This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

10 Years adding value to IBM Power Systems

AUCKLAND, NZ – October 26, 2011 – Spectrum Consulting, a professional services company that provides value-add solutions around IBM Power Systems and Storage is turning 10 next month. Spectrum started from humble beginnings on the 7th November 2001 and by focusing on providing turn-key solutions on IBM Power Systems has seen year on year growth. Spectrum partners very closely with IBM which enables us to add more value around IBM Power Systems infrastructure from systems design / architecture through to implementation and migrations (including Disaster Recovery)

“Our business has really evolved with the technology over the years and the opportunity for customers to benefit from IBM Power Systems has never been stronger” said managing directer and founder of Spectrum Consulting -Paul Tomlinson. “We started in 2001 with the mission to be the best IBM UNIX solutions provider in New Zealand and this goal is becoming clearer as we win more and more customers who wish to get the best out of their IBM Power Systems”

Spectrum Consulting credits its contined growth to a strong customer base, excellent value-add services offering using the highest level of skills in New Zealand. Spectrums focus has enabled it to become the boutique vendor of choice when customers are looking for IBM Power Systems solutions.

 Promotion Bundle

Power 720
4 Core 3.0 Ghz
16GB Memory
1 * 146GB SAS Drive
4 Processor Activations
IBM AIX Standard Edition V7.1
4 Processor Licence for PowerVM Standard Edition
IBM Systems Director Standard Edition
3 Years PowerVM SE SW Maintenance
3 years Hardware and Software Maintenance

List Price $31,221.00

Promo Hardware Price $15,395.00+GST

plus Spectrum Installation – $4,600.00+GST   (Includes up to 25 hours support to be used for installation, configuration etc)

Total cost $19,995.00+GST

Orders must be placed here by 15 December 2011.

We will contact you to sign an offical order form within 24 hours…

IBM System P was selected as the platform of choice due to its favourable ROI and low risk to the business.

Spectrum Consulting played a major role in the scoping and capacity planning exercise, and we chose them as our IBM partner to commission the new hardware.

They displayed a high level of expertise and professionalism and I would recommend them to prospective clients without hesitation.

Jeffrey Westcott

ICT Manager

Briscoe Group Limited

36 Taylors Road, Morningside, P O Box 884, Auckland, New Zealand

The following recognition will be made at the Awards Evening on 10 March 2011:

• Power Business Partner of the Year
• System Storage Business Partner of the Year
• System x Business Partner of the Year
• Software Business Partner of the Year

Spectrum was the winner of the:
2010 Power Business Partner of the Year

Six resellers were given awards in recognition of “revenue attainment, ease of doing business with IBM, year-on-year growth in IBM business, participation in the channel programs, enablement, co-marketing and innovation,” according to Raymond Skoglund, IBM’s New Zealand channel manager.

IBM BP Awards logo

Auckland, NZ – Mar 4th, 2011 – Spectrum Consulting, New Zealand premier provider of IBM Power Systems sales and support was announced today as a finalist in the Dynamic Infrastructure category of the 2010 IBM Business Partner Awards for its storage solution at Weta Productions in Wellington, New Zealand.

“Congratulations to all of the IBM Business Partner finalists,” says Raymond Skoglund, IBM New Zealand’s channel manager. “This year’s finalists have all demonstrated an ability to readily identify the business requirements of their customers and then deliver solutions that add significant value. This year we have seen customers develop new revenue streams, enhance visibility into their planning processes and increase performance while reducing costs and mitigating risk. The high quality of all of the submissions have made the selection difficult indeed and we are extremely pleased to have such talented people and innovative organizations as our IBM Business Partners.”

What is Dynamic Infrastructure?
A Dynamic Infrastructure is designed for today’s instrumented world, helping clients integrate the growing intelligent business infrastructure with the necessary underlying design of a flexible, secure and seamlessly managed IT infrastructure.

A Dynamic Infrastructure:

• Helps reduce operational cost and complexity, and achieve breakthrough productivity gains through virtualisation, optimisation and energy efficiency.
• Addresses today’s security, business continuity and compliance challenges, and helps prepare for the new risks posed by a connected and collaborative world
• Allows companies to quickly respond to customers’ needs today and add new applications and technologies for future growth.

Organisations supported by a dynamic infrastructure can deliver superior business and IT services with agility and speed.

PROJECT: Weta Workshop has massive requirements for storage as they ‘render’ the millions and millions of images that go into creating award-winning animated television shows. But their infrastructure couldn’t scale fast or far enough to support their anticipated High Definition workloads. Spectrum Consulting specified and assisted in the installation of the IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) solution, one of the first such implementations worldwide. Weta Workshop can now produce significantly more rendered sequences than before and now has the capacity to take on additional projects.

