Answer
Restore workflow clarity deserves more scrutiny than buyers usually give it during a demo. Ask to see the actual screens or commands involved in restoring a single library versus a full system, and ask how the platform handles a restore that needs to stop partway through and resume, since real recoveries rarely go perfectly start to finish. A save-while-active feature that lets production keep running during the backup window is often the difference between a manageable nightly process and one that eats into business hours, so ask specifically which objects and libraries it covers and which still require a traditional save window.
Daily supervision burden is easy to underweight against a feature checklist but tends to determine whether a product actually gets used correctly two years in. A platform that requires someone to manually monitor job logs every morning for failures will eventually have a missed failure buried in routine noise; one that proactively alerts on exceptions and summarizes status in a single report is more likely to catch a real gap before it matters. Buyers should also ask how the vendor prices growth, since IBM i shops that add partitions, LPARs, or IFS-heavy applications over time can see licensing costs climb faster than expected if the pricing model is not understood upfront.