The Bear Facts!

I started my travels last week in Boston and I had the privilege to attend a Bruins hockey game.

What an experience—these fans are so passionate about their hockey. (I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that they won the Stanley Cup last year.)

Seventy-five percent of the crowd was wearing something with Bruins on it; even kids had their faces painted. I learned that the Boston Bruins mascot is a bear. Maybe that’s why there were so many fights Monday night as the Bruins beat the NY Islanders 6-2: Bears don’t like islanders invading their turf.

The crowd’s passion got me thinking about lights-out processing. During the week, I visited six customers in different phases of automating their IBM i servers. Some asked whether anyone has achieved lights-out processing? “Yes,” I said, “They got there through due diligence and commitment.”

Six Customers and Six Setups

1. The first customer I visited is basically running lights-out, with a large 695 environment and several partitions, all reporting into a single console.
2. The next customer uses Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise to run their schedule across their IBM i, AIX, and Windows servers, and Robot/NETWORK to monitor QSYSOPR on 16 partitions from one console. They love the control.
3. The third customer was starting to schedule across 500 Windows servers. Their challenges included deploying the software to reboot these servers when the IBM i server is rebooted once a week. And, they plan to tie into their MySQL Server databases too. They also use the Robot/NETWORK Status Center to control their partitions.
4. The fourth site was deploying the PowerTech security solution for compliance, exit point monitoring, and managing privileged users. They plan to use our services to help them deploy, and to review their Robot configuration to improve their efficiency and take advantage of new features.
5. Next, I’m off to Atlanta—home of the Thrashers (FYI - their mascot is Thrash, a Brown Thrasher, the official state bird of Georgia). Here, we’re helping a company with two new data center implementations. They’ll be consolidating their servers into the larger 770 technology to create an extremely secure, redundant environment for their customers. They want to standardize on security and operation products. Thanks to all of your ideas, we have the right products to meet their needs. Our team is champing at the bit to automate their servers and cross-server security reporting.
6. On my final visit, I met with a customer that “got rid of the IBM i ten years ago.” Guess what—today they’re going to the new 770 technology and managing 40 partitions from these servers. They use Robot/SAVE’s Data Center Management to centralize tape management and consolidate reporting, and they use Robot/NETWORK to consolidate events from their backups to a single site. It was fun to walk in the doors and get hugs from the staff—the loyalty and dedication to our products is inspiring.

Common Ground

Some common themes I noticed during the week:

• Help/Systems Support ROCKS!
• Robot/NETWORK is great for consolidated resource management and QSYSOPR monitoring
• There’s a lot of passion to automate and finish the journey to lights-out automation