SAP on IBM Power – RedHat Edition

On this page we are collecting information and links regarding SAP and Redhat on IBM Power!

TCO Linux on Power
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/systems/lowering-tco-with-linux-on-ibm-power-systems/

IDC White Paper
Who Can Benefit from SAP HANA Database ans S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems?

https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/W4VKZJMO

“Since late 2015, SAP HANA has also been available on IBM Power Systems with IBM’s innovative IBM Power Systems architecture and processors, and IBM says that to date it has more than 3,000customers running SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems. IDC believes that IBM Power Systems is a strong differentiator for SAP HANA and S/4HANA. IBM Power Systems is designed for very data-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA, with powerful built-in virtualization that is SAP certified aswell as numerous reliability features”

References – Redhat + SAP

Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH
https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/blanc-und-fischer-it-services-systems-hardware-sap

Metalloinvest

https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/metalloinvest/
By adopting the SAP S/4HANA platform, Metalloinvest was able to shut down 100 IT systems and slash operating costs. More than 7,000 employees are using the new platform, which has improved efficiency and manageability. More than 2,400 employees use the SAP S/4HANA platform daily to plan and execute more than 34,000 maintenance orders each month.

Targeted audience (From IDC Whitepaper)

Businesses with SAP HANA Appliances Due for a Refresh

“Many businesses started their SAP HANA journey as many as six years ago with SAP HANA appliances on commodity architecture. This was the only solution available at the time. Those businesses are now facing a costly scale-out expansion or possibly a complete technology refresh”

Businesses on Commodity Architecture Moving to SAP HANA

“Businesses that are running their datacenter on commodity architecture that have not yet moved to SAP HANA have a choice between appliances on commodity architecture and IBM Power Systems. Even if they have never had IBM Power Systems in the datacenter, bringing the platform in today provides a powerful Linux system with significant processor benefits.”

Businesses with a Traditional Database and SAP Applications onIBM Power Systems

“There are many businesses that run their SAP business applications on IBM Power Systems with a traditional database, such as Oracle or DB2. For them, a move to SAP HANA (BW on SAP HANA, Suite on SAP HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, or SAP S/4HANA) involves their mission-critical processes and data. On the other hand, migrating to SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems will provide businesses with a significant database performance boost, easier administration and processing of vast volumes of business data, and faster user response time for transactional in-memory processing”

Businesses on IBM Power Systems That Currently Do Not Have SAP
“Many of these businesses prefer to remain on IBM Power Systems because they are invested and know IBM Power Systems, which makes migration easier. What’s more, once they have started a discussion to migrate off their traditional relational database management system (RDBMS), they are typically not looking to replace it with another traditional RDBMS. This essentially leaves them with two options: an open source database solution (e.g., EnterpriseDB) or SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems”

Businesses with On-Premises SAP Apps That Want to Expand Off Premises

“SAP expects its customers to move to a cloud or hybrid cloud model. Businesses can extend their environment to IBM Cloud using Power Virtual Servers. IBM Cloud provides a wide varietyof SAP-certified options for running SAP workloads, including IBM Power Systems. SAP infrastructure services are available in 58 IBM Cloud datacenters around the globe”

AIX Certification Preparation

There is a new certification in place for AIX admins and we would like with this post try to help you get a better grip of what you need to know and how to acquire the right skills to become certified.

There are different ways of learning stuff as always. Courses are one way but reading Redbooks and other documents could be a good alternative and/or complement. Most links are taken from the original landing page for the certification, but we’ve added a bunch of other good links that hopefully helps in your journey to become certified.

