• IBM Pulls Back The Covers On Migrate While Active

  January 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Last month, IBM began selling subscriptions to Migrate While Active, a new offering designed to speed and simplify the migrations of IBM i workloads from customers’ on-prem installations to Power Virtual Server running in IBM Cloud. Big Blue also last month hosted an online Guided Tour webinar that provided some much-needed answers to questions about the new offering.

  IBM launched the Migrate While Active in late October, a couple of weeks after unveiling the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5. IBM didn’t provide a lot of initial information on the new offering, which was designed to …

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• StarWind Hooks VTL to IBM i

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking to add a virtual tape library (VTL) to their IT mix may want to check out StarWind, a Rocket Division Software spin-off that provides a range of storage virtualization and software-defined storage offerings. The company recently added support for IBM i with its VTL solution, opening up a new market for itself in the midrange.

  StarWind bills itself as a provider of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for the enterprise remote office/branch office (ROBO), small and midsize business (SMB), and the edge. The company, which began in 2008 as a spin-off from Rocket Division Software …

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• What’s New with Db2 Mirror, PowerHA, and BRMS

  November 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  There’s something for everyone in the new releases of IBM i that IBM will be shipping later this month. For administrators who revel in having well-run high availability, continuous availability, and tape backups, the new releases will not disappoint.

  The most substantial enhancements appear to have been saved for Db2 Mirror for i, which is IBM’s continuous availability solution for IBM i. The new management and monitoring features should bring some major improvements to how customers interact with the product.

  Some of the biggest changes are due to the addition of the new “Health Center” component to the Db2 Mirror …

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• Like Tupperware, Think About Storage When You Move To The Cloud

  October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would be hard to find a company that knows more about storage than Tupperware Brands, which has a globe-spanning $1.6 billion business that designs and manufactures myriad containers to store food and beverages and has famously sold them through Tupperware parties for the past 75 years.

  For the past several decades, Tupperware operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have run their manufacturing and back-office operations on IBM’s AS/400 (now known as Power) systems and their progeny, just like countless other manufacturers and distributors have done around the world. The choice of the AS/400 was driven by a …

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• Big Blue Taps FalconStor To Move Data To PowerVS Cloud And Protect It

  August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When IBM i shops want to move some or all of their applications to the cloud, they have a lot of options. But there is still only one cloud that is designed and run by the same company that actually makes the Power Systems server and the IBM i operating system and database platform. And that, of course, is the Power Systems Virtual Server, colloquially known as PowerVS these days.

  Over the longest of hauls, we expect that a fair number of IBM i shops will use the cloud in some capacity, and some will move their infrastructure entirely to …

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• Big Blue Unveils New Scalable VTL For IBM i

  August 8, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM has unveiled the iDSI620, a new virtual tape library (VTL) for the IBM i server, developed by its business partner, Dynamic Solutions International, that scales incrementally via 1 TB chunks up to 240 TB of storage capacity.

  The iDSI620 is designed to keep pace with customers rapidly expanding data environment without requiring new hardware, according to IBM.

  “With iDSI620, there is no disruption to your data protection as your capacity or performance needs change,” IBM states in its July 26 software announcement. “You can simply add a storage license to your existing solution.”

  As a customer’s data …

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• Give Me A Fulcrum And A Lever Long Enough, And I Can Move Your Data

  July 13, 2022 Brad Jensen

  An old adage about the power of mechanics and physics illustrates perfectly how we feel about virtual tape libraries, and not just the ones made by us, but about other VTL wares out there in the field: Give me a fulcrum and a lever long enough and I can move the world.

  We know that there are other good VTL tools out there, and it is good because the competition keeps us all honest. The important thing is that using VTL brings IT organizations out of the Stone Age of managing data archives and backups.

  First off, if you are …

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• IBM Power: How Strong Is Your Backup Game?

  June 8, 2022 Jason Hardy

  Your business runs on IT and chances are if your systems are down, your business is down. Have you contemplated the most common reasons for data loss and whether your strategy can protect you in the event of natural disaster, hardware failure, fire, ransomware, human error or theft? Depending on the reason for your outage, you may experience data loss and need to leverage your backups to recover. Are you confident in your backup and recovery strategy?

  One of the simplest tests you can do to assess your backup strategy is to see how you stack up against the 3-2-1 …

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• Pledging Backup Assurances in an Unsure World

  March 30, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Companies are facing increasingly threats to their backups these days. Whether it’s ransomware attacks, migrations to the cloud, or random hardware failures, the possibility of corrupted data looms as big as ever. With World Backup Day taking place tomorrow (March 31), it makes sense to check out the state of backups on IBM i.

  The first thing to know is that backup plans appear to be changing at many companies, or at least the mechanism they use to execute the backup. From 2020 to 2021, the percentage of IBM i shops using tape to backup and recover data dropped from …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: LaserVault

  March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When somebody says they have been doing the same job for three or four decades, that is a big deal in the 21^st century because that kind of long-term employment is just not something anyone counts on. In the OS/400 and IBM i market, such constancy and longevity is, well, normal. Unremarkable. Expected. Good.

  So it is with Brad Jensen, the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Storage Corporation, a company that is perhaps best known for its LaserVault virtual tape library software, but since the company was founded in 1989 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it …

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