• Giving IBM i The Storage Of Last Resort

  July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every IT ecosystem has its niche players, and they are a vital part of that ecosystem just as are niche players as in the natural ecosystem. Lots of companies bridge the gaps between products and allow customers to do something that would be hard for them to replicate on their own. This brings real value.

  Entrepid Corporation is one such niche player in the IBM i and broader Power Systems market, and it bridges the gap between IBM’s Power-based systems commonly used as database and application servers in midrange and large enterprises and the storage offered by EMC before and …

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• What’s New With BRMS, PowerHA, And Db2 Mirror

  April 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The latest IBM i Technology Refreshes (TRs) brought a number of enhancements to various parts of the operating system and related licensed products. That includes new stuff for its backup and recovery product, BRMS, as well as the two high availability offerings, PowerHA and Db2 Mirror.

  On the Backup and Recovery Media Services (BRMS) front, IBM added several new features with IBM i 7.4 TR4 and IBM i 7.3 TR10, including new SQL services that returns log information for BRMS activities. This new SQL service generates the same information that the Display Log for BRM (DSPLOGBRM) command does, but it …

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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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• Big Blue Bolsters IBM i High Availability And Data Resiliency

  October 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

  High availability and data resiliency are critical topics in the minds of business owners these days, especially in light of the summer’s disasters, both natural and manmade. To that end, in the latest batch of Technology Refreshes, IBM has bolstered the services that provide high availability and data resilience in IBM i, PowerHA, and BRMS.

  Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS) is the licensed product that thousands of IBM i shops use to automate their backups and recoveries. Those backups usually involving tape, which was cited by 48 percent of IBM i shops in the 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey …

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• How The Latest TRs Bolster The Core IBM i OS

  October 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Yesterday was Technology Refresh (TR) day for IBM and its IBM i operating system, and Big Blue didn’t disappoint. The company unveiled new releases of IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 that bring a slew of new capabilities to the core operating system as well as surrounding offerings like Db2 Mirror, ACS, and RDi. In this article, we’ll look at enhancements to the core OS and related key features.

  During a COMMON webcast Tuesday, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will touched broadly on a number of enhancements that soon will be available in the TRs. Most of the new capabilities will …

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• PowerHA Updates Focus on Integration and Automation

  May 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Despite the introduction of Db2 Mirror last year, PowerHA remains a critical component ensuring the high availability and disaster recoverability for thousands of IBM i shops around the world. Recent updates, including the delivery of PowerHA version 7.4 in the second half of 2019 and a minor update delivered in March 2020, have focused on bolstering the product’s integration with Db2 Mirror, as well as HyperSwap in the DS8000. Automation, monitoring, and usability have also been improved.

  Brian Nordland, the PowerHA technical product manager with HelpSystems (which develops the product on behalf of IBM) recently updated the IBM i …

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• Latest TRs For IBM i Now Available

  November 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week delivered the latest IBM i operating system Technology Refreshes, giving good IBM i boys and girls around the world early Christmas presents in areas like programing, operations, database, and security. Here’s a quick recap of the new stuff in IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7.

  There were several general enhancements with IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7. For starters, administrators gained more control over resources available to the Integrated Web Server (the one powered by Apache) with the new capability to install it the Web server in a user-specified sub-system. Admins also get new functions …

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• How The Latest TRs Bolster HA/DR And Security

  October 28, 2019 Alex Woodie

  High availability, disaster recovery, and security are more important than ever, as enterprises look for ways to eliminate risks to their operations, applications, and data. To that end, it’s not surprising that IBM bolstered the HA/DR and security capabilities in IBM i with the latest Technology Refreshes that are slated to begin shipping November 15.

  Let’s start with the new HA features in Db2 Mirror for IBM i, the new business continuity offering that implements an active-active database cluster atop two unique IBM i logical partitions. Db2 Mirror, you’ll remember, was delivered with IBM i version 7.4, so it’s …

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• IBM i 7.3 And 7.4 Get Their Autumn Tech Refreshes

  October 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is hosting its IBM Systems Technical University this week, and used the occasion to quietly launch the Technology Refreshes, or TRs as they are known, for IBM i releases 7.3 and 7.4. If you were running around the Venetian Hotel, you could probably stitch together the extent of the updates to the platform, and to be honest, we are still trying to get all of the details, which were not available as we went to press.

  We will tell you what we know now, and then circle back and drill down into the details as appropriate.

  First of …

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• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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