• IBM Pulls Back The Covers On Migrate While Active

  January 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Last month, IBM began selling subscriptions to Migrate While Active, a new offering designed to speed and simplify the migrations of IBM i workloads from customers’ on-prem installations to Power Virtual Server running in IBM Cloud. Big Blue also last month hosted an online Guided Tour webinar that provided some much-needed answers to questions about the new offering.

  IBM launched the Migrate While Active in late October, a couple of weeks after unveiling the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5. IBM didn’t provide a lot of initial information on the new offering, which was designed to …

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• Rocket DevOps Gets Update for Free Format RPG, VS Code, and DORA

  April 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The latest release of Rocket’s change management tool for IBM i brings several new capabilities, including improved support for VS Code and Free Form RPG. Rocket DevOps version 10.3.1 also brings better code testing capabilities and will help companies comply with new regulations, such as the EU’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA).

  Rocket Software added support for the browser-based development environment VS Code last fall with the launch of Rocket DevOps version 10.2.2. Customers will find the new release of Rocket DevOps improves on that initial VS Code support, says Puneet Kohli, the president of the Rocket’s Application Modernization Business …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Maxava

  September 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i market is a big animal, even here in 2023 more than three and a half decades after the launch of the AS/400, and that means you have to take a lot of pulses to get a sense of what that animal is doing and how it is doing.

  This week, we are talking with John Dominic, who is global vice president at high availability and system monitoring software maker Maxava. Dominic has spent his life in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area, and, like many people in the IBM midrange, was cultivated very locally even though he …

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• Fully Managed Disaster Recovery For IBM i Partners

  July 31, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Maxava, a vendor dedicated to High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) for the IBM i market, has announced a new offering aimed at resellers, independent software vendors, and managed service providers, Maxava’s Fully Managed Disaster Recovery (FMDR) offering provides partners with all the components necessary to manage every aspect of IBM i DR. This extends all the way from initial planning, through implementation, ongoing monitoring, virtual and real role swap testing, to 24×7 crisis support in a disaster.

  John Dominic, Maxava’s vice president of global sales, says: “Our partners are telling us that their customers no longer want a …

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• Doing Disaster Recovery Planning Right For Your IBM Power Iron

  October 19, 2022 Jason Hardy

  As I was writing this article, I saw this in my LinkedIn news feed, according to Axios.com: “billion-dollar weather disasters now happen once every 18 days.” My perception was that the United States was getting more frequent significant weather events and it turns out that data from the National Weather Service backs that up.

  Now add in hardware/software failures, cyber security events and local disasters (fire, water damage, power outages) and it makes sense that disaster recovery is one of the top challenges facing CIOs today. If this is a topic you are contemplating, here are a few questions to …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: CloudFirst

  October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There aren’t that many companies that are in the IBM i business and that are publicly traded, but Data Storage Corporation, based in Melville, New York, out on Long Island, is one of them. Just down the road from another big software giant with a legacy history – Computer Associates, which is now part of semiconductor design company Broadcom.

  Hal Schwartz, president at CloudFirst, got a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California State University in San Bernardino back in 1988, and worked in sales at CAC Leasing outside of New York City before starting his own leasing company, called …

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• IBM Power In The Cloud: More Than A Hardware Lift And Shift

  April 4, 2022 Jason Hardy

  In my role, I speak with several companies each week about the prospect of migrating from their on-premise IBM Power server to our IBM Power Cloud. A common thread that runs through these conversations is a focus on the cost of purchasing and maintaining an on-premise server versus the monthly recurring fee of our cloud based service. Many prospects see this move as a simple lift and shift to cloud infrastructure rather than a modernization strategy.

  And while this may be partially true, as most customers are not modernizing their application when migrating, they are overlooking the modernization benefits that …

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• IBM i High Availability: A Met Need?

  March 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Data from the IBM i Marketplace Survey suggests an interesting phenomenon may be playing out when it comes to high availability and disaster recovery: As the usage of HA solutions goes up, the percentage of users expressing concerns about HA and DR goes down.

  After peaking at 66 percent in HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2020, the percentage of IBM i users declaring high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) a concern has dropped each of the past two years. For the 2022 survey, which was released last month, only 59 percent of survey participants declared HA/DR to be a …

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• IBM i Community Predictions for 2022, Part 2

  January 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The new year is upon us, which means it’s time for predictions. We continue where we left off on Monday with our second installment of predictions from the IBM i community.

  The way Fresche Solutions Chief Product Officer Marcel Sarrasin sees it, 2022 will be a period of heightened competition in the business jungle.

  “Technology advancements and changing markets will drive new competitive threats in 2022, creating the urgent need for new digital solutions to help companies thrive, survive and grow,” Sarrasin says. “Focus will be on new IT products and applications that will deliver improved business processes, pave the …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: IBM Champion Ash Giddings

  December 13, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe, but not everybody who has worked on an AS/400, iSeries, System i, or IBM i platform is a programmer. Even if they care a great deal about programs and how they run on the boxes. Ash Giddings, who is an IBM Champion in 2021 and a newly appointed product manager at high availability software provider Maxava, is one such chap, and we got an opportunity to have a chat with Giddings about what is going on with performance management, systems management, disaster recovery, and high availability out there in the IBM i base.

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