Today was a DB2 pureScale day for me and yes, I did manage to pass a certification exam as well! The pressure is off! 🙂
The day started with an excellent presentation by Steve Rees (IBM) on performance monitoring in DB2 pureScale. It always amazes me how Steve can deliver so much information in such a palatable manner and in just 60 minutes!
This was followed by two equally excellent presentations on customer experiences with pureScale. The first was Long distance call using pureScale – Early experiences by Frank Petersen (Bankdata) and the second was DB2 pureScale on Linux – Anixter Case Study by Bernie O’Connor (Anixter Inc.)
Frank’s presentation covered DB2 pureScale geographically dispersed clusters – a recently introduced feature in pureScale which allows for disaster recovery. DB2 pureScale clusters can now be “stretched” so that they can be used in an installation where 2 sites are placed kilometres apart. Frank discussed Bankdata’s Proof of Concept implementation of DB2 pureScale. He went through the hardware and software setup and the test plan to verify the solution. Bernie’s presentation reviewed Anixter’s implementation of applications on DB2 pureScale using Linux and IBM System x hardware. He discussed business drivers which included, High Availability, Scalability and Recovery amongst others. The key business driver in both presentations was high availability. Being z/OS customers for many years as well, the more salient business driver in adopting pureScale for both Bankdata and Anixter was the confidence that came with the knowledge that pureScale was based on the industry proven technology of data sharing on z/OS. Both Frank and Bernie were very pleased with their pureScale testing and are looking to implement pureScale in production in the very near future.
The day ended with a fabulous dinner hosted by IBM where one of my fellow DB2 Geeks, Julian Stuhler, was recognised for his outstanding contribution to the EMEA DB2 community. The socialising continued into the early hours of the morning. It’s now 2:30 am and my intentions for doing another certification test have almost faded away. Oh well, some things are more important than others …
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