Unattended IBM i Operations Continue Upward Climb
March 15, 2023 Alex Woodie
One of the IBM i server’s traditional strengths is its capability to run for long periods of time in an unattended manner. While manual intervention is inevitably necessary at some point in time, the human resources required to manage IBM i is far less than other business platforms. And according to the latest data from Fortra IBM i Marketplace Survey, more than three-quarters of IBM i shops are embracing automation.
In late 2022, Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) peppered a couple of hundred IBM i shops with a variety of questions about their IBM i setups, including the number and type of servers, the software running on them, and how they run. A full 77 percent of the survey-takers said that they ran their IBM i server fully unattended after normal working hours, which was 2 percentage points more than the previous year.
Those numbers warmed the heart of Tom Huntington, the longtime vice president of technical services for HelpSystems and now Fortra.
“My focus in the market has always been around automation, and it really kind of makes me grin to see that we’re at 77 percent of the survey respondents saying that they’re running their system totally unattended,” Huntington said during the January 2023 webinar sharing the results. “Great to see.”
Before it switched its focus to security, automation was Fortra’s main line of business. With its ROBOT family of products – and in particular ROBOT/Schedule and its rule-based job scheduling capabilities – the company built a reputation as trusted provider of system monitoring and management tools for IBM i shops.
Source: Fortra IBM i Marketplace Studies.
Of course, Fortra isn’t the only way to achieve automation on the platform. IBM i shops can use facilities provided in the IBM operating system to build automation into their routines. Adminstrators can use Control Language to automate various aspects of their IBM i operations without spending a dime on third-party packages.
And there is also Ansible, the lightweight open source environment from Red Hat that IBM has been pushing to automate monitoring and some management tasks. The company rolled out an Ansible on Power solution a year ago and it has been gaining traction in the IBM i world, by all accounts.
“This is a platform that – because of work management and the control language and open source and everything else that comes with it – you can run this platform unattended,” Huntington said. “It’s more of a mindset than it is necessarily a ‘can’t-do’ kind of thing.”
Automation has been trending upward over time. When Fortra started its annual survey back in 2015, 50 percent of its survey-takers said they were running unattended. That figure increased to 66 percent in 2017 before descending back to 49 percent in 2020.
For the 2022 survey, Fortra changed the wording of is survey from “Do your IBM i operations run fully unattended?” to “Do your IBM i operations run fully unattended after normal working hours?” to better reflect the type of automation that Fortra was trying to highlight (while acknowledging that operators and administrators will typically be ready to step in and respond to problems during regular working hours). As a result, the percentage of people responding in the affirmative jumped to 75 percent, a 21 percent over the previous year.
It’s unclear how much of that leap was due to the changing in the wording of the question. It’s possible that it increased the percentage to an extent, as companies that were running lights-out during nights and weekend but had people on hand during the day could not reply in the affirmative.
Needless to say, Fortra has another theory: COVID-19. According to the vendor, the shift from in-office work to working from home juiced the automation dial “to full speed.” “We expect this to trend upward as we continue to finesse the way we work,” the company said in its 2022 report.
Whether it’s the ROBOT line of products, good old CL, or newer open source products like Ansible, IBM i shops are finding ways of automating server operations, thereby keeping headcount lower than it would be otherwise. That is a longtime IBM i advantage that continues to pay dividends to this day, according to IBM i CTO Steve Will.
“You cannot run businesses of the size that our customers run on another platform and do it with as few people as they do on IBM i,” Will said during the January webinar with Fortra. “That return on investment right there is important. And then you don’t have to buy nearly as many software packages and maintenance packages etc. again because of the integration and the automation that we put into the platform.”
You can read Fortra’s 2023 IBM i Marketplace Survey report and watch the webinar here.
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