• Skytap Says It’s Building a ‘True Cloud’ Offering for IBM i

  December 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have a multitude of managed service providers (MSPs) to choose from for private cloud capabilities, but those looking for a public, AWS-like cloud experience are out of luck. Now an outfit called Skytap is looking to change that by providing a “true cloud” experience that lets IBM i customers scale up and down capacity from a Web GUI.

  Skytap was founded in Seattle, Washington, about 12 years ago to facilitate the development, testing, training, and modernization of enterprise applications destined to run in the public cloud. The venture-backed outfit used its expertise in virtualization to help customers …

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• Japan Is A Different IBM i Market, But The Loyalty Is The Same

  November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early November, we did an overview of the IBM i market in Japan, which accounts for about 10 percent of the IBM i installed base and is third to North America and Europe, which have always dominated the AS/400 and follow-on IBM midrange markets.

  In this follow-up story, we wanted to dig a little deeper and talked to two downstream resellers, Bell Data (which is a publishing partner of The Four Hundred in Japan) and Star Computer, which is a downstream partner from iGuazu, the largest distributor of Power Systems with IBM i machinery in the country. …

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• Maxava Adds New Products, Partners, And Users Around The World

  November 12, 2018 Marco Govender

  (Sponsored Content) Maxava, a worldwide developer of best in class disaster recovery and high availability software for the IBM i platform have been busy rolling out their bundled offering that includes their new products Mi8 for Cloud based monitoring, Mi7 for Cloud based security monitoring, and CPR, which is a recycle bin for the IBM i.

  Simon O’Sullivan, senior vice president at Maxava, says: “Our strategy of having all these products designed to work together in concert has been a great move for us as a company. We are winning new partners and new customers around the world.” …

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• The Herculean Task Of Applying Spectre/Meltdown Patches

  October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities are, as our resident chief technology officer and author of the weekly IBM i PTF Guide, Doug Bidwell, is fond of saying, the gift that just keeps on giving.

  We had the shock of finding out in January that there were vulnerabilities in all processor architectures that use speculative execution in their instruction chewing engines – that means all existing processors, by the way. There are none that do not use this very useful architectural feature. And then we had the wait to see what the industry would do to patch these …

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• New Option for 24/7 IBM i Monitoring

  September 19, 2018 Alex Woodie

  It’s important to keep one’s eyes on IBM i server metrics in order to nip problems in the bud. But hiring a night-shift operator can be expensive, and moving your applications to a private cloud might not be feasible. A third option was presented last week by Data Storage Corporation in the form of IBM Power Monitor 24, a new service that promises to provide continuous 24/7 monitoring of client’s IBM i servers.

  Like all cloud service providers, Data Storage Corporation invests in systems monitoring and management. After all, if you’re running critical IBM i servers on behalf of clients, …

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• Why Curbstone Picked iSam Blue for HA

  September 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to picking an IBM i high availability vendor, there are a lot of factors that come into play. Does the product do what I need it to do? Are the license and maintenance fees reasonable? Will the vendor give me the support I need? When the folks at Curbstone considered HA offerings for its IBM i-based credit card authorization portal, all signs pointed to iSam Blue.

  Founded in 2002, Curbstone has built a business around credit card authorization software, particularly on the IBM i platform. The company’s founder and CEO, Ira Chandler, wrote the first commercial credit …

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• iSam Blue Offers Choice for IBM i High Availability

  August 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops searching for a high availability solution have several options to choose from. One that they might not be familiar with is iSam Blue, a small Utah company that sells a solution called iSB-HA. According to iSam Blue’s president, the company is doing well by competing on affordability and service.

  If you’ve followed the history of high availability software on IBM i and its predecessor systems, the name Robert Seal will sound familiar. Before founding iSam Blue, Seal was best known as the original developer for iTera’s data replication software, called Echo2 Seal and iTera parted ways, …

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• Shield Takes Another Stab At Multi Node In HA4i

  April 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions is putting the finishing touches on a new version of its HA4i high availability software that can replicate data across multiple nodes. The product, which has the working name HA4i Multi-Node, will allow customers to adopt more complex data replication flows, such as one-to-many and many-to-one, which puts it on a more solid footing with other HA products.

  IBM i shops have been steadily adopting high availability software over the past few years, studies such as HelpSystems‘ annual IBM i Marketplace Survey and Vision Solutions‘ State of Resilience show. We’re now at a point where …

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• Syncsort Finds Security Key To Business Resilience

  January 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort is keeping up the tradition started 10 years ago by Vision Solutions, which it now owns, by publishing a State of Resilience report. This year’s report focuses the spotlight heavily on one particular aspect of IT operations that’s on everybody’s minds following a turbulent 2017: security.

  After surveying 5,632 IT professionals from January through July of last year, Syncsort found that security was the initiative at the top of most IT pros’ minds. Looking out over the next 24 months, security emerged as the top initiative, accounting for 49% of the votes, followed by high availability.

  Specifically, IT professionals …

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• Syncsort Strikes Again, Buys Trader’s For HA

  January 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort yesterday announced the acquisition of Trader’s, the French firm behind the Quick-EDD line of high availability software for the IBM i server. It’s the second deal for an IBM i software firm in as many months for Syncsort, which nabbed HA giant Vision Solutions last summer.

  The deal for Trader’s gives Syncsort and Vision Solutions a third major high availability product to sell, in addition to the iTera Availability and MIMIX Availability products. Perhaps more importantly, Trader’s gives Syncsort a stronger global presence, particularly in Europe but also Asia.

  “The addition of Trader’s extends our market-leading position in providing …

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