There was a time when IT determined the computing services that business users were allowed to have and how those services would be accessed. Those days are long gone. With the advent of mobile devices and social media, the center of gravity has shifted, and users are driving IT to behave differently and deliver computing services in new ways. This phenomenon has been coined “the consumerization of IT,” and it has far-reaching effects on the IT organization, including the choices that IT makes for infrastructure and automation tools…

The Intersection of Workload Manager, the Resource Measurement Facility and zManager Platform Performance Management…

Are three data centers better than two for Disaster Recovery (DR)? Using technologies such as Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS), which facilitates near continuous availability, more organizations are aiming for uninterrupted uptime. The rule of thumb used to be simple failover in a single data center with a hotsite or coldsite backup with more relaxed Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). Now more enterprises are looking at two separate data centers, and in some cases, a three data center DR and failover model that minimizes or eliminates RTO lag time altogether. Let’s consider these newer DR data center models and review the critical decision points for sites to consider as they chart out the role of data centers in their DR strategies…

The term “software-defined data centers” has become a fixture in contemporary IT speak, carving out a niche as a specialty practice or research area in the industry analysis space…

Advanced Function Printing (AFP) is an IBM proprietary protocol used for printing bulk documents such as bank statements. We have an application that takes as input user text messages, typically marketing messages in specific fonts and sizes, and generates the corresponding AFP overlays. These overlays are merged with the main customer documents, also in AFP form, and printed. This application used to be written in Visual Basic, and a third-party tool was used in the application for generating AFP overlays from the user input text…

Your company’s investment in backup and recovery tools can be leveraged in a variety of ways that you may not have considered. These resources aren’t just for managing disasters or significant unplanned outages, which happen infrequently. The following examples describe how to maximize your investment in these tools by also using them to support your day-to-day operations:…

Recovery processes are like “the elephant in the room.” Like ignoring the elephant, it’s often just too difficult to openly discuss how unplanned outages have, or could in the future, wreak havoc on business if the right backup and recovery procedures aren’t established and followed.
   
An unplanned outage can damage customer satisfaction, result in lost business, and hurt a company’s reputation. Here are some examples:…

For decades, we’ve relied on the cast-iron availability and reliability of the mainframe-centric IT environment to support mission-critical applications in the banking and financial services sector. When something does go wrong, we can generally count on sophisticated processes to back out of trouble. When those supporting processes also fail, as they did recently at the Royal Bank of Scotland group in the U.K., the results can be devastating and demonstrate that true resilience depends on a lot more than the choice of hardware or software…

Equens SpA, the leading company in Italy in Automated Teller Machine/Point of Sale (ATM/POS) authorization and back-end payment process management, has spent the past few years consolidating its business and IT operations while orchestrating its strategic card processing transactions around zEnterprise technology. Reliable transaction processing and quality services backed with a comprehensive plan for Disaster Recovery (DR) and failover are critical to the company’s growth and market share…

With a network of thousands of independent insurance representatives throughout the U.S. and Canada selling term life insurance, Primerica’s corporate commitment to 24x7 processing with continuous availability and support goes without saying, as does its commitment to zEnterprise technology in its data centers. However, supporting and building upon a sound technology base also includes the ability to grow staff along with the technology and to implement more effective technology monitoring and problem diagnosis and resolution tools…