• Maxava Prepares For DR and HA Growth Through Partnerships

  December 7, 2016 Dan Burger

  As we prepare to step onto the IBM midrange escalator to 2017, one of the areas of high interest is disaster recovery and high availability. Maxava, one of the leading vendors in those fields, added subscription-based, multi-platform systems monitoring to its feature set in early 2016 and as the year winds down it is expanding its managed service provider (MSP) business to take its software to a more localized level. Most would agree the number of IBM i shops that depend on MSPs to handle some of the IT workload is expected to grow in the coming years. Disaster

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• IBM i Performance Secrets Revealed

  December 7, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server is unlike any other computer system on the planet, with unique architectural elements like single level storage and TIMI that simplify programming and boost security. But the 64-bit RISC server also has unique performance characteristics, especially compared to its X64 brethren. To ensure long-term success with the platform, it’s critical to maximize performance. The folks at IBM recently put together a very informative paper that describes some of the unique performance tracking features that are present in every IBM i system. The paper, titled “IBM i on Power – Performance FAQ,” dives into the various components

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• Reporting Elevated IBM i Privileges to SIEM

  December 7, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Why work hard to find a back door when you can go through the front door? This is the gist of the enlightened hacker mind, which understands there is an excess of user profiles equipped with administrative privileges floating around most shops. Now new software from Townsend Security can detangle the complexity of authority levels and give intelligent SIEM tools the data they need to keep hackers out of IBM i. Far too many IBM i shops weaken their security by handing out special authorities like they’re candy canes at a Christmas party. PowerTech has documented this unfortunate phenomenon quite

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• What A Trump Presidency Might Mean For IBM Rochester

  December 5, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Big changes are expected in national policy when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on January 20, 2017. From healthcare and climate change to tariffs and international trade, Trump has promised to do things that will help to “make America great again.” But what will this mean for IBM, one of the most American of success stories, and specifically its Rochester, Minnesota, plant, home of the IBM i server? During his historic presidential campaign, Trump insisted that middle-class Americans were getting the short end of the economic stick, and that he would

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• Server Sales Slow Across The Board

  December 5, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The major suppliers of servers to the datacenters of the world that are public have turned in their financial results in recent weeks, and those numbers do not look good even though they are nothing as alarming as what we saw ahead of the recession in 2001 through 2003 or the Great Recession that started at the end of 2007 and we think ended maybe two and a half years later. We may or may not be heading into a national or global recession in the coming year or maybe the one after that, but as far as the server

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• Spending Energy, Buying Results

  December 5, 2016 Dan Burger

  If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got. Some people do more with what they’ve got. Some businesses do more with what they’ve got. Ake Olsson is a “do more” guy and the energy he puts into IBM i modernization projects has resulted in multiple successes. He loves to learn and travels great distances to do that . . . and to change. Olsson is a guy who invests in staying current with technology and helping others do the same. He believes in creating new opportunities and encouraging

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• Hidden Deals Related To Power Systems In The IBM System

  December 5, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is a big organization and when it comes to the IBM i business, it has been focused on selling through the channel, and has had control of the top several thousand key accounts, for so long that making deals formally and vocally is not something it feels it needs to do. But if you poke around inside Big Blue, you can find all kinds of weird things. It is helpful sometimes to poke around in the RPQ and PRPQ portions of the IBMLink central information system, which has all announcements, marketing and sales materials, and documents relating to Request

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• Backup And Recovery Options Proliferate With New Storage Director

  December 5, 2016 Dan Burger

  You just escaped from a meeting on IT objectives and your backup strategy took a beating. Slow, inefficient, antiquated, completely lacking a recovery plan were just some of the stones that were thrown. So, what’s your next move? One option is virtual tape backup. If high speed, multiple server and multiple storage technology capabilities, and a redundant data recovery strategy sound good. Storage Director from Tributary Systems deserves investigation. Storage Director was recently updated to include policy-based tiering of data storage with capabilities to replicate data to a separate site or multiple sites–both on premise and off premise–that have object-storing

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• IBM Tweaks More Power Systems Peripherals

  November 30, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes a bit of time to drill down into the annual Power Systems announcements from Big Blue, which in the case of this year happened across September and October. We have told you all about the new systems, such as they are, and updated IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 software releases, as well as various other components. In this week’s installment, we are going to drill down into some of the new peripheral cards that IBM is putting into the Power Systems iron. First up is a new cryptographic accelerator, called by the unwieldy name of the PCIe Cryptographic

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• Skills Shortage Prompts Fresche’s New View of X-Analysis

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Different companies have different ways of dealing with the emerging IBM i skills shortage. Some shops may look to college grads for fresh new faces, while others may seek to retrain existing IT personnel in IBM i skills. Still others will seek to exit IBM i through wholesale migration to X86 or cloud platforms. At Fresche, the skills shortage presents an opportunity to get a well-regarded code analysis tool called X-Analysis into the hands of more people. X-Analysis, you will remember, was Fresche Legacy’s first big purchase following its 2012 name-change from Speedware. Developed by the British software

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