Resources

Astronauts Rely on Checklists (and So Should You)

By Kurt Thomas on Tue, 08/30/2016

What do astronauts and IBM i admins have in common? Checklists! These seemingly simple yet effective devices serve as our external memories and deliver process consistency, but they’re not without limitations.

Article

Disks Busy vs. ASP Busy in Robot Monitor

By Kurt Thomas on Thu, 08/25/2016

Did you know that the Disks Busy monitor reports the average percentage across all your ASPs, not just System ASP? You could be teetering near an I/O overload and not know it! If you have multiple ASPs, use the ASP Busy monitor instead. Here’s why.

Article

High Availability Fail Tales (and How to Avoid Them)

By Kurt Thomas on Thu, 08/25/2016

Chasing a high availability state is a common goal for IBM i administrators and one that can be thwarted by a single issue left unattended. By sharing some of the most frequent tales of what went wrong from real-world environments, you’ll be able to avoid these same scenarios.

Article

Monitoring the Demands of Fast Disk

By Kurt Thomas on Wed, 08/24/2016

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.

Article

Small but MIGHTY: Controlling the *CLS Object Type

By Kurt Thomas on Wed, 08/24/2016

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.

Guide

HelpSystems (now Fortra) Fills Encryption Gap With Linoma Buy

Despite all the IBM i security vendors that Fortra has bought over the years--and there have been at least five of them--the company has lacked one key security capability valued by enterprises: encryption.

Guide

Which Enterprise Job Scheduling Tool is Right for You?

Blog

The 9 Server Sprawl Questions You Need to Ask

Mon, 06/27/2016

For budding companies, server sprawl may be just one of many growing pains—a temporary inconvenience for a greater good. But if you’re struggling to complete processes on time, stalling with the auditors, and jumping from server to server whenever an error occurs, it’s time to ask the tough questions.

Blog

The #1 Step Before Automation

Fri, 06/10/2016

An up-to-date and comprehensive runbook won't win you any awards. But when you get the green light to implement a workload automation tool, documentation is your lifeline. Unfortunately, most runbooks aren’t up to snuff.