• Time For Tapeless? LaserVault Tempts The SMB

  August 29, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM midrange shops with dedicated system operators that manage backup media and drives are few and far between these days. The common staffing arrangement has programmers or maybe network admins juggling backup duties along with their other responsibilities. Of course, lean staffing invites human error into IT operations. Automating backup procedures can provide welcome relief. Data at risk is a problem that Electronic Storage Corporation is addressing with a new appliance it calls Backup SAVSmart for i. Electronic Storage Corporation is the maker of LaserVault backup and recovery solutions. SAVSmart uses the newest version of the LaserVault Backup software, which

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• Clouds Grow, But Can IBM i Follow?

  August 29, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Until cloud computing–meaning virtualized compute, storage, and networking that is sold under utility pricing–is absolutely the norm in the data center, we will be talking about what is and is not cloud and how fast it is or is not. The prognosis is that investments in public cloud computing are going to continue to grow fast, much faster than the overall IT sector, which has been coasting along more or less level for years. That placid surface on overall IT spending masks the churn underneath the surface, so don’t be fooled. According to researchers at IDC public cloud spending is

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• The Prospects For A Power9 Revolution

  August 22, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As a relative underdog as a supplier of processors in the datacenter now that it has left the X86 server market and has gone from being a partner of Intel to a direct competitor that is fostering its own ecosystem in the richest and most competitive parts of the market, IBM wants for the Power processor to be able to take on the Xeon chip and win. The Power9 chip from Big Blue has about the best chance of any chip we have seen from IBM since the Power4 way back in 2001 to do this. The top chip engineers

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• IBM i Power8 Migrations Flourish, Say Service Providers

  August 22, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s second quarter financial report was an icy description of Power Systems revenue. It exposed a shivering 24 percent decline compared to a year earlier. Despite that biting insight, there’s a warm glow in the midrange market that is predicted to continue through the third quarter. Migrations to Power8 boxes are finding momentum in the IBM i-dominated small to midsize market, where purchases have been delayed, but are now occurring at an accelerated pace. With hardware migrations comes downtime, so it’s interesting to take a peek at how the migration/downtime dilemma is being handled. Bob Johnson, an executive vice

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• Vision Bolsters Entry-Level HA With iTERA 6.2

  August 22, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Small and midsize IBM i shops that are looking to adopt a high availability (HA) solution to protect their businesses from downtime have a lot of options available to them these days, including cloud solutions and hardware-based offerings from IBM. SMBs looking for in-house logical replication solutions will eventually call on Vision Solutions, which recently added some enterprise-level features to its entry-level solution with the launch of iTERA Availability version 6.2. It’s a great time to adopt HA for IBM i shops. The combination of dropping hardware and software costs, higher levels of affordable network bandwidth, and the

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• As I See It: Breakup

  August 22, 2016 Victor Rozek

  I went to a wedding last weekend and it was everything a wedding should be: beautifully located, attended by scores of family, supported by legions of friends, and replete with that singular optimistic naivety that believes in happily ever after. While it would be foolish to marry without a firm belief in the prospect of future happiness, regrettably “happily ever after” has a shelf life for about half of all married couples. There’s a fair chance that at some point during the career of a married employee, divorce will bring an unexpected end to what might have been. Whether amicable

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• Knocking On The Old Database Door

  August 22, 2016 Dan Burger

  Keeping up with technology should be systematic and efficient. Avoidance behavior will only reduce your anxiety for so long. At some point, the limitations companies have learned to live with and consider “good enough” will prevent them from keeping up with the herd. Here are three organizations that realized it was time to take on database modernization, after discovering their existing databases lacked documentation, defined relationships and normalized procedures. The three examples are projects that involve Resolution Software, a company that specializes in database modernization services and developed software that automates much of the labor intensive work in the

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• Ublu: A Modern Band-Aid for Legacy i Ills

  August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  In a perfect world, companies would hire and retain technology professionals who possess the requisite skills for working on the IBM i server. However, that is clearly not the case, as an IBM i skills shortage has bubbled up as one of the platform’s most pressing issues. For those jack-of-all-trades who are struggling with this thing called the IBM i, the open source tool Ublu offers a bridge to familiarity. Ublu is an interpretive scripting language designed for automating IBM i tasks from any remote platform capable of running Java, which includes Windows, Mac, Linux, OpenBSD, and other desktop operating

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• Inside Infor’s Data Science Lab

  August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve noticed subtle improvements to your enterprise software lately, you’re not alone. For the past two years, IBM i ERP giant Infor has been using data science techniques to optimize various business processes that are automated by its software. And the best part may be that Infor is offering its Dynamic Science Labs expertise to customers for free and that improvements get wrapped back into the product. The big data revolution is impacting many aspects of our lives, including how we work and play. The technologies and techniques that the big Silicon Valley Web firms like Yahoo, Google

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• Bank Says ‘HA’ to System i Hardware Failure

  August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  When the New Zealand bank Westpac experienced a rare backplane failure in its System i server last year, it took a critical wholesale trading application completely offline. IBM immediately put a replacement on a plane, but the best case scenario called for three days of downtime. But thanks to its use of a high availability solution from Maxava, not a single transaction was lost. With more than 13 million customers, Westpac is one of the biggest banks in the Asia Pacific region, and one of Australia’s “big four” banks. The Sydney-based company relies on a variety of applications and

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