• Cobalt Iron Targets IBM i with New VTL Offering

  November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Cobalt Iron yesterday unveiled a new analytics-infused virtual tape library (VTL) solution that it says will optimize and bring IBM i backup and recovery operations into sync with the rest of the enterprise. The offering lets IBM i users back up their data to anywhere – including on-premise and the cloud backups, with automated replication in between — but without giving up IBM i-specific features delivered through existing tools like BRMS and native commands.

  Richard Spurlock founded Cobalt Iron five years ago with a plan to modernize backup and recovery. He saw that enterprises were spending too much time and …

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• Data Needs To Be Anonymized For Dev And Test

  November 14, 2018 Scott Heinlein

  (Sponsored Content) Every company needs to create applications and then test those applications against a database that has real data in it. And therefore, most companies will take their test data from production databases and make a copy of it, or a subset of it, to do such testing, usually by doing a bulk copy. And at that moment, all of the sensitive data in that database is exposed to the programmers and testers.

  Given that in excess of 80 percent of information leaks start from an internal source, this is a potential – and possibly great – …

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• HelpSystems Gets Into JAMS for Scheduling

  November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems yesterday announced the acquisition of MVP Systems Software, the Connecticut-based developer of the JAMS workload management and scheduling software. While JAMS supported IBM i, HelpSystems will count on the product to deliver capabilities primarily in the open systems realm, with cloud possibilities looming in the future.

  The acquisition came together as the result of mutual respect that HelpSystems and MVP Systems Software had for each other, says Kate Bolseth, general manager of cross platform products at HelpSystems.

  “We’ve known each other for years in the workload automation space and I’d say that we’ve both been very impressed with one …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 14

  November 14, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  I learned a valuable lesson this week: never stick your hand in the middle of a dog fight. Now, that may seem like common sense, but sometimes in that moment of panic when you’re trying to figure out what to do, you do something dumb. But it got me thinking about the efforts of our community who look to help each other out whether it be through a free webinar, a virtual training, or a product so our readers will know exactly what to do – or not to do — if disaster strikes. IT Jungle also plays a vital …

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• Is Nagios The Future Of Monitoring For IBM i?

  November 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  For decades, technology professionals turned to established frameworks from IBM Tivoli, CA, Hewlett Packard, and BMC (“The Big Four”) to monitor their hardware and software stacks. But the open source world has caught up with those closed monitoring environments, and a project dubbed Nagios is poised to be the go-to platform for IT monitoring, including on IBM i.

  Nagios, if you are not familiar, is a free and open source software product that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, network gear, applications, and the array of services that organizations increasingly rely on. The software –backed by the obligatory recursive acronym …

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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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• Guru: Configure Collection Services

  November 12, 2018 Dawn May

  Collection Services collects valuable information about your partition and the workloads you are running. While many think of Collection Services as performance data, it is really systems management data and at some point you will need that data. Collection Services helps you understand the overall workload running on your system and trends over time. It provides the ability to look backwards in time to understand “How did I get here?” and has the data to answer a wide variety of other questions.

  Collection Services is on by default, so whether you know it or not, you are running Collection Services. …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Phoenix Envy

  November 12, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  IBM is understandably concerned that its annual revenue, likely to be about $80 billion this year, is 25 percent less than it was in 2011, when it reached nearly $107 billion. The company’s revenue increased during the first two quarters of 2018 after falling every quarter for five and a half years, but its falling fortunes have discouraged customers, employees, and investors. Apple, the largest technology company in the world, boasts revenue that is three times that of IBM. It nearly failed in 1997, but Microsoft helped it rise from its own ashes like the Phoenix.

  The …

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• IBM Winds Down PowerVM V2, Nudges Customers To PowerVM V3

  November 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may not occur to you, but the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor that Big Blue created for Power Systems servers has a version just like every other piece of software in the world, and like all software, it ages and eventually it is retired from the field in lieu of more modern code.

  In announcement letter 918-129, IBM let it be known that PowerVM V2, of which there were three releases, will be withdrawn from marketing on February 19, 2019 and will have its support withdrawn on September 30, 2020. That may seem like a long time away from …

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• Modernizing IBM i Apps with Microservices

  November 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Application modernization means different things to different people. For some, it could be turning a 5250 screen into a Web or mobile interface, or replacing database access with SQL. But for others in the IBM i community, including the vendor OpenLegacy, modernization refers to exposing existing business logic as APIs through a microservices architecture.

  Microservices refers to a software development technique whereby applications are broken down into multiple self-contained components and served via APIs in a loosely coupled but coordinated manner. The main advantage of this approach is each microservice is built independently of others, which can boost productivity and …

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