• 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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• Thoroughly Modern: Time To Develop Your IBM i HA/DR Plan For 2022

  December 6, 2021 Josh Osborne

  Disasters and unplanned downtime can hit any company at any time – regardless of where its applications or data sits. Establishing a high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) plan is paramount to getting your mission critical IBM i applications and your business back up and running – fast!

  2021 saw its fair share of challenges. Everything from bush fires to earthquakes to flash floods, and the continuation of the pandemic. And, those are just the ones mother nature sent our way. The manmade risks in the form of cyberattacks and ransomware also grew exponentially in 2021. With over 30,000 security …

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• Technical Debt: The Silent Killer

  October 27, 2021 Alex Woodie

  There’s a dangerous malady afflicting companies that rely on the IBM i server to run their business applications. Left undiagnosed and untreated, it can debilitate an IT shop, rendering it unable to take advantage of new opportunities and respond to challenges. It’s called technical debt, and you or an organization you know may be suffering from it as we speak.

  Technical debt is a concept that is credited to Ward Cunningham, the American programmer and the co-author of Manifesto for Agile Software Development. “If you develop a program for a long period of time by only adding features but …

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• Shield Launches Message Monitoring Offering for IBM i

  August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals should stay on top of important messages generated by their server. But sometimes can be difficult for a user to sign-in on a console. With Enterprise Monitoring Solution for IBM i, or EM4i, Shield Advanced Solutions is giving operators and administrators the capability to view messages and log files remotely via email, text, or push notifications, and to respond to them, too.

  EM4i monitors IBM i message queues and job logs on behalf of the user. When a message hits the log, EM4i automatically forwards it to the user as email, text, or via Pushover Notification, …

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• Malware Threats and Cyber-Recovery on IBM i

  May 26, 2021 Brian Barth

  Cyber threats have evolved from the traditional vectors of theft and direct attacks to more financial driven cyber destruction and extortion, especially via ransomware. Hospitals, manufacturers, universities and financial institutions have all been attacked in the last year, and the rate of attacks is increasing as networks become more accessible to support remote workers. The Colonial Pipeline attack has demonstrated that even the critical infrastructure that supports our supply chains is not invulnerable.

  In 2021, more than three quarters of attacks are financially motivated, and over half of those attacks are ransomware – an attack in which files are typically …

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• RevSoft Leans On ‘Shadowing’ To Ensure Speedy Job Scheduler Failovers

  March 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  There are several things that can prevent a high availability failover from executing quickly on an IBM i server, including data synchronization issues, communication failures, and other problems. With the “shadowing” feature in its job scheduler, RevSoft is determined that issues with synching job schedulers do not make that list.

  Jobs demand special treatment in the IBM i high availability world. Care must be taken to ensure that active jobs, including jobs that are in the job queue as well as jobs that are scheduled to run in the job scheduler, are replicated from the primary server to the backup …

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• 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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• 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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• ERP Deployments Shift Cloudward, Even On IBM i

  July 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Applications of all sorts are moving to the cloud, including the critical ERP systems that businesses rely on to automate processes. That’s been the trend for some time in the industry as a whole, but it’s also having an impact on the IBM i community, which is becoming cloudier by the month.

  While on-prem deployments of IBM i still dominate, the cloud portion is growing. Nearly one-quarter of IBM i shops have IBM i resources running in the cloud, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Study, including 6 percent who are cloud-only and 17 percent who run …

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