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.

The concept of high availability has been on the minds of IT decision makers in the last several years. As the recent IBM Top Concerns survey revealed, comprehensive high availability is the second highest concern among IBM i users, with only keeping current skill sets coming ahead.

Have you recently adopted an IBM server running IBM i and don’t know where to begin with system operations? You are not alone.

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.

The three Vs of big data are volume, velocity, and variety, but in order derive value from big data, IT departments need tools to store massive amounts of data (volume) and make sure it is always available for quick analysis (velocity).

Isn’t it time your job scheduling environment (and your IBM i) got the modern look it deserves? Give Schedule Activity Monitor a try for graphically monitoring your jobs on the go.

If you’re using EnterpriseOne or SAP, it may be to take a closer look at the security and business process automation that Robot Schedule can offer these key applications on IBM i. We don’t talk enough about the integration we’ve done between Robot Schedule and EnterpriseOne (formerly JD Edwards, now owned by Oracle) and SAP.