• Escape From The Tape Trap

  December 12, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM i storage strategy remains heavily dependent on tape. Even beyond the IBM midrange, around 75 percent of all data is stored on tape. Old habits die hard, even when alternatives become easier and less expensive to manage. A good example is the Universal Backup Device designed by LaserVault. In its original form, it’s an IBM i backup appliance that appears as a tape device. Now it works in VM environments as well. The VM integration eliminates the cost of the LaserVault appliance and the cost of an X86 server. That’s roughly $6,000 to $8,000. Instead of requesting a

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• New LUG Spreads ‘MAGIC’ In The Mid-Atlantic

  December 12, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Starting next month, a broad swath of IBM i professionals along the eastern seaboard will have their very own local user group (LUG) to call home. Dubbed the Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators, or MAGIC, the group hopes to create a sense of IBM i community across a large region of the country where visible support for the platform was lagging. If you’ve been around the IBM midrange for any length of time, you realize how much the community has shrunk in size. Instead of semi-annual COMMON conferences that attracted 4,000 devoted AS/400 and iSeries enthusiasts twice a year,

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• Talking Change Management With Chrono-Logic

  December 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is, we think, a bit of a resurgence in the IBM i community when it comes to software change management tools, which have always been one of the workhorse pillars of the vendor community and one of the key functions that need to be automated in the datacenter. To get a sense of what is happening in the software change management arena, we had a chat with Ghislain Jacques, vice president of development at Chrono-Logic, a long-established vendor in the IBM i market that has expanded its product lines and boosted its aspirations to get more IBM i

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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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• 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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• 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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• Freebie IBM i Software, And Some Hardware Withdrawals

  December 7, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are coming into the home stretch for the Power Systems and IBM i business here in 2016, and there are still some things going on that we need to tell you that Big Blue is up to with the product line. We have discovered that IBM is giving away certain licensed program products for the IBM i operating system for free, and that it is also mothballing a bunch of peripherals starting next year. The freebie software deal was unveiled in announcement letter 316-187, which actually came out on October 11 along with the fall IBM i 7.2

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• 7 Must-Have Open Source Products for IBM i

  December 7, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i operating system is proprietary; its Licensed Internal Code (LIC) is private, and good luck getting into the innards of DB2 for i. But for all the top-secret code running in an IBM i server, there’s a surprising amount of open source technology available for the platform, too. Here are the top seven open source products every IBM i shop should have, or at least be aware of. These products are in no particular order. But we would be remiss if we didn’t start with the big one from IBM itself. 1. Open Source Technologies on IBM i

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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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• 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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