The IT industry is decisively moving away from traditional hard disk drives (“platters”) in favor of Flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs). It’s a welcome change; it makes much more sense to circulate only electrons instead of disks of metal with electrons on them.

While the instinct for administrators and IT managers is to always hunt down a culprit – a rogue job, an inactive journal receiver, or something else – sometimes the very building blocks of a common process, or rather the specifics that define processes, can be where the trouble at hand resides.

Robot Schedule version 12 makes monitoring for file events and setting them up as dependencies a very simple process.

A Robot Schedule forecast shows you the run activity scheduled for all Robot Schedule jobs over a time period that you specify. Robot Schedule uses the job schedule, job completion history, and any information you add for user jobs, remote prerequisites, and members of remote groups to make its forecast.

Last month, Chuck Stupca (retired IBMer) and Chuck Losinski (Fortra) presented a webinar discussing FlashCopy for IBM i. Based on the attendance, it looks like this is a very important topic for many of you so I wanted to explain how FlashCopy ties to Robot products.