News Briefs and Product Shorts

IT Director Reports Better Sleep After Replacing Windows with iSeries

What's the best way to fight server sprawl, eradicate viruses, and virtually eliminate downtime, all at the same time? If you're Tyler Cooper & Alcorn, a prestigious Connecticut law firm, you accomplished this by moving off Windows to an iSeries environment. Last week, IBM tooted its iSeries horn by announcing the success Tyler Cooper & Alcorn is having with its new server--and how glad the lawyers are to find an alternative to Windows. "With Microsoft, every time you turn around, you need another server--seven for document management, three more for e-mail, and another three to five for financial systems, and then they'd crash," says Barry Winnick, an IT director and attorney with the law firm. "Our iSeries system has not gone down, and I don't have to worry about managing a farm of separate servers." The new system is composed of a single iSeries server running DB2, Lotus Domino and Notes, and a suite of legal software from Rippe & Kingston. As a result of the new system, the law firm has reduced its IT staffing needs in half, and has chopped its IT costs by nearly 50 percent. "I can now sleep soundly at night," Winnick says.

Teamstudio's New Resolver Aims to Banish Notes Save Conflicts

Domino administrators looking for a tool to help deal with replication or save conflicts with Notes documents may want to check out Teamstudio for Administrators Edition 3.0, which Teamstudio started shipping in early May. With the update, the tool suite gains a fourth component, called the Teamstudio Resolver, that is designed to save Notes administrators' time by eliminating the need to resolve save conflicts manually. Teamstudio Resolver lets administrators view the changes that were made to Notes documents on a field-by-field basis, and select which document to preserve based on the changes that were made to both documents involved in the conflict, thereby ensuring that only the most up-to-date and informative changes are retained. In addition to the new Resolver tool, Edition 3.0 brings new features to the Teamstudio Analyzer Server Edition component, which allows administrators to audit database design and identify potential security risks. With this release, Teamstudio has added views that help administrators with the analysis of ACLs, assets, templates, agents, and replication, the Beverly, Massachusetts, company says. In addition to Teamstudio Analyzer Server Edition and Teamstudio Resolver tools, the Teamstudio's Administrator suite includes Configurator Server Edition and Validator Server Edition components.

Tandberg Unveils 1U LTO Tape Autoloader

Do you have a use for an LTO autoloader that occupies only 1U, or 1.75 inches, of space in an industry standard rack? Tandberg Data, which last week announced what it claims is the densest rack-mount LTO autoloader in the business, is betting that you do. The LTO StorageLoader features a half-height LTO-2 tape drive that can hold up to eight data cartridges across two removable magazines, giving the device a native storage capacity of 1.6 TB (3.2 TB compressed) and a native transfer rate of 24 MB per second (or 48 MB per second compressed). Users can interact with the SCSI-based StorageLoader through its LCD screen and four-button keypad, or through a Web-based interface; a barcode reader is optional. "For small to medium businesses, our new StorageLoader will cost less than a LTO-3 full-height drive and store four times the capacity, while providing integrated automated backup and manageability features," says Ken Cruden, Tandberg Data's chief operating officer. To sweeten the pot, Tandberg is offering eight free LTO2 cartridges with the purchase of a new StorageLoader; see www.storageloader.com for more information.

Quadrant Curtails the Paper Chase at Plymouth Foundry

Plymouth Foundry, an iron parts manufacturer in northern Indiana, is the latest OS/400 shop to discover the benefits of electronic documents--in this case, those generated by Quadrant Software's document management software. The foundry, which uses the BLIS-400 ERP package from B&L Information Systems, had been using pre-printed forms for everything from invoices and order acknowledgements to payroll and accounting checks, says the company's IS director, Joann Wagoner. However, the lack of flexibility with the pre-printed forms was hurting productivity. "Customers are getting more and more demanding about wanting their documents delivered in different ways," Wagoner says. "You might forget to send a customer a copy of something that they wanted because there are so many people who want something different." Before the implementation of Quadrant's Formtastic and FastFax/Enterprise products, Plymouth Foundry employees had to manually fax documents to customers. With Quadrant Software's interface to BLIS-400, the company put a code into the customer master file that instructs the software to forward a copy of an acknowledgement anytime it gets sent to a particular customer. "You put it in once and it happens automatically," Wagoner says. To read the complete case study (in PDF format) click here.

HiT Enters the Market for Database Migration Tools

HiT Software last week launched a new release of Allora, its SQL middleware product for moving data between XML and major relational database formats, including DB2/400. With version 4.1, the San Jose, California, company has added a multiple SELECT feature that lets users perform multiple SQL queries that are then joined in real time using XSL. HiT Software says the product previously was able to handle complex database-to-XML transformations with a single SQL query, but there are cases where the single SQL query approach is not ideal. The new multiple SELECT feature will also enable users to keep their complete database structures, including data table relationships and constraints, in XML, which will be useful for database migrations. Other enhancements in Allora 4.1 include support for namespace definitions, complex database expressions, NetBeans 4.1, and stored procedures in Oracle databases.

NetManage Unveils JCA-based Data Adapter

Host connectivity specialist NetManage last week unveiled the newest member of its Librados product family, which is a suite of Java-based adapters for integrating a variety of applications, databases, and data formats. The newest member is the Librados Data Integration Plug-In, an adapter that takes data from the XML format and transforms it into other formats, including XML, relational database, flat file, and EDI. The new Data Integration Plug-In joins a collection of more than 50 other connectors written according to the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) standard, including connectors for SAP R/3, Oracle's database and eBusiness Suite software, J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne, and PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. "The Data Integration Plug-In continues the NetManage Librados commitment to delivering pure Java, open standards-based application integration solutions that offer complete server platform portability," said Jim Campigli, chief technology officer for Librados products at NetManage.

Happy 17th Birthday to the AS/400!

We don't use exclamation points around IT Jungle very much, and when we do, we have a good reason for it. Either we are shouting or we are happy. In this case, upon celebrating the 17th birthday of the AS/400, we are happy that after a lot of shouting from the OS/400 community, IBM is doing something to try to shore up and grow the iSeries market.

This will not be an easy task, of course. But if it is any consolation, neither is the Windows server base growing any more; within about a year or so, the Windows server base will be flat in terms of revenue growth, just like the Unix market is after substantial decline. To one way of thinking, that large installed base of Windows and Unix users might as well be a million miles away from OS/400. To another way of thinking, there are tens of millions of unhappy customers who are looking for an integrated system on which they can run applications that does not have the problems of either. They want the low sticker price of Windows, the openness of Linux, and the ruggedness of Unix. OS/400 servers could be all that in 2005, just as they could have been in 1990 or 1995 or 2000.

Let's hope we don't have to wait until the AS/400-iSeries-Whatever is 27 years old before IBM figures this out . . .