Twitter Posts on the IBM i Cache Battery Maintenance Problem

If you’re interested in the IBM i cache battery maintenance issue I documented in IT Jungle, check out my ongoing discussion on this issue on my twitter feed @JoeHertvik.

The problem is that due to new industry standards and regulations, IBM now ships IBM i disk cache batteries with less than 50% charge. When these batteries are concurrently installed into an IBM i machine, it takes five to six hours to recharge and that can slow performance down to a crawl.

Once the batteries are charged, performance goes back to normal but your IBM i machine has taken a huge disk performance hit in the meantime.

Check out the conversation. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits coming out, including this one by @fatherjoecode.

Father Joe Code‏@fatherjoecode
Heard stories of large #IBMi shops that maintain empty partitions that exist simply to charge new cache batteries. Has to be a better way.

And Pete Massiello checked in with this tweet, indicating the problem may be solved with newer machines.

Pete Massiello‏@petem59
@JoeHertvik @Sever_i If you use the new cards those batteries don’t need changing

Check out the conversation @JoeHertvik, if interested.

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