IBM I upgrade

Halcyon Software has announced the immediate availability of the latest version of Systems Operations Suite, the industry-leading monitoring and automated operations solution for IBM i. This new release will enable managed service providers, corporate data centres and IBM i customers to achieve higher levels of system availability for IBM Power Systems infrastructures.

“This latest version of Systems Operations Suite will increase the efficiency of IT resources and reduce the workload of IT staff by delivering greater levels of automation to business operations running on the IBM i platform,” commented Carole Chandler, Sales and Marketing Director at Halcyon Software. “It will also help prevent business disruption and ensure that organisations attain the highest level of confidence in the resilience of their IT infrastructures.”

The new features include Job Log Monitor, which allows users to view all application, error and other messages relating to jobs that are currently running, whether they take seconds or hours to complete. Normally, this kind of important information is transient on the system, hidden from view and only visible if IT staff physically and continuously watch the computer screen. Job Log Monitor enables system or application issues that only occur when specific jobs are running to be quickly identified and resolved. Data can also be captured from all job log entries for future review and analysis.

Halcyon Software has also enhanced Object Manager to enable Journal Receivers to be managed more efficiently. Predetermined criteria, such as age and date last used, are used to automatically find, check and delete or move Journal Receivers to other locations delivering considerable time savings for IT staff. Object Manager also enables organisations to achieve faster backups and restores and save business costs by reducing the need for additional and expensive disk resource to store old journal receivers.

Systems Operations Suite is now shipping with the latest version of Halcyon Software’s Enterprise Console, which has been enhanced to provide greater flexibility of how key system information is displayed and managed. It includes the rolling-up of alerts to reduce the on-screen ‘message storm’ that can occur when errors are reported on jobs that run on a regular basis, giving IT staff a clearer console view and greater visibility of important issues that need to be resolved. The Enterprise Console now allows the use of an unlimited number of panels enabling alerts and critical system messages to be grouped together by device, customer, priority and much more. The graphical user interface has also been redesigned to the latest Windows-theming standards making the console even more familiar and intuitive to use.