This newsletter includes:
A Word from iTech Solutions President, Pete Massiello.
I told someone the other day that it was “raining POWER9s”. They said, “What do you mean by that?”. It seems like we are installing a few new POWER9 systems a week at this point, and we have quite a few that we are in the process of helping customers order.
These machines are fast, and a great replacement from any previous machine. We recently had a customer who was running a POWER6 at a P20 software tier, and we were able to give him a machine with twice the CPW, 4 times the memory, and a good amount of more disk for less money than he was paying in just software maintenance costs, as he went from a P20 tier to a P10.
The initial savings don’t even take into account the savings on hardware maintenance, since the new POWER9 came with 3 years of warranty coverage. Another happy customer.
We have some new videos on installing POWER9 coming soon to our website, with a few more already being recorded. Also, don’t forget our iTech Solutions iTips for help with your IBM i.
Disaster Recovery
I can’t not talk about Hurricanes as that was one of the biggest stories in September. We helped a few customers with issues from Hurricane Florence. The flooding was just unreal watching it on the news. We hope those customers, employees, and their families impacted by the hurricane are recovering.
For the rest of us, have you tried to recover your system since then? What will it take to test your recovery? If your recovery is a wish and a prayer, then I think it is time to test your recovery. Even the most polished shops need to test out their recovery. You may be surprised by the issues you will uncover. The job you may save may be your own.
You want to test out the recovery process when it isn’t an emergency. To do that, you need to do a full system recovery based upon how you normally backup your system. If you back up the entire system each Saturday, and perform selective backups during the week, then you need to try and recover using both sets of backups. If you don’t have a machine to test a recovery on, contact our sales group and they can set up a contract for you to use one of our systems at your location, or our location to perform a disaster recovery test. Or better yet, talk to our sales group (203)-744-7854 press 3 for sales about our DR as a Service (DRaaS), where for a very low monthly rate you can do a test and have a partition in our cloud when a disaster strikes.
Conferences
With the fall approaching, its conference time again. Look for iTech Solutions to be at the Vermont IBM i Users Group, Jack Henry Conference, COMMON Fall, IBM Technical University, and COMMON Sweden. Our dates are in the events section of this newsletter. I hope if you are planning on attending these, that you plan to stop by either our booth or at one of our speaking sessions and say hello. It’s always great to meet our customers, and learn more about them. I will be at most of those events.
Encryption
One item that I see quite a few of our customers asking for is encryption at rest. Most people in the financial sector, as well as medical are asking for this. While IBM i does offer software encryption on an ASP, you can’t do the entire system unless you use external storage. We have implemented this over the last few months at a couple of customers who required it, and it was just so simple with the IBM Storwize.
In one case, we converted them over with only 90 minutes of downtime. There are some great features and functions in a SAN, there are also many benefits to internal disk as well, so let’s discuss which makes the most sense to you from a financial, performance, and ease-of-use perspective.
IBM i 30th Anniversary eBook
Have you seen the IBM i 30 years of innovation eBook? And to think we are just getting started.
There are some great stories about the success of companies using IBM i, and you can read them in the book. We have quite a few clients in there as well, and that makes me extremely proud knowing that we have been instrumental in our clients use of IBM i in the success of their company. View the book here.
This newsletter includes:
- 6 Steps to Help Backup Your Data During Hurricane Season
- Guide: 25 Tips to Prepare your IBM i for the Unexpected
- iTech iTips from Steve Pitcher
- Infographic: IBM i Identity & Access Management
- Featured Blog: How to Evaluate Your Managed Service Needs by Laurie LeBlanc
- Managed Service vs. Self Service by Phil Pearson
- Events
- Release Levels and PTFs
Please note that for all 7.1 customers that are on the Quarterly or Semi-annual iTech Solutions PTF maintenance plan, we will be installing the latest PTFs as you are now on Technology Refresh 11. For the 7.2 customers, we will be installing 7.2 Technology Refresh 9, and 7.3 will be Technology Refresh 5.
Thanks,
Pete
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