About the IBM Business Partner Awards

The IBM NZ Business Partner Awards, in association with Reseller News, recognise and reward the achievements of IBM Business Partners and IT resellers who are leading the way by helping to deliver smarter solutions, whether through outstanding industry knowledge, superior service or timely delivery of IT solutions. The awards are for Business Partners who are leading the charge and have delivered unique and innovative solutions that have raised the standard for business excellence and customer satisfaction. Winners will be announced in Auckland on 10 March, and will be published in the Reseller News 18 March 2011 edition. For more information please visit www.bpawards.co.nz.

Auckland, New Zealand – 02 Feb 2011: Auckland, New Zealand – 02 February 2011, IBM announced today that New Zealand Blood Service (NZBS) is shifting its national blood management system from SUN servers to IBM Power 750 systems. The deal delivers NZBS much higher computing performance which, combined with a major software upgrade, will help improve resilience and ultimately help streamline blood collection and transfusion processes across the country.

NZ Blood Service is currently implementing a new feature rich version of its blood management software, Progesa. eProgesa will coordinate every stage of blood bank management, from collection to transfusion. IBM recently assisted the Netherlands’ national blood service with a similar upgrade.

This is the first POWER7 server implementation in New Zealand and was carried out by IBM Business Partner Spectrum Consulting.

“We chose POWER7 servers after a competitive evaluation based on our need to improve resiliency and redundancy, while also meeting criteria for capacity, scalability and pricing,” says NZ Blood Service eProgesa upgrade project manager John Cox. “IBM’s experience advising the Netherlands’ national blood service gave us the additional benefit of relevant international expertise.”

“Ensuring safety and security of blood supply is mission critical for New Zealand Blood Service and this significant upgrade enhances the disaster recovery facilities available,” says Andrew Fox, Systems & Technology Group Manager, IBM New Zealand. “Making collection as easy as possible for its donors is an important part of ensuring a continuous supply.”

The eProgesa system provides a front-end to a database which records details of roughly 125,000 active donors, results of tests carried out on every donation, and details of the eventual recipients of the blood and other products. It also manages  hospital orders and tracks movement and storage of donations from their collection point, through testing and delivery nationwide.

This technical white paper demonstrates the extent of the performance lead that PowerVM enjoys over x86-based add-on virtualization products, by running identical virtualized workload benchmarks on comparable POWER7- and Intel-based systems. The benchmark results show the dramatic improvements that can be expected when deploying virtualized workloads on Power Systems servers, compared to the performance of those same workloads on x86-based platforms running using a third-party virtualization product such as VMware vSphere 4. Key findings include the following:

* PowerVM on Power 750 performs up to 65% better than VMware
* PowerVM on Power 750 scales to four times more virtual CPUs than VMware in a virtual machine
* PowerVM on Power 750 scales linearly to use all CPUs, while VMware does not

It is clear from the published benchmark results that PowerVM on POWER7-based platforms not only offers vastly superior scalability than VMware vSphere on Intel x86-based servers, but it also makes more efficient use of system resources and imposes a negligible impact on performance. Many of these advantages relate to the fact that PowerVM is built directly into the firmware of all Power Systems servers, as opposed to x86-based virtualization products such as VMware vSphere, which are typically third-party software add-ons that are sold and installed separately.

In summary, the benchmark results published in this white paper prove that PowerVM on POWER7 platforms offers a far superior virtualization solution than VMware vSphere on Intel x86 platforms, with higher performance, broader scalability and increased flexibility.

View full report ‘A Comparison of PowerVM and VMware Virtualization Performance’ (175KB)

IBM PowerVM provides industrial-strength virtualization for Power Systems™ servers running AIX, IBM i, and Linux operating systems. PowerVM now features Active Memory Sharing, the technology that allows you to intelligently exchange memory between running partitions for increased optimization of physical memory resources. Active Memory Sharing enables the sharing of a pool of physical memory among logical partitions (LPARs) on a single server, helping to increase memory utilization and drive down system costs.

This paper provides a high-level overview of Active Memory Sharing including an overview of its capabilities, a description of its benefits, and examples of good candidate workloads as well as usage considerations.

Active Memory Sharing Whitepaper

Overview of shared memory

Shared memory is physical memory that is assigned to the shared memory pool and shared among multiple logical partitions. The shared memory pool is a defined collection of physical memory blocks that are managed as a single memory pool by the hypervisor. Logical partitions that you configure to use shared memory (hereafter referred to as shared memory partitions) share the memory in the pool with other shared memory partitions.

For example, you create a shared memory pool with 16 GB of physical memory. You then create three logical partitions, configure them to use shared memory, and activate the shared memory partitions. Each shared memory partition can use the 16 GB that are in the shared memory pool.

The hypervisor determines the amount of memory allocated from the shared memory pool to each shared memory partition based on the workload and memory configuration of each shared memory partition. When allocating the physical memory to the shared memory partitions, the hypervisor ensures that each shared memory partition can access only the memory allocated to the shared memory partition at any given time. A shared memory partition cannot access the physical memory allocated to another shared memory partition.

