• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• RPG Website Resurrected. Is the Language Next?

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community got a peak at the latest RPG website last week when the official wraps were taken off www.ile-rpg.org. While it may appear to be new, the website is in fact a resurrected (and updated) version of an older website, rpglanguage.biz, that was essentially abandoned by its previous owner. The website’s new owner, TEMBO Tech Labs, is confident that it will help spread the word about RPG’s prowess as a business language. John McCay originally created the rpglanguage.biz website back in 2007 to provide a place where RPG developers could share tips, concerns, and

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• ERP System Gets an A+ in User Satisfaction

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Infor generally received high marks from users of its A+ application, according to a recent report by the Frantz Group. However, the fact that many users of the IBM i-based distribution system are going five to 10 years between ERP upgrades means many are missing out on potentially valuable features, the report concludes. There were no major revelations in last week’s release of the Frantz Report, titled “Customer Research Survey: Infor A+ and IBM iSeries,” which depicted a swath of North American IBM i shops in the light you would have expected. That is, Infor A+ customers are generally

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