Dan Burger
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IBM i Shops Turn To MSPs For Help
March 16, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreCompanies are looking to MSPs to help them obtain operational efficiencies and increased value from their IT investments. I wouldn’t call it a hive of activity, but there are more frequent indicators of shops wanting to consolidate IT investment and avoid the upgrading hardware expenses. It is pushing new decisions. Two Connectria Hosting customers that I spoke with last week fit both those descriptions. Here’s what brought them to the popular IBM i MSP.
Morgan Craven, director of IT engineering at The Freeman Company, based in Dallas, Texas, described the situation that led him to Connectria as beginning with two
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Storagepipe Takes Aim At IBM i Tape Backup And Recovery
March 16, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreIn the IBM midrange, tape backup is what we do. None of the backup alternatives are even a close second. Internet-based vaulting services, however, continue to make inroads as organizations study ways to achieve quicker recovery times without stepping into the high cost and high complexity of high availability. One of the service companies to keep an eye on is the off-site backup company Storagepipe Solutions.
Why are so many organizations completely dependent on tape backup? And why are data recovery plans often an afterthought? You might actually be one of the companies that have given some thought to
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What’s Up In The IBM i Marketplace?
March 9, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreAnalyzing the IBM i market could be generously described as a crap shoot. There’s not a great deal of hard data to be found. When something does arise, we take notice. A month ago, an article in IT Jungle provided a peek into the results of a survey of IBM midrange shops conducted by HelpSystems. The results of that survey have been compiled and presented in a report that has just been released.
IT Jungle, along with the European publishing company PowerWire, assisted HelpSystems in choosing topics and questions that would lead to revealing details about the
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Maxava IFS Replication Makes Performance Leap
March 9, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreIn the high availability world, the replication of IFS data has been a bit of a bottleneck. Companies that require 24×7 continuous operations have no tolerance for downtime, so backing up all systems and data, creating a failover system, and having access to everything is of the upmost importance. One of the keys to this is throughput performance and Maxava has addressed this with multi-threaded replication architecture for the IBM i Integrated File System, or IFS, which has just become available in its enterprise HA product.
Multi-threaded IFS replication lets organizations run multiple IFS replication processes in parallel, increasing the
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UCG And Expedient Partner For Expanded IBM i Hosted Services
March 4, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreUnited Computer Group built a trustworthy reputation alongside its growing IBM midrange customer base by offering online backup services. It also offered disaster recovery services to organizations that have figured out the limitations of their downtime survival endurance. UCG has made the investments in equipment and staff to deliver service that meets high expectations, and now it’s taking the next step.
Expedient, a company with 11 data centers in seven markets from Chicago eastward, including the northeast regions of the United States, and UCG decided they could use one another’s help, so they formed a partnership.
Expedient provides colocation
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Affordable Energy: Investment In The IBM i ISV Community
March 2, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe IBM midrange ecosystem was built on ISV applications. When the first AS/400 was ready to be shipped, more than 2,500 applications were available. That was a huge number then and it’s a huge (but undetermined) number now. So much has changed in the past 25 years. Who would expect the AS/400, now the IBM i, ISV community to resemble what it once was? And a fair question to ask is: “Should it?”
As long as the software remains vital and diverse and modern, the platform survives. A weak ISV community will sap the strength of the system. True. But
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Infinite Success Is Modernization Via Migration
March 2, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read more“We see lots of interesting ways forward for IBM i applications,” says Infinite Corporation president and CEO Bruce Acacio. He’s talking about IBM midrange shops looking to modernize, but he’s specifically interested in shops that have decided to leave the IBM i platform behind and migrate their applications to Linux, Windows, or Unix systems. Infinite helped “just under 200” IBM i shops make that migration in 2014, Acacio says. He expects that number to reach 400 in 2015.
Decision makers have had modernization in mind for several years during which they’ve been in talks with Infinite about options and the
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Implement, Teach, And Get Out Of The Way
February 23, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreStretched, strained, and even swamped are words that describe IT resources in a great many companies that are leaning on service providers to advance their IT objectives. This is decidedly true when it comes to implementing new technology, where skills and experience are in short supply. The circumstances occur across all platforms, but perhaps is more apparent among the users of the IBM Power Systems running the IBM i operating system, where IT staffing is known to be light.
IBM recognized this years ago and came up with team of technology specialists who could be called on when
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PHP Changes IBM i Shops, And They Change The PHP Community
February 16, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhat has PHP done to buck the trend in IBM midrange shops to resist change? Fear of disrupting traditional business policies and procedures is not unusual and it’s not unique to the IBM i community. Change is scary, but it can also be exciting. PHP has brought about a pretty fair share of change. And in the process, PHP has changed. The IBM i PHP community has changed, too.
There are a lot of companies that leverage their RPG development staffs by cross-training them in PHP, a server-side scripting language designed for Web development but also used as a general
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HelpSystems, SoftLanding Partner To Upgrade TurnOver
February 16, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreSoftLanding has collaborated with HelpSystems to obtain more modern cross-referencing and documentation tools for SoftLanding’s widely used change management tool, TurnOver. The partnership, which was announced last week, involves the integration of a more modern version of HelpSystems’ application development tool, called ABSTRACT, with the goal of enhancing software development capabilities for IBM midrange shops using TurnOver.
TurnOver (referred to as TurnOver for iSeries v100 edition in the company’s literature) supports repeatable procedures for developing and maintaining IBM i applications, including issue tracking, project management, development, and deployment. It is used by IBM i ISVs and development departments in IBM