iTech Solutions - for all of your IBM i System needs
iTech Solutions - for all of your IBM i System needs
Steve Pitcher, iTech Solutions
This article was originally written for and published on MC Press Online. The original article can be found here.
With supply chain uncertainty, it makes sense to not delay your 2020 purchase of POWER9 and storage.
The new COVID-19 virus is making its way around the globe. In response, governments are issuing travel embargoes, companies are ordering staff to work from home if possible, and people are stocking up on groceries, fuel, and water.
IBM has recently requested its workers in China, Japan, South Korea, and Italy work from home and has designed contingency plans for employees elsewhere (the details of those plans were unavailable at the time of writing this article). Participation at conferences, meetings, and trade shows will be evaluated on an individual basis. Company travel is restricted to some locations, and just recently IBM cancelled its in-person participation at the RSA cyber security conference in San Francisco from February 24–28, along with other tech giants like AT&T and Verizon. There are no stated plans for IBM to scale down participation for other conferences. My guess is they’re in a wait-and-see mode like most companies: reduce risk as events unfold.
Pete Massiello, President, iTech Solutions
This article was originally written and posted within 2020 February COMMON Connect. The original article can be found here.
Open Source?
Yeah, I put a question mark at the end. Most times when people think of Open Source, they are thinking Python, PHP, Java, Swift, Ruby, C# and JavaScript to name a few. Most people don’t associate Open Source with systems management or operating systems. In fact, most people don’t even think that open source is ready for enterprise corporate programming. When open source started taking off, about 30 years ago, I could see the potential, but I was concerned if people would be willing to move it into production. Would it remain in the labs, colleges, and with the programming underworld, or would it ever be able to see the light of day? Many years have passed, and I think we are finally seeing over the past 10 years more and more companies embracing open source. As they should.
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?