(IBM Champion Dmitry Mironow has written about the certification process and gives some tips in THIS ARTICLE)

IBM AIX v7 Administrator Specialty

You can get a sample test HERE

By IBM recommended courses:

AIX Basics (Course code AN10DG)

Power Systems for AIX II AIX Implementation and Administration (Course code AN12G)

Pre-reqs for AN12G:

AN10G: AIX Basics

AN11G:Power Systems for AIX I: LPAR Configuration and Planning

Power Systems for AIX III: Advanced Administration and Problem Determination (Course code AN15G)

Pre-reqs for AN15G
AN11G: Power Systems for AIX I: LPAR Configuration and Planning
AN12G: Power Systems for AIX II AIX Implementation and Administration

AIX Network Installation Management Concepts and Configuration (Course code AN22G)

Pre-reqs for AN22G
https://www.ibm.com/training/course/AN11G
https://www.ibm.com/training/course/AN12G

Areas and objectives in the exam

System Management

Related Link

  • Set user’s environment
  • Create and troubleshoot a shell script
  • Connect to AIX system console
  • Create and verify a system backup using mksysb, volume group backups with savevg,
  • Manage file backups and file archives
  • Define AIX management tools including SMIT
  • Manage devices and attributes
  • Document the systems configuration
  • Identify the LPAR configuration
  • Manage system time
  • Manage services using System Resource Controller (SRC)
  • Start and stop programs / scripts in /etc/rc.local etc
  • Manage the AIX boot and shutdown sequence
  • Manage root email
  • Define the process lifecycle and priorities
  • Scheduling execution of commands using cron, at, batch

Software Management

Related Link

  • Install AIX fixes and updates
  • Manage open source packages with rpm
  • Use NIM

Storage Management

Related Link

  • Explain the LVM terminology
  • Manage volume groups
  • Manage root volume group specific tasks
  • Manage logical volumes
  • Manage file systems
  • Manage raw physical volumes

System & Network Security

Related Links

  • Log-in to AIX and configure SSH
  • Manage basic system security
  • Manage users and groups
  • Explain file permissions

Network Management

Related Link

  • Manage basic IP configuration
  • Manage hosts and name resolution order
  • Manage network services with inetd
  • Mount and export NFS

Performance Management & Tuning

Related Link

  • Define performance bottlenecks
  • Explain the difference between logical, physical and virtual CPU
  • Define basic VMM concepts
  • Monitor usage of memory
  • Expand and monitor usage of the paging space
  • Define basic IO performance concepts
  • Display system tunables

Problem Determination & Management

Related link

  • Monitor for hardware and software messages using errpt, syslog and alog
  • Define the requirements to generate files for IBM support
  • Troubleshoot client log-in issues
  • Troubleshoot boot errors
  • Boot AIX from an external source
  • Troubleshoot the file system
  • Use diag for basic troubleshooting and maintenance

Cost advantages of running Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Systems

Download here: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/26A6ONYL

This paper examines Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) running on IBM® Power Systems as an effective platform for application modernization for a hybrid cloud environment. IBM tests show that the same multi-tier online transaction processing(OLTP)workloads on Red Hat OpenShift,running IBM WebSphere®Hybrid Edition on an IBM E950 Power System,can process 3.2x more transactions per second and can reduce the cost per transaction in a three-year TCO modelby 53%versus compared x86 servers. In addition to reducing IT costs, IBM Power Systems provide other benefits such as resiliency, security and scalability that are requisites for enterprise IT.

rhop

Infor M3 runs best on IBM i

Yesterday (May 17th 2021) the Swedish user group for Infor M3 (and Movex) arranged a webinar with focus on IBM i for the first time in many years.

The message from the huge ERP vendor has shifted slightly from “Cloud only” to “you are ok if you run our software anywhere actually”. This opens up for a lot of good things for the very strong M3 on IBM i community who until now has hasited to invest in infrastructure as the previous message was very clear from Infor. The problem with that message was that many of their clients didn’t either want to go to any public cloud (Infor runs on AWS) or actually couldn’t for a number of reasons (compliance is just one of them).

Anyway, back to today’s webinar with the IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will doing the first part where the title was IBM i Anywhere, IBM i Everywhere – Strategy, Roadmap & Innovation.

The message was very strong from IBM that they are very committed to IBM i and that the operating system has a long period of growth even during the pandemic. The future is also great due to its very innovative features and functions built into the system (code compiled once in the 1980’s still runs on Power9 and will run on Power10 coming out later this year).

