• PSSP: The Latest Threat To Business Continuity

  November 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Businesses in Northern California learned about a new threat to business continuity in October: the Public Safety Power Shutoff, or PSSP. With weather conditions ripe for the rapid spread of wildfire, Pacific Gas and Electric de-energized thousands of miles of power lines, sending thousands of homes and businesses into disaster recovery mode.

  In late September, as weather conditions turned dry, hot, and windy, PG&E warned that it would have to cut power across large swaths of its Northern California service territory, potentially shutting off power to 2.4 million people. In the wake of power line-sparked wildfires that destroyed tens of …

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• Digging Into the Latest IBM i TRs

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The fall batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) have been revealed, and as expected, there’s a bit of new functionality available for customers who use IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. In this story, we’ll tackle enhancements in open source, systems management and monitoring, and development, which means we’ll dive deeper into other areas, like database and HA/DR, in a future story.

  Let’s start with the fun stuff: open source. With IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1, IBM has brought support for two prominent open source projects, including ZeroMQ and Redis.

  ZeroMQ is a universal messaging library that allows users to …

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• Staying On Top Of High Availability At HelpSystems

  October 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) HelpSystems got its start in systems management and automation software and has expanded its solution portfolio over the years to include cybersecurity, business intelligence, document management, robotic process automation, capacity management, and more. More recently, HelpSystems entered the IBM i high availability (HA) arena with their Bug Busters acquisition in 2016. I recently checked in with Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, and Tim Woodfield, director of development, to get an update on the company’s HA offering.

  “HelpSystems does a good job of listening to the things our customers like and …

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• 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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• Cloud Cover

  November 7, 2018 Victor Rozek

  (Sponsored Content) Imagine for a moment that you’re on a floundering ship, surrounded by angry water. You look around for a lifeboat only to discover they are stored below deck, in the vessel rather than hanging off the side where they might actually prove useful.

  But that effectively describes an equally chancy IT practice: conducting system-monitoring activities from within the system. When the digital waters rise, the value of a monitoring method vulnerable to a variety of server and facility mishaps greatly diminishes. Once disaster strikes, there is ample irony but scant comfort in restarting monitoring operations after …

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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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• 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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• Vision Buys Enforcive, Then Gets Sold And Merged With Syncsort

  July 10, 2017 Alex Woodie

  To say that it was busy couple of days for Vision Solutions last week would be an understatement. On Wednesday, the company announced its acquisition of IBM i security firm Enforcive. The following day, Vision announced that it was being bought by Centerbridge, a private equity firm that intends to merge it with ETL provider Syncsort.

  When all the smoke from the fireworks cleared, here’s how the chips landed: Clearlake Capital Group, which acquired Vision Solutions barely a year ago and bought Syncsort in 2015, was offered $1.2 billion by Centerbridge Partners for majority stakes in both firms. That …

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• Maxava iFoundation Grants Available; IBM i Community Benefits

  June 14, 2017 Dan Burger

  When it comes to investments in the IBM i community, the leading-by-example philanthropy of Maxava, now in its seventh year, has hit the target of making meaningful change. The company’s iFoundation has put funds in the hands of local user groups where it encourages IBM i professionals to become active in the community and get people thinking and moving and becoming more connected and more engaged.

  Maxava just confirmed another $50,000 to fund foundation grants to local user groups that promote training and education in IBM i technology. This program reminds me that change is better served by good …

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