• IBM i Shops Turn To MSPs For Help

  March 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  Companies are looking to MSPs to help them obtain operational efficiencies and increased value from their IT investments. I wouldn’t call it a hive of activity, but there are more frequent indicators of shops wanting to consolidate IT investment and avoid the upgrading hardware expenses. It is pushing new decisions. Two Connectria Hosting customers that I spoke with last week fit both those descriptions. Here’s what brought them to the popular IBM i MSP. Morgan Craven, director of IT engineering at The Freeman Company, based in Dallas, Texas, described the situation that led him to Connectria as beginning with two

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• Splunking Through IBM i Log Mysteries

  March 16, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Tracking down problems in the modern data center can be an exercise in extreme patience. Today’s mantra of “loosely coupled yet tightly integrated” sounds great theoretically, but doesn’t give you much to go on things start to fail. When the going got tough for one multi-billion-dollar ecommerce operation that relies heavily on the IBM i server, it turned to Splunk to sort it all out. Splunk made a name for itself as a provider of next-gen power tools that enable IT administrators to collect, analyze, and search vast sums of log files generated by a multitude of systems. Instead of

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• As I See It: In the Land of the Panel Beaters

  March 16, 2015 Victor Rozek

  A somber-looking man stands in the front of the aisle facing a plane-load of passengers. His arms are crossed above his head and in each hand he holds a high-pressure spray can of poison. Overhead luggage racks are opened, and a brief announcement is made to justify what is about to happen. Two hundred seventy-two passengers descend into apprehensive silence. The man then walks up and down the aisles spraying toxic chemicals ostensibly to kill invasive pests. There are infants and seniors aboard the plane. Everyone is drenched. Welcome to New Zealand. It was barbaric, an uncivilized measure unworthy of

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• Storagepipe Takes Aim At IBM i Tape Backup And Recovery

  March 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  In the IBM midrange, tape backup is what we do. None of the backup alternatives are even a close second. Internet-based vaulting services, however, continue to make inroads as organizations study ways to achieve quicker recovery times without stepping into the high cost and high complexity of high availability. One of the service companies to keep an eye on is the off-site backup company Storagepipe Solutions. Why are so many organizations completely dependent on tape backup? And why are data recovery plans often an afterthought? You might actually be one of the companies that have given some thought to

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• What’s Up In The IBM i Marketplace?

  March 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  Analyzing the IBM i market could be generously described as a crap shoot. There’s not a great deal of hard data to be found. When something does arise, we take notice. A month ago, an article in IT Jungle provided a peek into the results of a survey of IBM midrange shops conducted by HelpSystems. The results of that survey have been compiled and presented in a report that has just been released. IT Jungle, along with the European publishing company PowerWire, assisted HelpSystems in choosing topics and questions that would lead to revealing details about the

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• SMA Aims To Grow IBM i Automation Biz In The U.S.

  March 9, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Despite being based in Texas, SMA Solutions and its systems automation software for IBM i are not particularly well-known in the United States. However, the company has enjoyed success recently in the European IBM i market, and now SMA’s owner and CEO, Michael Taylor, has tasked his European managers with accelerating growth in IBM i market stateside this year. Taylor admits that he would rather spend money on R&D and customer support, as opposed to investing in marketing. “The average iSeries reader is going to say, who the heck is SMA? They’ve got no clue,” Taylor tells IT Jungle.

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• Maxava IFS Replication Makes Performance Leap

  March 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  In the high availability world, the replication of IFS data has been a bit of a bottleneck. Companies that require 24×7 continuous operations have no tolerance for downtime, so backing up all systems and data, creating a failover system, and having access to everything is of the upmost importance. One of the keys to this is throughput performance and Maxava has addressed this with multi-threaded replication architecture for the IBM i Integrated File System, or IFS, which has just become available in its enterprise HA product. Multi-threaded IFS replication lets organizations run multiple IFS replication processes in parallel, increasing the

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• IBM Discounts Let CPUs And Memory Go Mobile For Less

  March 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been noting in recent issues of The Four Hundred that Big Blue’s sales and marketing people in the United States and Canada have been quiet on the wheeling and dealing front in recent months, which is a bit peculiar seeing as though you would think that IBM, having exited the X86 system business, would be doing everything in its power to help push new iron to its Power Systems and System z installed base. The Power8 machines have been in the field since last year, and many of the customers and resellers we talk to say a

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• Reader Feedback On Affordable Energy: Investment In The IBM i ISV Community

  March 9, 2015 Thanks for continuing to find new topics to stir conversations around the IBM i marketplace. I just read your story about IBM's ISV support programs and had a few thoughts to share.

  Hi Dan: Thanks for continuing to find new topics to stir conversations around the IBM i marketplace. I just read your story about IBM’s ISV support programs and had a few thoughts to share. One of the challenges for ISVs who want to work in this market is that sometimes the strategies and development methods recommended by IBM are out of touch with the ISV’s market niche. You have to be careful not to follow IBM down a path that can lead you to create an application that IBM developers will praise, but very few customers will buy. Another challenge

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• There Is No Lack Of RPG Programmers, IBM i Community Contends

  March 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Balderdash! That’s the general response to a story we ran two weeks ago in this newsletter about Computer Sciences Corp. blaming its earnings miss in part on an RPG programmer shortage. “There is no shortage of RPG programmers,” says one RPG programmer in the Northeast, “but there is a shortage of RPG programmers who will work at 1985 wages.” CSC said a lack of RPG talent was partly to blame for the company’s $230 million revenue shortfall during in the fourth quarter. “RPG is not a programming language where a lot of people are learning it today, so there is

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