New Bluemix Data Sink Service Tackles Data Overload

IBM today announced a new experimental service for its Bluemix cloud platform that provides Data Sink capabilities to its users, helping companies to tackle data overload scenarios, enhancing data archiving throughput and solving data retention issues. Building on the global network of SoftLayer data centers the new data sink as a service will feature triple redundancy for high performance and increased fault tolerance, and hence tentatively is named DSaaSTR (Data Sink-as-a-Service with Triple Redundancy).

Initially the experimental Bluemix service is free and allows to pipe up to 1 TB (one terabyte) of data a month to the data sink. Customers already on direct network links will be able to utilize the full network bandwith. This gives the opportunity to test the DSaaSTR offer for the following scenarios:

• The abundance of sensors and their generated data, whether in Internet of Things (IoT) or Industry 4.0 scenarios, leaves companies struggling with data storage. Utilizing the new service they can leverage the DSaaSTR in the cloud to get rid of local data.
• The more data and data storage options, the more intruders. By piping data to the Bluemix DSaaSTR it will become unavailable for attackers.
• Local data archives require active data management, enforcement of retention policies, and rigorous disposal. DSaaSTR offers easy choices for data retention and disposal.
• Many enterprises have learned that even Hadoop Clusters need actively managed storage. DSaaSTR can be configured to be part of a local or cloud-based Hadoop system (hybrid cloud), thus eliminating storage costs and simplifying the overall administration tasks for the cluster.

The new service is made available to select customers worldwide as part of the experimental Bluemix service catalog. If you are interested in signing up please send me an email or get in touch with your regular Bluemix seller or support contact.

My DB2 pureScale / Parallel Sysplex Moment

Last week, members of the German union for train operators/engineers were on strike and only a fraction of trains were operating. I had to go to Zurich, Switzerland, but most of the trains on my usual route were out of service. That's when I had my DB2 pureScale or DB2 Parallel Sysplex moment.

What is special about a DB2 Parallel Sysplex or DB2 pureScale configuration? It is a data sharing cluster. If one node in the cluster or a network connection goes down and is inaccessible, the other components can pick up the work. All this is usually transparent to the application. In my case I was the application and data at the same time: Try to get me to Zurich, discuss some issues in person, get back home.

50 Years of IBM Mainframe: The Art of Selling

IBM (and the world) are celebrating 50 years of mainframe, "Make the Extraordinary possible". To honor the mainframe, I want to point you to a series of IBM-produced videos from few years back. The series is labelled "THE MAINFRAME: The Art of the Sale", featuring real IBMers and lots of wisdom...

Lesson One:


Lesson Two:


Lesson Three:


Lesson Four:


Lesson Five:


Lesson Six:

DB2 10.5: Overview of product editions, licensing and features

On the IBM developerWorks website is a new article discussing the different editions of DB2 10.5. It is titled "DB2 editions: Which distributed edition of DB2 10.5 is right for you?". It gives an overview of what editions are available, some of the top notch features, and what licensing options are available. Another new article, "Compare the distributed DB2 10.5 database servers" has a similar intent, but focusses on features by edition and is organized in a table format. The third installment, "Licensing distributed DB2 10.5 servers in a HA environment", does exactly that. :)

WLB, ACR, and Client Affinity in a DB2 pureScale environment

End of April a longer article was published on IBM developerWorks describing Workload balancing, automatic client reroute, client affinities concepts and administration for the DB2 pureScale feature. The mentioned technologies are key to setting up a shared disk DB2 cluster for a 24x7 availability. So if you want to learn about server lists, member priorities, connection timeouts, and other related concept, this is a good place to start reading.

It is important to note that right now the article is based on DB2 10.1. The new release DB2 10.5 adds so-called member subsetting to the above concepts, so that an application can be configured to use a subgroup of available machines.

Tune in to DB2 FM... (Happy Holidays)

Ever heard of a radio station "DB2 FM", ever tried to listen to it? If you prefer streaming radio, why not start up the music service "db2fm" on your console...?

With that music in the background I plan to go offline for some time, enjoy the holiday season and Christmas with the family. Happy Holidays and see you next year...

Black Friday and DB2 recovery objects - new db2adutl feature

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming up, busy days for many database systems working in the background of brick and mortar and online shops. Will the infrastructure keep up with the traffic? Will response times be acceptable for shoppers and store personnel alike? How much revenue is made with which types of products? Many questions at the start of the holiday season.

There is an interesting feature in DB2 that shipped in version 9.7 FP5 (see here for the db2adutl feature announcement) and in version 10.1 to manage high peak load on DB2 systems. db2adutl now allows to UPLOAD recovery objects (backup images, archived logs) to TSM in a very simple way without breaking the log chain. Some examples of the new UPLOAD feature are shown here. The idea is to first archive to a fast disk instead to TSM, so that during a peak like Black Friday or Cyber Monday log archiving can keep up with the rest of the system. Later on, the recovery objects can be moved from disk to TSM to allow TSM-based recovery if needed.

Happy Thanksgiving (for those in the USA) and interesting shopping deals for all of us...

BTW: As of DB 10.1 archived logs can also be compressed reducing what needs to be written out.

Updated Redbook for DB2 10: High Availability and Disaster Recovery Options

Well, there is not much to say about this existing Redbook that has been updated to reflect DB2 10.1 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows and current technologies. The "High Availability and Disaster Recovery Options for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows" Redbook describes and explains technologies like IBM Tivoli TSA, PowerHA SystemMirror, Microsoft Windows Failover Cluster, WebSphere Q Replication or InfoSphere CDC.

With close to 600 pages it also requires your high availability...