Once It’s Mission-Critical, You Need Automation

For years I’ve believed that once a computer system becomes mission-critical, you need automation. You no longer can afford to have people watching and monitoring the system manually. You need software that’s smart enough to tell you there’s a problem. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running IBM i, MVS, Windows, UNIX, or Linux—all of them need to be automated if they’re critical to the business.

How did IBM i become mission-critical? In many industries it was always critical to the core 9-to-5 business, but after hours and on weekends it was less critical. (There were exceptions, like casinos, banks, and 24-hour manufacturing plants.)

However, over the last decade and a half, people have become used to using a browser to access data. Now, we’re conditioned to look up accounts online, access e-mail, run a management dashboard, or sign on to a server to check on something. We expect computing technology to be available when we want it. And, technology like VPN, Internet, and worldwide communications, have made it easy to access servers anywhere.

As a result, the IBM i server (System i, iSeries, AS/400) sitting in the corner of the data center needs to be available 24/7 because it stores the business data that your executives and staff need to access. You have to monitor it, automatically, around the clock. And, you have to figure out when you can back it up without downtime.

High Availability (HA) used to be for large IBM i customers only, but this also has changed over the past decade. Now, almost all IBM i servers are mission-critical because they host business data that data access solutions, like SEQUEL, need so they can handle on-demand, data analysis requests.

Automation is the best way to keep servers and processes available. The Robot solution was designed for automation and monitoring. You don’t need to keep making decisions about what's important—your rules do that automatically. Escalation is part of the automation process. It helps identify who or what needs to know about different security, hardware, or application events.

So, when you think mission-critical hardware, think industrial-strength software like the Robot Automated Operations Solution.