Jul 12, 2024

Azure service life cycle – Azure Service-Level Agreements

Azure service life cycle

The service life cycle defines how each Azure service that’s introduced is released and made available.

New Azure services are introduced through preview services; these preview services are not provided with an SLA or support during the preview (unless there’s an explicit service exception).

The service life cycle and the services you can access are as follows:

• Development: Not available to the public
• Private preview: Available only to a selected audience
• Public preview: Available to all customers
• General availability (GA): Available to all customers

Preview services can be accessed from the Azure portal; you can get the latest updates on services and their statuses from the following URLs:

• https://azure.microsoft.com/updates
• https://azurecharts.com/presence/rollout
• https://azurecharts.com/timeline

Some preview services are subject to additional terms; you can find this information by going to the Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews at https://azure.microsoft.com/support/legal/preview-supplemental-terms.

While you can use a preview service in production, you should fully evaluate this decision so that you are aware of any limitations of the service and the impact it may have on operations.

You can view the latest Azure updates at https://azure.microsoft.com/updates. Here, you can filter to show updates that are available in preview or development.

You can keep up to date with the latest service announcements from the Microsoft Azure blog announcements page at https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/topics/announcements.

In this section, we looked at the service life cycle in Azure. In the next section, we will look at a thought exercise to conclude this chapter.

Thought exercise

Returning to our digital company, MilesBetter Pizza, they have encountered some service availability issues over the last few months. They have noticed that their services have different SLAs, and they need to ensure that, in total, they always meet a target total of 99.9%. However, they are unsure how to calculate and achieve this.

First, the team at MilesBetter needs to understand the concept of a composite SLA; as we learned earlier in this chapter, this means that when you combine services, the overall SLA is lower than the individual highest SLA on one of the services. This is because each service that you add increases the probability of failure and increases complexity. The following example illustrates how a composite SLA is calculated across the services:

• Service 1 = 99.9%
• Service 2 = 99.95%
• Service 3 = 99.99%
• Service 4 = 99.99%

The calculation looks as follows, which shows that the target SLA will not be met:

0.999 x 0.9995 x 0.9999 x 0.99999 = 0.993 = 99.3% total Composite SLA

Therefore, to ensure that they have a total SLA of 99.9%, two of the services must be increased to 99.99% or better, as shown in the following example:

• Service 1 = 99.99% (action taken to increase from 99.9%)
• Service 2 = 99.99% (action taken to increase from 99.95%)
• Service 3 = 99.99%
• Service 4 = 99.99%

The calculation looks as follows, which shows that the target SLA of 99.99% will now be met:

0.9999 x 0.9999 x 0.99999 x 0.99999 = 0.999 = 99.9% total SLA

In this section, we looked at the thought exercise for this chapter. In the next section, we will look at the hands-on exercises for this chapter to build on the skills we’ve learned so far.

Mar 13, 2023

I/O drawers – Introduction to Power E1080

1.6 I/O drawers

If more PCIe slots beyond the system node slots are required, the Power E1080 server supports adding I/O expansion drawers.

At initial availability zero, one, two, three, or four PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawers per system node are supported. To connect an I/O expansion drawer, a PCIe slot is used to attach a 6-slot expansion module in the I/O drawer. A PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer (#EMX0) holds two expansion modules that are attached to any two PCIe slots in the same system node or in different system nodes.

For the connection of SAS disks, a disk-only I/O drawer is available. The EXP24SX is the only disk drawer that is supported.

1.6.1 PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer

The 19-inch 4 EIA (4U) PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer (#EMX0) and two PCIe Fanout Modules (#EMXH) provide 12 PCIe I/O full-length, full-height slots. One Fanout Module provides six PCIe slots that are labeled C1 – C6. C1 and C4 are x16 slots, and C2, IBM C3®, C5, and C6 are x8 slots. PCIe Gen1, Gen2, and Gen 3 full-high adapters are supported.

A blind-swap cassette (BSC) is used to house the full-high adapters that are installed in these slots. The BSC is the same BSC that is used with the previous generation server’s 12X attached I/O drawers (#5802, #5803, #5877, and #5873). The drawer is shipped with a full set of BSCs, even if the BSCs are empty.

Concurrent repair and adding or removing PCIe adapters is done through HMC-guided menus or by operating system support utilities.

A PCIe CXP converter adapter and Active Optical Cables (AOCs) connect the system node to a PCIe Fanout Module in the I/O expansion drawer. Each PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer has two power supplies.

Drawers can be added to the server later, but system downtime must be scheduled for adding a PCIe Gen 3 Optical Cable Adapter or a PCIe Gen 3 I/O drawer (#EMX0) or Fanout Module.

Figure 1-8 shows a PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer.

Figure 1-8 PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer

26      IBM Power E1080: Technical Overview and Introduction

The AOC cable feature codes are listed in Table 1-16. Also listed is the supported order type. The feature codes that are associated to cables that support RPO only are not available for new orders or MES upgrades. Instead, they are used to manage the migration of supported I/O expansion drawers from previous IBM POWER® technology-based servers to the

Power E1080. Feature codes that are associated to cables with longer length are required to support inter-rack connection between the system node and I/O expansion drawer.

Table 1-16 Active Optical Cables feature codes

Careful balancing of I/O, assigning adapters through redundant EMX0 expansion drawers, and connectivity to different system nodes can ensure high-availability for I/O resources assigned to LPARs.