News Briefs and Product Shorts

IBM to Distribute Bytware StandGuardAV Trial with i5/OS V5R3

IBM will include a fully functional, limited-time trial of Bytware's StandGuard Anti-Virus software with every new copy of i5/OS V5R3, the companies announced at a joint news conference at the COMMON conference in San Antonio last week. A copy of StandGuardAV will be distributed on the "core" DVD that includes the operating system, and, once activated, the product will give users full access to the product for 15 days (previously, Bytware offered trial downloads that would identify, but not delete, viruses in OS/400's Integrated File System). Including StandGuardAV with i5/OS V5R3 makes a strong statement about the significance of security and the importance of keeping a virus-free IFS, IBM says. "We're pretty excited about it," says John Reed, IBM's director of iSeries product management. StandGuard AV, which is based on McAfee's antivirus software, is the only antivirus scanning tool designed to run natively on the OS/400 (and now the i5/OS) operating system, and provides a number benefits over PC-attached antivirus scanning. With the first release of i5/OS, Bytware and IBM collaborated to include new "on access" virus scanning capabilities, which allow StandGuardAV to detect and neutralize viruses when someone tries to open or access a file infected with a virus (see " 'On-Access' Virus Scanning to Debut with OS/400 V5R3"). The i5/OS V5R3 is required in order to run the new i5 hardware, and also runs on older iSeries Model 8XX and AS/400 Model 7XX servers.

LXI Issues Open API, Tells Vendors to 'Get Serious' About iSeries Backup and Recovery

LXI Corp. shook things up a little in the storage software management world last week, when it announced its new iSeries Open Client at COMMON. With the iSeries Open Client API, LXI says it's providing a way for providers of distributed backup and recovery products (Legato, Computer Associates, and VERITAS, for instance) to support the iSeries with their Windows-, Linux-, and Unix-centric solutions. The new API allows vendors to control many aspects of iSeries backup and recovery processes from a network-based, non-iSeries console, which is important because the vast majority of network backup products don't support the iSeries. The API is similar in some regards to LXI's Universal Client, which allows LXI's backup and recovery software for OS/400, called MMS, to control backups and recoveries on other platforms. The new iSeries Open Client, however, is designed for vendors, not customers. LXI product manager Tim Kormos says he hopes the new API causes some disruption in the broader market for backup and recovery software, in which OS/400 has been the odd duck. "We're forcing these people to get serious and take note," Kormos says. Hundreds of customers of LXI (which specializes in OS/400 back up and recovery software but also supports Unix, Linux, and Windows) have requested more interoperability between their LXI-controlled backup and recovery processes for OS/400 and for other platforms, the company says.

Stonesoft Ships New iSeries Firewall for VLAN Security

Stonesoft announced the general availability of its StoneGate Firewall and Virtual Private Network for the iSeries server last week. The StoneGate Firewall and VPN, which uses packet filtering, stateful connection tracking, and application-level security to filter and block unwanted Internet traffic, includes its own "hardened" Linux operating system and installs on AS/400, iSeries, and i5 servers equipped with logical partitioning (LPAR). The Finnish developers say StoneGate excels at providing intra-logical-partitioning security for Linux partitions running across the iSeries' virtual local area network (VLAN). While traditional OS/400 partitions are very secure and don't pose a security risk when run side by side in an iSeries server with logical partitioning, introducing Linux into such a system does add a security risk to other Linux partitions running on that VLAN, Stonesoft executives say. Stonesoft, which announced its iSeries firewall in February (see "Stonesoft to Launch Firewall and VPN for iSeries"), is starting the StoneGate product at about $6,500. For more information, go to www.stonesoft.com.

BOScom Adds Desktop Integration Enhancements to BOSaNOVA Emulation Product

BOScom is shipping a new version of its BOSaNOVA 5250 emulator that features new desktop integration capabilities, the company announced at COMMON. With BOSaNOVA 7.0, the Phoenix-based company introduced the capability to copy and paste data directly into Microsoft Excel files, which, BOScom says, will be particularly useful when copying multi-language text and numbers that would otherwise be subject to Windows' automatic text corrections. There is also a new feature in the software's "external link" capability, which lets users open documents that are attached to text strings on 5250 screens. Now administrators can configure the external link feature to use a specific program to a file, when the file type is supported by more than one application. BOSaNOVA 7.0 also has the capability to configure a mouse wheel to scroll by page. BOScom uses the BOSaNOVA emulation in three of its products, including BOSaNOVA TCP/IP, BOSaNOVA Client, and BOSaNOVA Plus. For more information, go to www.bosweb.com.

Lakeview to Distribute Barsa's Automated LPAR Resource Allocation Tool

Lakeview Technology is now a distributor of Barsa Consulting Group's Automatic Partition Resource Manager product, the companies announced at COMMON. Automatic Partition Resource Manager is used to automatically and continuously adjust iSeries system resources to adapt to changing application needs in a logical partitioning (LPAR) environment. The product monitors the amount of CPU, interactive performance, and memory used by applications running in partitions, and automatically resizes the partitions based on rules set up by the system administrator. Lakeview, best known for its MIMIX high availability software for OS/400, says Automatic Partition Resource Manager is a good fit for its customers, many of which use partitioning. "When MIMIX rolls production to a standby partition, Automatic Partition Resource Manager ensures appropriate system resources will be there," said Dave Schnee, Barsa's chief solution architect for Automatic Partition Resource Manager.

ITI Announces iSeries Support with Suite of Banking Software

Information Technology Inc., a Lincoln, Nebraska, developer of banking software, has ported its applications to run on the iSeries, and it already has two customers lined up. ITI, a Fiserv subsidiary, announced last week that Premier, its flagship community banking suite, which previously ran only on Unisys ClearPath servers, would be available on the iSeries platform, as well. Forming the core of the Premier offering are the demand deposit, savings accounts, certificates of deposit, loan accounting system, and customer information system modules. Additional add-ons include the exception item module, computer billing services, delinquent child support reporting, safe deposit, financial reporting, repurchase agreement module, and the Moneyve$t module. Two banks (Southern Community Financial Corporation of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the Cornhusker Bank of Lincoln, Nebraska) have decided to run Premier on iSeries hardware. Southern Community Financial, which has more than $1 billion in assets, plans to go live in June.