Sunny with Clouds

Greetings from sunny Rochester! Well it is sunny today (Monday) anyway. When we first arrived on Saturday afternoon it was freezing. Not quite literally but a lot closer than one should ever expect to get in late July. There was even an overnight frost warning in some parts of the state last night.

We are actually in Rochester to participate in the kickoff meeting for a new modernization Redbook, which will be covering everything from modernizing the UI, to modularizing code, to updating the database, to ... well you get the picture. It is a daunting task but many good people are involved in the project. This week is devoted to determining the topics to be covered, so if there is anything in the modernization arena that you feel your company needs advice and guidance on, please let us know via the comments to this blog and we'll bring them forward to the group.

But Backups are Looking Cloudy

For some time now we've been trying to find a simple, reliable method of providing an off-site backup for our mission-critical files. This is particularly important during those periods (like now) when we are registering folks for our fall RPG & DB2 Summit.

We had been using FTP to send the nightly backups to an off-site IBM i, but have suffered timing issues that made this approach unreliable for reasons we won't delve into. As a result we had been looking for a commercial FTP site that might work for us, but those that we found either had file size limits that were too low for us or had prices that were too high.

We knew that sites like Box.com (where we already had an account) and DropBox.com had the kind of cloud-based service that we needed. But they didn't support FTP and we just didn't have the cycles to program to their APIs.

Just when we thought we were going to have to give in and either program to the APIs or pay through the nose for an FTP site, along came Arpeggio Software with its latest offering ARP-DROP. ARP-DROP currently only works with DropBox, but will shortly support other cloud-based services such as Google and Box.com. Best of all, it is a free offering that works in the IBM i native environment. As soon as we heard about it we signed up for a copy and loaded it onto our IBM i. Within 10 minutes were sending and receiving savefiles from DropBox using simple IBM i commands, and the performance was really impressive. Also, because the product is command based, it is perfectly suited to being used in automated backup scripts and that's exactly what we'll be doing. If you have a need for a similar tool take a look at ARP-DROP. We're really impressed with what we have seen so far and intend to take full advantage of it in the coming months. Thanks Arpeggio.