• Tape Popularity Increases in IBM i Land

  March 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With all of the disaster recovery options available to IBM i shops these days — virtual tape libraries, hardware- and software-based high availability, and backups to the cloud — it may be surprising to learn that customers are still installing tape drives in large numbers.

  According to the recent HelpSystems’ Marketplace survey, 54 percent of respondents say they rely on tape as one of their ways to recover from a disaster. That was up 6 percent from the previous year’s study. It was also the highest figure for tape since the very first year the company conducted the survey, …

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• Testing: The Secret Weapon Of DR Success

  December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Just as every company should carry liability insurance, every company should have a disaster recovery (DR) plan. Without a plan, the odds of recovering from a disaster are meager, at best. But just having a plan isn’t good enough, either — the company must test the plan to gauge whether it will actually work.

  Whether your software runs in a server housed at your headquarters or in a giant rack in a public cloud across the state, it’s a critical element for smooth operations. While this information technology is usually reliable — and if you’re running IBM i, it’s almost …

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• Disaster Recovery, At Your Service

  November 16, 2020 Matt Paterini

  Every organization needs a sound disaster recovery plan to protect their business from natural disasters, weather events, cyber-attacks, and other unexpected threats. Disaster recovery strategies can take on different forms depending on the requirements of the business, specifically the defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

  These RTO and RPO metrics are not precisely the same, but they are interrelated and are part of a complete disaster recovery plan.

  The RTO metric is not just a stopwatch that starts ticking between the time applications go down, for whatever reason, and when they come back again online again. …

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• Recovery Point Provides Another Option for Full-Service DR

  October 21, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to full-service disaster recovery firms, most IBM i shops are aware of IBM Business Continuity and Recovery Services (BCRS) and Sungard, the two giants of the space. But there’s a third, slightly smaller option that nevertheless should be on their list: Recovery Point Systems of Germantown, Maryland.

  Recovery Point was formed nearly four decades ago to serve the document storage needs of businesses and organizations near the nation’s capital. As tape storage took off, the company evolved its business plan and served as secure repository for tape storage, sort of a regional Iron Mountain.

  Today, Recovery Point …

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• From Here To There: Securing Your Future On IBM i (And In The Cloud)

  September 23, 2020 Steve Grzybinski

  The Connectria team presents a three-part series addressing concerns IBM users have about the platform and its future. Part Two: Security And Disaster Recovery.

  Last month, we kicked off our discussion of common concerns about the IBM platform by taking a close look at the shrinking system admin pool and how to leverage remote administration to offset that risk. This month, we dive deeper into another area of concern for Power Systems platform users: Security (and I’m not talking about social security for all of us about to retire).

  Security is a broad and extensive topic, so let’s break it …

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• The Dollars And Sense Of Business Continuity

  September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those companies that have been in the IBM midrange market for a long time and are still alive and kicking have undergone a lot of change over the decades. But as is also the case, the core people at the company have been there for a long, long time and they understand how to leverage change to drive business and absorb change to help customers cope.

  That is one of the secrets of longevity for Datanational, founded in September 1979, which is located in the Farmington Hills suburbs of Detroit and which has always had a strong presence in …

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• Four Things That IBM i Shops Get Wrong About HA, DR, And Data

  July 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s always a little hard to generalize, but IBM i shops tend to be conservative, thoughtful, and thorough when it comes to running IT. But no IT organization is perfect, and there are still issues when it comes to disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA).

  We think this is more often a reflection of the situation than it is of the people running IBM i systems. And to get a sense of the HA and DR missteps that people are making, we had a chat with Lilac Schoenbeck, Vice President of go-to-market strategy in the Power Systems division at …

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• Tapping The Sky For Disaster Recovery

  July 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The killer app for IBM i in the cloud, at least for the next several years, is very likely going to be disaster recovery and high availability. Not just because it is so much less expensive to provide these vital infrastructure services on the cloud than it is on premises, but because so many people still need DR and HA but cannot afford it.

  The cloud is changing that, and a partnership between Skytap, the upstart provider of IBM i server instances in the cloud, and Maxava, the now established but once upstart provider of HA and DR software …

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• Abacus Cloud Customers Enjoy Wider Ecosystem

  June 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For many years, Abacus Solutions ran its private IBM i cloud business out of a commercial datacenter close to its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. A few years back, Abacus decided to move its clients’ machines to a new datacenter, and in addition to getting better disaster preparedness, the move opened up a whole new ecosystem of services for its IBM i customers.

  The move from Abacus’ old datacenters into new datacenters was completed in 2019, but only recently did Abacus Solutions announce it. To get the low down on the big move, IT Jungle recently caught up with Patrick Schutz, …

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• Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions For 2020, Part 2

  January 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i community in 2020? It’s a question that’s worth some speculation, particularly from members of the IBM i community who have given it some thought. Here is our second (and final) batch of community predictions for 2020.

  The IBM i platform has been chugging along for 32 years (or 40 if you count the S/38). Do you really think this will be the year that it goes kaput? Trevor Perry certainly doesn’t think so, and you probably shouldn’t, either.

  “There will be continued predictions of the demise of IBM i throughout 2020,” the IBM …

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