I recently performed some Live Partition Mobility (LPM) testing for a customer, and ran into a number of problems – see Part 1 of this post for the full story on all of the problems and solutions. The most complicated problem required us to investigate our SAN...
Live Partition Mobility (LPM) is not a new feature for IBM Power servers, but I recently revisited it, and discovered some interesting problems (and solutions) that I wanted to share, to help anyone else that might run into the same issues. I hadn’t touched Live...
This blog entry presents a basic introduction to Oracle execution plans. What exactly is an Oracle execution plan? An execution plan consists of the steps that the database server will take to accomplish a DML statement, e.g. SELECT, INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE, etc....
While Oracle has been responsible for bringing many revolutionary features to the enterprise RDBMS market throughout its 38+ year history, recent releases have left me scratching my head in wonder. As a UNIX/AIX Sysadmin as well as an Oracle DBA, I thought I’d...
So IBM has released details on the new mid-ranged POWER 8 system – and it’s awesome! I’ve always felt, ever since POWER8 was GA, that there was a gap between the low(er) end systems and the high-end systems. This has been answered with the new POWER8 E850. It’s...
When most people think of computing data storage, they think in terms of USB thumb drives, recordable CDs and DVDs and, of course, cloud storage solutions. Such storage options work very well when it comes to personal computing data. However, when it comes to...
As IT professionals, we're always looking for ways to get the best performance out of our systems. On the systems side, much of the focus on optimizing performance is placed at the operating system layer (CPU attributes, memory tuning, I/O related tuning, etc)....
IT business storage requirements today must adhere to a labyrinth of confusing and contradictory government- and industry-decreed regulations. Increasingly, every bit and byte of data has to be categorized and stored to protect a business from any number of “what...
In the 1958 film “The Blob,” the blob begins as a small alien creature brought to earth via a meteorite, but it quickly begins consuming every human it contacts and becomes ever larger and voracious with each victim. There are many parallels that can be drawn...
I think it's important to stress your hardware as much as possible. It's kind of like when you buy a new car, you always punch the gas a little bit to see what the thing can do! Likewise, with your enterprise hardware, you want to give it a little gas. What I like...
