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2017: An IBM i Year In Review

December 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

It’s mid-December, which means it’s time to look back upon 2017 and reminisce on the biggest stories of the year for IBM i and the overall midrange community. From a pair of Technology Refreshes and the scheduled demise of IBM i 7.1 to acquisitions and security breaches, there was a lot to take in.

It all started off innocently enough in…

January

IBM has had a good run of not changing the name of the platform. In fact, it hadn’t changed the name since 2008, giving it a line of uninterrupted starts that even Giants quarterback Eli Manning could appreciate. …
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Vision Adds Security To HA Management Service

October 23, 2017 Alex Woodie

Fresh off its acquisition of Enforcive, Vision Solutions last week unveiled a new managed resilience service that adds professional IBM i security services to its managed offering for high availability and disaster recovery.

As part of its managed HA and DR services, Vision Solutions (which has been merged with Syncsort) works with customers to ensure that their MIMIX, iTera, and OMS/ODS environments are shipshape and read to be called into duty in the event of an unexpected outage or natural disaster.

Now Vision is adding the same type of options to its managed security service and selling it alongside …
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Cloud Provides A Third HA Option

September 20, 2017 Alex Woodie

In the third part of our series on IBM i high availability options, we’re looking up — to the cloud, that is.

If you’re in the market to implement an IBM i high availability solution – and the best data we’ve seen indicates that many IBM i shops are shopping in 2017 – then you basically have three options to choose from: logical replication software solutions, IBM’s Power HA hardware solution, and a cloud-based HA solution.

We covered the first two offerings in previous stories (you can find our story on logical replication here and our story on PowerHA here …
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MSPs Get Monthly IBM i Pricing; Why Not Everyone?

April 3, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

On one of the problems with cloud computing, from the point of view of the people building the clouds, is that they can provide per-user or per-hour utility style pricing to their customers for hardware and system software, but they have to pay for perpetual licenses to software and buy the hardware to provide that service. They have to get a lot of capital and shell it out before they can even begin to take in the first dollar.

Over the past several years, IBM has offered managed service providers – really more hosting companies than true cloud capacity vendors …
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IBM i Shops Seeking More Services

March 27, 2017 Dan Burger

Many folks view managed services as a replacement for processes that company employees used to do. Like backing up data, for instance. Slow backups and nearly closed windows for planned downtime have more organizations looking at the managed service providers for improved efficiencies and the opportunity to add a disaster recovery plan that makes sense.

That used to be a big part of managed services, but the definition has greatly expanded in the past few years. As IT complexity has soared, there are many pieces in the IT puzzle that are missing or a bad fit in organizations that struggle …
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Inside Carbonite’s IBM i Plans For EVault

March 22, 2017 Alex Woodie

It’s been a year since Carbonite acquired the EVault business from Seagate for $14 million, and not a lot has changed, save for the addition of IBM i support in the cloud backup agent. But according to Carbonite, there are big plans underway to bolster the EVault product line, and in particular its IBM i capabilities.

Carbonite continues to develop and sell the entire line of EVault products that it acquired in December 2015 from Seagate, according to Kashan Mohammad, Carbonite’s senior product manager in charge of EVault office solutions. (The home-based products, which account for the lion’s share of …
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SaaS Meets MSP To Benefit IBM i Development

March 22, 2017 Dan Burger

Development environments in IBM i shops have a reputation for clinging to the past. Taking into account all the shops where there is ongoing development, it’s fair to estimate that two-thirds to three-quarters of IBM i users have changed their development techniques very little in the past 25 years. There was little incentive to change during the first 15 years, but during the past ten years and planning for the future things will have to change.

Software as a service (SaaS) and managed service providers (MSPs) are gathering more attention. SaaS (subscription-based pricing) is becoming more common and MSPs are …
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Bank-Turned MSP Sees Growth in IBM i

March 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

There aren’t a lot of areas of the IBM i business that are growing these days. Fewer companies are running the platform, which causes young people to look elsewhere to start their careers. That dynamic is actually helping to drive business for First National Technology Solutions, which was an IBM i customer before becoming a managed service provider (MSP).

In January, First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) announced it was seeing “a sharp increase” in demand for IBM i and mainframe hosting. While the Omaha, Nebraska-based company gets most of its revenue by providing private and hybrid cloud hosting for Windows …
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Litmis Spaces Pitches Price, Monthly Contracts To Cloud Shoppers

January 30, 2017 Dan Burger

There are plenty of places an IBM i shop can turn to for cloud computing services. The list of IBM i managed service providers (MSPs) is longer than the line to get free adult beverages at the COMMON conference vendor reception. One of the choices is Litmis Spaces, a host for IBM i development space that has a hankering to grow into a full-service MSP. The company’s $157 per month IBM i access is maybe the next best thing to a free adult beverage.

The low monthly fee buys a single-tenant Power8 machine (meaning that you are the only …
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