August 2005

[26-Aug-2005]
Detecting the dreaded QFUL:   I run this command procedure regularly to detect the dreaded QFUL condition on HSG80 controllers. $ say := write sys$output... (269 words, 2 comments, 0 pings)

[24-Aug-2005]
Pros and cons of consolidation:   This morning, we had a fibrechannel adapter go flaky in one of the GS160s that is now supporting the production cluster. By the time the system had finished dumping memory and I had diagnosed the cause of the crash, it was too late to replace the card, as this necessitates shutting down the other Galaxy instances on this GS160. This is the downside of consolidation. For the benefit of being able to dynamically reassign CPUs, and the speed that shared memory brings to cluster communications, you have to put up with not being able to correct a hardware issue unless you shut down the entire hard partition. In this case, the entire machine. (137 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[22-Aug-2005]
IBM has the right idea:   and are working to enhance the visibility of z/OS. HP have had the same software capabilities in OpenVMS for a long time: TCP/IP, web services, Java, etc, etc, but are terrible at promoting the benefits of the operating system. Come on, HP. Take a lesson from you main rival and start doing some of the things mentioned in this article. The alternative is watching OpenVMS become even more marginalized than it already is. (74 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[15-Aug-2005]
GS160 performance:   On paper, the switch from the six AlphaServer GS140s to the two GS160s should have given us approximately 50% improvement in MIPS. Additionally, the GS160s have significantly more memory that the GS140s. Both of these things should be great for a performance boost because with over 4000 users normally logged into the front ends sucking up all the memory, and ad-hoc batch queries bottlenecking the back end CPUs, the GS160s are just what the doctor ordered. (135 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[14-Aug-2005]
GS160 cutover:   Today we logically moved the production cluster from the six GS140s to the two GS160s that I freed up with the move of the data warehouse cluster. (108 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[01-Aug-2005]
GS160s (finally) under test:   The AlphaServer GS160s that I freed up by moving the cluster that was hosted on them onto some brand spanking new GS1280s have now been reconfigured and replumbed into the SAN. Today, I booted them off a copy of the production cluster's system disk, and finally got UETP running on them. This time I don't have the luxury of a couple of switches I could just unplug from the rest of the network, so they are testing without network access. However, I know that the ports work from the previous installation, and I am more interested in stressing out the PCI cards that we moved around. (107 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)