In 2007, the Common Europe “Top Concerns” survey found that people in the AS/400 user community were most concerned about high availability and disaster recovery. Common shared the results with IBM, and received this response from Mark Shearer, Vice President Marketing and Offerings, IBM Business Systems Group:

“Thank you very much for sharing the results of the Top Concerns Survey. It’s very helpful to have the collective views and priorities from the COMMON Europe members. I’ve forwarded this information to my executive team to factor in to our overall product and business plans as appropriate.”

This year, in addition to the “on the spot” survey conducted during the opening session of Common Europe Congress, all AS400 users are invited to share their thoughts via a web survey on the challenges they will be facing in the coming years. An iPod nano will be sent to a web winner each from North America, Europe and Australasia along with three other prizes awarded for survey respondents at the conference.

We know you have opinions, so share them now — the survey closes May 9, 2008.

High availability and disaster recovery software provider Vision Solutions Inc. recently announced a significant increase in sales volume following the acquisition of Lakeview Technology.

According to the Irvine, Calif.-based company, Vision Solutions “closed more than 1,000 new sales of high availability, disaster recovery, and data management software,” more than 40% of which are to new customers. That’s good news for investors, but what about the people who actually use Vision’s products?

In an IM conversation with iStudio400.com’s John Brandt, sales is all Vision seems to be talking about. “My impression is that they are simply pushing for more sales,” Brandt said. He also added that the media has not said “a word about better functionality or better service” concerning Vision post-acquisition.

Does anybody else share this opinion? Send me your rants or raves or leave us a comment here.

A lot of System Administrators utilize BRMS and IBM’s Advanced Job Scheduler to backup thier systems.  

In the past, one of the major drawbacks to the AJS was the fact that you couldn’t directly monitor for *Escape messages within the AJS command definitions. You had to create a CLP shell in order to do this.

Well… I don’t know when this changed, but I was looking through the AJS documentation the other day and stumbled across this:

Monitor for messages with Advanced Job Scheduler

Add message identifiers to any command within the command list of a job to monitor messages.

Each command in the command list of a job can have message identifiers that will be used for monitoring. When the job runs and an error message is issued that matches one of the messages entered for the selected command, the job logs the error but continues processing with the next command in the list.

If zeros are specified in either two or all four of the rightmost positions, such as ppmm00, a generic message identifier is specified. For example, if CPF0000 is specified, all the CPF messages are monitored.

To add message identifiers to a command, follow these steps:

1. Open Work Management from your iSeries™ Navigator window.
2. Right-click Advanced Job Scheduler.
3. Click Scheduled Jobs to list jobs.
4. Right-click the scheduled job and click Properties.
5. Select the command from the list and click Properties.
6. Click Messages.
7. Enter the message identifiers to monitor and click Add.

This feature is not available via the Green Screen interface to AJS. That is why I didn’t run into this a long time ago! One more reason to start using the iSeries navigator GUI interface!

Check it out…

 Kenneth

Hello …

My name is Kenneth Graap and I will be sharing my thoughts on System i Backup/Recovery, Security and general System Administration.

This is my first attempt at “blogging”… It should be interesting!

Kenneth