Right now the planned support for future versions is well into the 2030’s. IBM just delivers according to their plans as they’ve always did..

Steve Will also talked about how open IBM i is today compared to earlier versions of the operating system. Open Source has been a huge area of success for the platform, not at least due to all the runtimes, tools and frameworks that AI requires and IBM continues to port to IBM i. They are always listening to their customer base through the many different user groups and other channels to make sure they are investing in technologies that their customers are asking for.

The message was very clear – IBM i can do it!

Next after Steve Will, Mr Eddie Chaffin from ABP Food Group in the UK continued the presentation.

A short presentation first about ABP showed they are a very large organization with approximately £3 billion in revenue. With only about 140 persons in their IT-organizations (Five companies) tells me their choice of platform for M3 is a very cost effective one.

The technical description of their M3 environment shows they are running everything on just two Power8 S814 servers. Talking about cost effective..

Eddie gave the audience a number of tips and tricks for managing M3 with the help of ACS. Access Client Solutions is the best tool available for any kind of IBM i related management in general, but in this session there were some M3 related tips such as changing the heap size for performance purpose when it comes to navigating the IFS (M3 has a huge number of files / documents in IFS) and how to use built in Authority Collection for compliance reasons.

He gave many other tips regarding database performance, how to use SQL Scripts for collecting information that could take a day in the past etc.

The main thing in Eddie’s presentation was their implementation of Row and Column Access Control – RCAC in their M3 environment.

This is a level of data security they need to avoid “Data Tourism” that their database was open for before. M3 has a very good security system in place for end users, but for people connecting via ODBC/JDBC it is not so good. Besides just the commercial risk with unauthorized people reading the data, GDPR Compliance is as well high priority for companies.

RCAC was implemented with the help of Infor and IBM LAB Services (Kent Milligan was the RCAC expert involved from IBM Rochester) and the solution is fully supported by Infor today.

Overall the whole session today was a great success. The user group leader was very happy with the content and glad that IBM (that he work for in 1988 when the AS/400 was launched) welcomes IBM and ABP back in the future.

Full version of the presentation can be downloaded HERE

At the keyboard: Torbjörn Appehl

IT-Infrastructure related sessions at IBM Think

Register for free today at ibm.com/think

At Think, you’ll have the chance to directly engage with world-class experts, industry leaders and peers. Learn all about the future of hybrid cloud and AI and see how Power Systems deliver the security, reliability and performance necessary in an effective hybrid cloud strategy.

Security Keynote

2303 Put security everywhere, so you can put trust everywhere

IBM Cross Systems

Session ID 2081: A deep dive into the IBM innovations powering the next generation of hardware

Session ID 2019: Understanding flexible consumption: The new way to pay for IT infrastructure

IBM Power Systems

Session ID 1702: Modernizing mission-critical infrastructure using cloud technologies

Session ID 1708: Supporting our healthcare heroes: IT agility and the pandemic response

Session ID 1736: Pfizer’s 2020 successes aided by SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

Session ID 2025: Making DNA storage more cost-efficient

Session ID 2076: CSI, top UK MSP, enables leading trading platform to manage unprecedented volumes

What you’ll find at Think…

Personalized curriculum:

  • Gain insights and perspectives from IBM executives, product leaders and clients who are leveraging Power Systems technology in their journey to hybrid cloud.

Credential-building education:

  • Learn about the latest technologies and make yourself indispensable by upgrading your Power Systems skills through technical breakouts, hands-on labs, master classes and discounted certification exams.

New ways to engage:

  • Participate in virtual forums and interactive IBM Power Systems experiences. Chat one-on-one and collaborate with the pros who create the technology you use every day.Sellers Contact InformationFull Name Goes HereTitlediam nonummynibheuismodtinciduntutemail: laoreetdolore magnaIT Infrastructure at Think 2021Register for free today at ibm.com/think
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