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Lessons Learned from IBM's Native Scheduler

The systems that businesses rely on today are increasingly complex and challenging to manage without sophisticated job scheduling tools. According to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey Results , only 22 percent of IBM i shops are running the IBM i operating system exclusively. 68 percent are also running the Windows OS, another 56 percent are running Linux, and 26 percent are running AIX. That...
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Performance Management

What is Performance Management? IT performance management is responsible for everyday aspects of capacity management , like monitoring performance and resources, planning changes to make efficient use of resources, analyzing performance, and reporting back to the business. Now more than ever, your company’s bottom line rests on your ability to provide 24/7 service online. Even short outages can...
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IT Maturity

What are your optimization goals? An optimization initiative is typically triggered by one of the drivers listed below and the focus is dictated by your overall business objectives. But singlehandedly focusing on one objective may negatively impact your capabilities in the other areas. This can reduce the overall service quality and offer limited to no real value. In order to achieve concurrent...
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How to Go from Simple to Strategic Capacity Management

Capacity Management Strategies If IT was like a restaurant…then capacity management should be like the restaurant manager (aka Maître D’). Unfortunately, too many organizations are using capacity management as the clean-up department. When something goes wrong, capacity management fixes it. And while that used to work, that’s not the best practice to follow today. A Brief History of Capacity...
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Capacity Planning

Have you ever experienced an online service outage? It’s like losing half your physical locations without any warning. Downtime is a huge problem. It stops your revenue stream. It compromises customer loyalty. It damages your brand’s reputation. And it wastes hours and IT resources to fix the problem—when it shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with. Isn’t it about time you prevented downtime...
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IT Risk Mitigation

It's a brave new world for IT. And it often seems impossible to predict future demand and guard against performance risks. You have mountains of data, scalable cloud infrastructures, and a complex web of IT environments. It's complicated, to say the least. And it's matched by skyrocketing consumer demand for and reliance on online services. Bottom line: outages are more dangerous to a company’s...
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Do You Need Enterprise Scheduling Software?

Job scheduling was simpler when you only needed to worry about your IBM i (AS400) server and its batch processes, but several dynamics have changed over the past decade which have forced us into worrying about processes on other platforms.
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Service Level Management

While IT managers agree that service level management (SLM) is critical to their organizations, many also find it intimidating. It need not be. An SLM program is what you make it - it can be formal or informal, all-encompassing or focused on key services. The point is to document required service levels for services provided to the business by the IT organization. Service-level requirements are...
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Top 15 Vendors in Capacity Management Software

Where TeamQuest (now part of Fortra) Capacity Management Stands TeamQuest, a global leader in capacity management and predictive analytic modeling , has made the Top 5 Vendors list by Research in Action’s 2016 Capacity Management SaaS and Software Report. Called “the most important focused player in capacity management,” TeamQuest (now part of Fortra) scored higher in customer satisfaction and...
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Ensure Availability at a Reasonable Cost to Meet Business SLAs

Availability is a key indicator of how successfully an IT organization is supporting the company’s business objectives. Are required service levels in terms of workload volume and response times being achieved consistently for the business units? If not, the impact can be significant: a stoppage or slowdown can, in a matter of minutes, disrupt your supply chain and result in lost transactions...