mirrored. This meant that the failure of a single hard drive would have taken 4 production systems offline.
2.) The main production LPAR had itself not been mirrored. Again the failure of a single drive would have resulted in the customer’s production system going down. Given this LPAR’s storage was being provided by the un-mirrored Virtual I/O server the risk was doubled!
3.) A production LPAR was mirrored with both copies of the mirror on the same physical hard drive. This poor implementation again meant that the loss of a single hard drive or SCSI adapter would have resulted in the failure of the LPAR.
These systems were implemented almost three years ago and the customer was totally shocked to find their production systems not configured correctly. The customer is grateful that Spectrum undertook the system audit, immediately notifying them of the issues and fixing them promptly.
The customer has engaged with Spectrum to support their IBM AIX / Power Systems environment moving forward…
If you are responsible for IBM Power Systems and would like Spectrum to audit your environment please call us today… +64 9 826 5588
Paul Tomlinson
Managing Director
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