• Like Tupperware, Think About Storage When You Move To The Cloud

  October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would be hard to find a company that knows more about storage than Tupperware Brands, which has a globe-spanning $1.6 billion business that designs and manufactures myriad containers to store food and beverages and has famously sold them through Tupperware parties for the past 75 years.

  For the past several decades, Tupperware operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have run their manufacturing and back-office operations on IBM’s AS/400 (now known as Power) systems and their progeny, just like countless other manufacturers and distributors have done around the world. The choice of the AS/400 was driven by a …

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• IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.

  There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …

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• Moving To The Cloud Should Be Easier Than Switching Homes

  August 29, 2022 Rich Spring

  If the modern economy has taught us anything, it is that ownership is sometimes overrated. There are many things that we are accustomed to buying that we might better rent at a slight premium.

  The cloud IT infrastructure is one of those things. This new deployment and purchasing model is a boon for the workloads we rely on. Done right, a move to the cloud should be relatively painless, if possibly a little time consuming.

  But for a lot of IBM i customers, the idea of moving to infrastructure outside of local control is scary, not because of their fear …

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• Big Blue Taps FalconStor To Move Data To PowerVS Cloud And Protect It

  August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When IBM i shops want to move some or all of their applications to the cloud, they have a lot of options. But there is still only one cloud that is designed and run by the same company that actually makes the Power Systems server and the IBM i operating system and database platform. And that, of course, is the Power Systems Virtual Server, colloquially known as PowerVS these days.

  Over the longest of hauls, we expect that a fair number of IBM i shops will use the cloud in some capacity, and some will move their infrastructure entirely to …

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• The Case For Software-Based IBM i HA/DR

  July 25, 2022 Ash Giddings

  Software-based replication surfaced in the 1990s and continues to be a very popular choice for IBM i shops of all sizes, across an array of industry sectors. But what are the benefits of using software solutions versus hardware alternatives for HA/DR? There are a number of benefits that are an outgrowth of an HA/DR strategy that go beyond HA/DR and where the software approach is better than the hardware approach.

  The first one is business intelligence.

  Due to its reliability, powerful integration capabilities and ability to secure, many choose Power Systems running IBM i as their main database server or …

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• Give Me A Fulcrum And A Lever Long Enough, And I Can Move Your Data

  July 13, 2022 Brad Jensen

  An old adage about the power of mechanics and physics illustrates perfectly how we feel about virtual tape libraries, and not just the ones made by us, but about other VTL wares out there in the field: Give me a fulcrum and a lever long enough and I can move the world.

  We know that there are other good VTL tools out there, and it is good because the competition keeps us all honest. The important thing is that using VTL brings IT organizations out of the Stone Age of managing data archives and backups.

  First off, if you are …

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• New Nav for i Brings New Stuff to You

  May 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

  With the recent launch of IBM i 7.5, IBM added several compelling new features to “New Nav,” the new version of IBM Navigator for i that debuted less than a year ago. Among the goodies that all you IBM i admins out there will get are support for the audit journal, integration with Content Manager OnDemand for i, and updates to Performance Data Investigator, among other additions.

  IBM launched a remake of IBM Navigator for i with last September’s Technology Refresh for 7.3 and 7.4. The company rewrote Navigator from the ground up in Angular, a JavaScript framework for building …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: LaserVault

  March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When somebody says they have been doing the same job for three or four decades, that is a big deal in the 21^st century because that kind of long-term employment is just not something anyone counts on. In the OS/400 and IBM i market, such constancy and longevity is, well, normal. Unremarkable. Expected. Good.

  So it is with Brad Jensen, the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Storage Corporation, a company that is perhaps best known for its LaserVault virtual tape library software, but since the company was founded in 1989 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it …

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• IBM Accelerates New Nav Development Following Log4j Issue

  February 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i last fall, executives figured they had time to fill out the new product’s functionality as customers gradually adopted it. But those plans were upended when Log4j rendered the old version vulnerable to a serious security flaw, and now IBM finds itself needing to accelerate the build out of New Nav while simultaneously ramping up promotion and outreach.

  IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i back in September 2021, when it announced the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. New Nav, as the product …

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• No Plan To Support New Nav on Older IBM i Releases, IBM Says

  January 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM has no plans to support the new version of Navigator for i (i.e., “New Nav”) with older releases of the operating system, despite the existence of the severe Log4j security flaw in the heritage version of Navigator (“Old Nav”). The early, unexpected death of Old Nav also will hasten the adoption of New Nav for customers on current releases, and New Nav will become the default version with an update in March, IBM says.

  Earlier this month, IBM announced that no security patches would be forthcoming for Old Nav, which uses the Log4j code at the heart of a …

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