Welcome to the Executive Corner, a new feature of this newsletter for 2008. The idea is to have a designated space in each issue where the executive leaders of IBM's Power Systems team can share our thoughts and perspectives with the PowerAIX Community throughout the year.

This is really an exciting time for all of us. It was less than a year ago that the first POWER6 systems were announced, and the level of acceptance and enthusiasm among users has been very gratifying. Among the biggest keys to success, in my mind, are new capabilities that move the needle beyond a single attribute - raw performance -- that used to define the value of UNIX systems in the minds of clients. When IBM brought POWER6 and AIX 6 to market we talked about "performance plus" - performance plus efficiency plus availability as the new parameters of client value in UNIX.

More and more, client value is perceived through systems software that takes advantage of capabilities residing in hardware and firmware. IBM has formalized this in Power Systems Software, an integrated modular stack of offerings that provide value in the contexts of virtualization, operating systems, availability, security, energy and management, using the advanced capabilities built into POWER6.

One example is Active Energy Manager, which exploits the energy management features of POWER6 EnergyScale technology so users can customize system power consumption to suit their particular data center needs. Another example is PowerVM -- complete virtualization functionality with IBM Micro-Partitioning allowing up to 10 operating system partitions per processor core and support for multiple shared processor pools, and Live Partition Mobility, a unique virtualization technique that enables POWER6 servers to move operating system workloads between UNIX servers while the systems are running.

The many elements in the Power Systems Software stack have the potential to radically improve operations and processes, such as reducing or eliminating planned downtime in the data center. In the hands of imaginative users in this and other communities, it can unlock tremendous business value. I am eagerly looking forward to seeing and hearing about the new ways you apply Power Systems Software in 2008.


Ross A. Mauri
General Manager
IBM Power Systems

Global Rational User Group Community Webcast: Enterprise Modernization for System i

Databorough - Enterprise Modernization for System i using Rational Tools and X-Analysis

2007 was a very succesful year for our community. We now have over 2000 members in 38 user groups. With your help, we are looking for another great year in 2008.

Cheers to the following user groups whose memberships are growing the fastest:

Seattle AIX Users Group

Houston AIX/Linux Users Group

NY Metro POWER-AIX/Linux Users Group

Vermont POWER Users Group

UG Higlight: Application Virtualization UG

A new virtual UG was started by Ken Milberg that will focus on Application Virtualization. They are planning a first meeting in early April that will feature Bob Cancilla, IBM System I Software Evangelist presenting on the Rational approach to Application Virtualization for System i.

New User Groups

Please welcome the following new Ugs to our community:

Puerto Rico Power Group

Application Virtualization User Group

Capital Region of NY UG

PowerAIX Poll
March 2008 Poll Results:
Are you using Virtual I/O Server in production?

Yes 73%
No 27%

Click here to take this month's poll, and click here to suggest a future poll question.

Spreading the word!

A number of members asked if they can include a poweraix.org logo and/or link to the Community on their email signatures. The answer is yes! For those members who want to help promote the Community, we encorage you to include the following logo and/or tagline on your email signature: "Member of the Global PowerAIX Community Join at www.PowerAIX.org"

developerWorks space - Virtualization
Stay current on the lateset virtualization topics for AIX and Linux on Power with the Virtualization community space, hosted by the Program Manager for the System p Community Program.

PowerAIX Forums

Hands-on Technical Demo Movies

Systems Administration Toolkit: Network scanning

Accessing DFS and NFS V4 directories simultaneously

Using Net-SNMP and IPython

Kerberos policy management in IBM Network Authentication Service for AIX Version 5.3

IBM Network Authentication Service KDC and administration servers discovery using LDAP for AIX

Systems Administration Toolkit: Monitoring mail usage

AIX NFS Version 4 configuration over Kerberos inter-realm setup

Overview of AIX page replacement

AIX commands you should not leave home without

nmon performance: A free tool to analyze AIX and Linux performance<

Advanced techniques for using the UNIX find command

nmon analyser -- A free tool to produce AIX performance reports

Writing endian-independent code in C

Using the GNU C/C++ compiler on AIX

CPU monitoring and tuning

Errors: errno in UNIX programs

Easy system monitoring with SAR