Thomas B. Mathias

IBM zEnterprise energy management

Data centers are facing serious energy challenges. Increasing energy costs make the operation and cooling of servers more significant cost factors. Furthermore, improvements in technology have led to processor chips and systems with rapidly increasing power density. The resulting power consumption and cooling requirements of these systems are pushing many existing data centers to the limits of their power distribution capability and cooling capacity. Improvements in energy efficiency and management are needed at the chip and the system level to counteract this trend. This paper provides a comprehensive description of the hardware and firmware improvements implemented with IBM zEnterprise® 196 to stop the growth of and even reduce its energy footprint compared with previous IBM System z® servers. These include more power-efficient chips; power conversion and distribution; new sensors; cooling control firmware; new energy management functions; integrated hybrid energy management for power saving and power capping across the whole hybrid system; and data center energy-efficiency improvements resulting from options for water cooling, high-voltage DC (HVDC) power, and overhead cabling.

SCSI initial program loading for zSeries

This paper describes a new kind of initial program loading (IPL) for IBM zSeries® servers. The new IPL protocol expands the set of input/output devices that can be used during IPL to include Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) Fibre Channel protocol (FCP) disk devices (SCSI disks). We begin by describing several new challenges resulting from the use of SCSI disks during IPL, followed by a brief overview of new concepts we have applied to the IPL process to overcome these challenges. We continue with a step-by-step description of the processes executed during SCSI IPL, the tools used, the disk format, the parameters required, and related topics. Since SCSI IPL is supported for virtual machines instantiated by the z/VM® operating system, some unique features of this capability are described. Finally, we describe a variation of SCSI IPL that enables the contents of memory to be dumped onto a SCSI disk.

Flash storage integration in the IBM System z EC12 I/O drawer

Flash storage is integrated for the first time on System z® as a card in the EC12 I/O drawer. This provides a number of functions and benefits in the immediate product, in addition to laying a foundation for further system benefits in future generations of System z systems. Enabling flash MLC (multilevel cell) technology as SCM (storage class memory) in an enterprise-class product required myriad diverse individual technological advances, together with a series of system design features. Extreme care and attention were paid to ensure that the required level of System z reliability was maintained. As with legacy I/O, the programming interface is subchannel-based. The subchannel programming interface is expanded with new architecture via the extended asynchronous-data-move facility. Operating system changes were required to enable exploitation of the features that this new system technology offers. These individual hardware, firmware, and software design aspects are described in this paper, along with the overall functionality and system-level value of this new technology.

Autonomic computing and IBM system z10 active resource monitoring

Among the essential components of the IBM System z10™ platform is the hardware management console (HMC) and the IBM System z™ support element (SE). Both the SE and the HMC are closed fixed-function computer systems that include an operating system, many middleware open-source packages, and millions of lines of C, C++, and Java™ application code developed by IBM. The code on the SE and HMC is required to remain operational without a restart or reboot over long periods of time. In the first step toward the autonomic computing goal of continuous operation, an integrated, automatic software resource monitoring program has been implemented and integrated in the SE and HMC to look for resource, performance, and operational problems, and, when appropriate, initiate recovery actions. This paper describes the embedded resource monitoring program in detail. Included are the types of resources being monitored, the algorithms and frequency used for the monitoring, the information that is collected when a resource problem is detected, and actions executed as a result. It also covers the types of problems the resource monitoring program has detected so far and improvements that have been made on the basis of empirical evidence.

Power and thermal monitoring for the IBM system z10

In May 2007, IBM announced Project Big Green, an initiative M. R. Vanderwiel designed to accelerate the adoption of green technologies and services in order to make data centers more energy efficient. An integral part of this strategy is to enable power and thermal monitoring on all IBM server platforms. The IBM System z10e server delivers these capabilities and is the first system in its class on the market to provide this functionality. This paper introduces the z10e power and thermal monitoring architecture and provides an end-to-end view of the underlying technology, from reading voltage and current to visualizing trending information in the Active Energy Manager extension to IBM Director.