The amount of memory that you assign to the shared memory partitions can be greater than the amount of memory in the shared memory pool. For example, you can assign 12 GB to shared memory partition 1, 8 GB to shared memory partition 2, and 4 GB to shared memory partition 3. Together, the shared memory partitions use 24 GB of memory, but the shared memory pool has only 16 GB of memory. In this situation, the memory configuration is considered overcommitted.

Overcommitted memory configurations are possible because the hypervisor virtualizes and manages all of the memory for the shared memory partitions in the shared memory pool as follows:

1. When shared memory partitions are not actively using their memory pages, the hypervisor allocates those unused memory pages to shared memory partitions that currently need them. When the sum of the physical memory currently used by the shared memory partitions is less than or equal to the amount of memory in the shared memory pool, the memory configuration is logically overcommitted. In a logically overcommitted memory configuration, the shared memory pool has enough physical memory to contain the memory used by all shared memory partitions at one point in time. The hypervisor does not need to store any data in auxiliary storage.

2. When a shared memory partition requires more memory than the hypervisor can provide to it by allocating unused portions of the shared memory pool, the hypervisor stores some of the memory that belongs to a shared memory partition in the shared memory pool and stores the remainder of the memory that belongs to the shared memory partition in auxiliary storage. When the sum of the physical memory currently used by the shared memory partitions is greater than the amount of memory in the shared memory pool, the memory configuration is physically overcommitted. In a physically overcommitted memory configuration, the shared memory pool does not have enough physical memory to contain the memory used by all the shared memory partitions at one point in time. The hypervisor stores the difference in auxiliary storage. When the operating system attempts to access the data, the hypervisor might need to retrieve the data from auxiliary storage before the operating system can access it.

Because the memory that you assign to a shared memory partition might not always reside in the shared memory pool, the memory that you assign to a shared memory partition is logical memory. Logical memory is the address space, assigned to a logical partition, that the operating system perceives as its main storage. For a shared memory partition, a subset of the logical memory is backed up by physical main storage (or physical memory from the shared memory pool) and the remaining logical memory is kept in auxiliary storage.

A Virtual I/O Server logical partition provides access to the auxiliary storage, or paging space devices, required for shared memory partitions in an overcommitted memory configuration. A paging space device is a physical or logical device that is used by a Virtual I/O Server to provide the paging space for a shared memory partition. The paging space is an area of nonvolatile storage used to hold portions of a shared memory partition’s logical memory that do not reside in the shared memory pool. When the operating system that runs in a shared memory partition attempts to access data, and the data is located in the paging space device that is assigned to the shared memory partition, the hypervisor sends a request to a Virtual I/O Server to retrieve the data and write it to the shared memory pool so that the operating system can access it.

On systems that are managed by a Hardware Management Console (HMC), you can assign up to two Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) logical partitions to the shared memory pool at a time (hereafter referred to as paging VIOS partitions). When you assign two paging VIOS partitions to the shared memory pool, you can configure the paging space devices such that both paging VIOS partitions have access to the same paging space devices. When one paging VIOS partition becomes unavailable, the hypervisor sends a request to the other paging VIOS partition to retrieve the data on the paging space device.

You cannot configure paging VIOS partitions to use shared memory. Paging VIOS partitions do not use the memory in the shared memory pool. You assign paging VIOS partitions to the shared memory pool so that they can provide access to the paging space devices for the shared memory partitions that are assigned to the shared memory pool.

Driven by workload demands from the shared memory partitions, the hypervisor manages overcommitted memory configurations by continually performing the following tasks:

* Allocating portions of physical memory from the shared memory pool to the shared memory partitions as needed
* Requesting a paging VIOS partition to read and write data between the shared memory pool and the paging space devices as needed

The ability to share memory among multiple logical partitions is known as the PowerVM™ Active Memory Sharing technology. The PowerVM Active Memory Sharing technology is available with the PowerVM Enterprise Edition for which you must obtain and enter a PowerVM Editions activation code.

Active Memory Expansion relies on compression of in-memory data to increase the amount of data that can be placed into memory and thus expand the effective memory capacity of a POWER7 system. The in-memory data compression is managed by the system, and this compression is transparent to applications and users.

Active Memory Expansion is configurable on a per-logical partition (LPAR) basis. Thus, Active Memory Expansion can be selectively enabled for one or more LPAR’s on a system.

When Active Memory Expansion is enabled for a LPAR, the operating system will compress a portion of the LPAR’s memory and leave the remaining portion of memory uncompressed. This results in memory effectively being broken up into two pools – a compressed pool and an uncompressed pool. The operating system will dynamically vary the amount of memory that is compressed based on the workload and the configuration of the LPAR.

Because Active Memory Expansion relies on memory compression, some additional CPU utilization will be consumed when Active Memory Expansion is in-use. The amount of additional CPU utilization needed for Active Memory Expansion will vary based on the workload and the level of memory expansion being used.

System Requirements
Active Memory Expansion is supported across all POWER7 systems. In order to use Active Memory Expansion, the following minimum levels of software are required:

• HMC: V7R7.1.0.0
• eFW: 7.1
• AIX: 6.1 TL4 SP2