iTech Solutions - for all of your IBM i System needs
iTech Solutions - for all of your IBM i System needs
Steve Pitcher, iTech Solutions
It was 9 PM on a Sunday night about a year ago when I received a call on my cell phone from a local IBM i customer. For the purposes of this article, we’ll call him…Gary. I reached out to Gary a couple of times before to introduce myself but never had any return communication until then. Turns out, Gary had a down system. His staff did an IPL and the system just wouldn’t come back online. He did what we all would do and called IBM support. Unfortunately, they told him that he had no software maintenance contract. He then called his then-partner. No answer.
I immediately sent a GoToMeeting to the customer and texted iTech Solutions’ President Pete Massiello to have him on alert that I may need some backup. Pete, being Pete, was on the GoToMeeting faster than the customer.
Richie Palma, Tech Solutions Consultant
I wrote an article on LinkedIn called “Shocking… IBM i Cost of Storage beyond the CEC: EXP-24S or V3700 SAN?” back in 2016 that sparked many conversations on what place external storage has in the IBM i hardware stack. As a result of the popularity of my previous article, big innovation in the storage market, changes in storage costs, and a much more open IBM i infrastructure stack, it seemed like a really good time to go through the exercise again.
I don’t think it’s my place to sell you on whether internal or external storage is better. Honestly, I believe there is a strong case to be made for both, depending on the customer situation. With that being said I think it’s important I share my experience and knowledge, so you have what you need to make an informed decision for the businesses you serve.
For IBM i clients, typically there are a few reasons why they start to ponder a move to external storage:
By Laurie LeBlanc
IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1 were announced during IBM Tech U and will be generally available on November 16, 2019. This refresh includes many enhancements to improve further the reliability, availability, and security of your IBM i environment. Some of the major enhancements are focused on DB2 Mirror for IBM i, enhancements to help developers modernize, increased security, and support for new hardware.
I’m going to highlight some of the features that improve the security and administration of your system. There are also many enhancements for RDi that will improve developer productivity and allow you to modernize with additional support for Open Source languages and tools. I don’t plan to get into the details of those enhancements in this article, but I will touch on them. You can get more details about all of the enhancements here.
It’s plain and simple. You must execute backups daily. No excuses! It’s not just about being able to recover in a disaster; you also need to be able to recover a file that is accidentally overwritten or deleted.
If you have high availability and you think you don’t need to back up every day, you really should reconsider your strategy. Replication ensures that your target and source data are in sync, but if you delete a record or several records you need, you can’t get them back with replication. Backups protect your business data, which is a valuable asset.
May Trucking, an iTech Solutions customer, was recently featured in an IBM Systems Magazine case study, Transporting to the Future.
Jim Utsler of IBM Systems Magazine teamed up with Becki Wagoner, May Trucking Company’s vice president of strategic innovation and technology, to tell the story of how they modernized their infrastructure by moving to a POWER8 system.
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It is my pleasure to introduce to you a new product from iTech Solutions. We first developed this for our Managed Services (MSP) customers, and after so many great comments we decided to make it available to everyone. While our MSP customers get this report daily, this report on our new offering will be sent our weekly.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you had an experienced IBM i System administrator give you a report each week on the status of your system?
On July 2, 2019, IBM announced that 15K RPM hard disk drives would no longer be available for new orders of its Storwize V5000 and V7000 storage systems, US announcement letter 119-048. Why did IBM make this announcement and what does it mean for IBM i customers?
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It’s that time of year again, hurricanes, tornadoes and severe thunderstorms are back again. Which means you’re at risk, especially if you haven’t done a recovery test of your backups recently. What are you waiting for, a natural disaster?
While it may be common sense that you need to keep a copy of your backups offsite for recoverability, we encounter many companies who are not religious about removing tapes from the drive. It’s imperative that you store your backups offsite in case of a disaster. It doesn’t matter if you use physical tapes or virtual tapes, you need to make sure there is a copy in a second location.
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