A couple of months ago, we had a look at the initial workshops and sessions announced for this year’s International i-Power conference, which takes place at the Wyboston Lakes Executive Centre in Bedfordshire, from 9th and 10th September.
In that time, the agenda has filled out with a whole host of workshops and sessions. Therefore, I thought it was time to provide an update on some of my highlights over the two-days.
As a quick reminder, International i-Power is run by i-UG, the only independent user group in the UK dedicated solely to the IBM i and POWER platforms.
International i-Power consists of in-depth educational workshops on day one and multi-stream sessions on day two which promise to provide attendees with up-to-date, practical information on the IBM i and POWER System platforms.
Day One: Educational workshops
On the opening day, the conference agenda focuses on the educational workshops which provide attendees the opportunity to dive-deep into workshop topics and learn the best practices and latest tips and tricks on IBM i and POWER.
Installing and running open-source products on your IBM i (Pete Samways)
An obvious highlight on day one is the workshop being run by Proximity’s Pete Samways entitled ‘Installing and Running Open Source Products on your IBM i’. This will be a practical session on how to install and run an open-source PHP application such as Drupal, Magento, WordPress, Mantis Bug Tracker or SugarCRM on the IBM i.
During Pete’s workshop attendees will see how the IBM i has become a more open platform over the last few years and how it is now an excellent platform for running and developing web and mobile applications.
Pete is a regular contributor of technical articles to Powerwire. He is an expert in the development, modernisation and mobilisation of IBM i applications, particularly in the logistics sector.
If you have a specific interest in PHP on the IBM i, you might be interested in a new section that has been added to the Proximity website, which focuses specifically on PHP on i.
Other experts delivering IBM i and POWER workshops on day one include:
Introduction to SQL (Paul Tuohy)
Paul is one of the IBM i’s most respected, and popular experts and was one of the most popular speakers at last year’s event due to his ‘passion, enthusiasm and knowledge of the IBM i platform’. His workshop session will provide an introduction to SQL and how to take advantage of it on the i (System i , i5, iSeries and AS/400). The workshop does not cover embedded SQL, so a programming background is not essential.
SQL may represent some of the biggest benefits an IBM i-focused programmer can gain. SQL is the most widely used language for relational databases — it’s a data language that programmers can use to create, control, access, and manipulate databases – and is both simple and powerful.
Performance monitoring (Steve Bradshaw)
Steve is one of the best (and entertaining) presenters in the IBM i and POWER community. The session will show you how to use the new (FOC) IBM Graphical Performance Tooling built into in Director Navigator. Bradshaw will also show how you can analyse what is going on in our systems if we feel that performance is not as good as it should be and how we can interpret that data for making decisions.
Day Two: Sessions
Since my last blog about International i-Power, there have been a whole host of new sessions added to the agenda.
Latest and greatest features from IBM i (Alison Butterill)
Alison, who is the World Wide Manager for the IBM i Offering, will be giving the keynote session at this year’s event. Here she’ll be giving her thoughts on what are latest and greatest features in both POWER and IBM i platforms. Alison is one of the world’s leading experts on IBM i and when you combine this with her accomplished background in IBM i application development.
Power8 and beyond (Alison Butterill)
In the second of her sessions, Alison will run through the future plans for POWER8 – as well as what is available now.
Bring CL programming up to date (Andy Youens)
Andy is the managing director of FormaServe. In this session, he’ll show you how to take full advantage of the enhancements to CL programming that have been introduced in recent releases of the IBM i.
Modernisation – what, why, where, when and how (Paul Tuohy)
I couldn’t give a better explanation of what this session is all about, so here’s the full description!:
“The i community is facing an ever-changing environment and it must ensure that applications may be easily enhanced and maintained when dealing with these environments.
Modernization means different things to different people. In this session, Paul discusses what modernization might mean for you and different approaches to modernization – regardless of whether you are a one-person or one hundred person shop”.
The session will cover:
- The need for database modernization
- Interface modernization and program modernization
- Approaches to modernization
- The benefits of modernization
- Where to start
- The challenges and roadblocks
- The ground rules
- Just what is a ‘Modern Application’?
Using the workload capacity on Power7/8 (David Spurway)
David is the IBM Power Systems Product Manager (AIX, IBM i and Linux) for UK and Ireland. In this session, he’ll show you how to leverage the spare processor capacity that is present in modern POWER7 and POWER8 servers (in some cases this can be up to six spare cores).
“Whilst many IBM i workloads are adequately catered for using one or two cores, we have an opportunity to add considerable additional workload for very little money, right inside the box”.
Why you should love your HMC (Steve Bradshaw)
This session looks at the reasons to have and look after a Hardware Management Console (HMC) on the POWER system. During the session, Steve will show you that an HMC can not only make administering your system quicker and easier but that it can even make it your applications run faster and more reliably.
The future of email is…? (John Taylor)
John, the Chairman of the Typex Group plc which looks at the growth of social business in the workplace – and IBM’s take on it.
Flash and SAN storage options (Therese Eaton)
Internal, External, HDD, SSD or Flash? IBM i storage management is superior to most operating systems and that is why storage still matters, according to Therese from IBM, who will guide you through the current IBM storage options and adapters and best practices.
Registration
You can register for the conference. Members of i-UG get a discounted attendance rate at the conference, but if you are not yet a member you can benefit from a 10% discount if you quote code NC222 when registering.
Posted by Paul on 3rd July 2015.