But Wait, There's More

MIMIX Disaster Recovery Solution Heals Hospital's HIPPA Pain

Prior to the HIPPA regulations, there were numerous situations such as the one at Rochelle Community Hospital (RCH) where 24- to 48-hours worth of data was typically at risk. This is a fairly small hospital, only 54 beds, and like many small to mid size companies, it relied on tape backups to protect its records. After the data was backed up, the tapes were shuttled across town to a vault for safekeeping. Occasionally tapes remained on site for another day.

If a natural disaster or a system failure disabled its server, the potential loss of data would be costly in many ways, but primarily to patients receiving care. That's where the HIPAA regulations come into play. Among other things, they require healthcare organizations to provide verifiable protection for their medical records.

After examining other information availability solutions, RCH selected Lakeview Technology's MIMIX dr1 as its disaster recovery solution. Lakeview's business partner Healthcare Management Systems (HMS) assisted in the implementation, which also included IBM TotalStorage DS4300 Express storage devices. According to the hospital's IS director, the implementation was up and running within a few hours.

And rather than having 24- to 48-hours worth of data at risk, the hospital now gets replication to a backup server every hour; it takes 10 minutes to do the replication. All applications are protected against major data loss, including those that process accounts payable, order entry, emergency room, radiology, laboratory interface, patient data, patient diagnosis, pharmacy, and insurance. RCH still performs nightly tape backups as an extra line of defense.

Lakeview also pointed out that MIMIX dr1 was recently designated as a Built on IBM Express Portfolio Solution, which is designed for small and mid size organizations that need availability and recovery products such as the Express storage devices used by RCH.

American Software Reports Increasing Sales, Profits

Midrange application software provider American Software finished its fiscal 2005 on April 30, and the company posted some pretty good numbers. Software license sales were up 17 percent to $3.4 million, and services sales were up 61 percent to $9.9 million. Maintenance fees from the installed base grew by 26 percent to $5.4 million, which pushed overall sales in the quarter to $18.7 million, up 40 percent. Net earnings in the quarter were $1.45 million, up by 556 percent, which must be making shareholders and employees at American Software pretty happy.

For the full fiscal year, American Software booked sales of $64.6 million, up 18 percent. The company added $2.2 million in cash to its coffers, boosting cash and equivalents to $59.1 million; however, cash is down quite a bit from this time last year, when American Software had $66.4 million in the bank. It costs money to fuel growth, of course. American Software's growth is being fueled in large part by its Logility supply chain management subsidiary, but the company's ERP software still has some game. For instance, in the fourth fiscal quarter, Petroleos de Venezuela upgraded its ERP suite for 16 new iSeries servers located in the company's oil lubrication facilities throughout Venezuela.

HP, IBM Jockey for the Lead in the Tape Market

Tape technology has been around in commercial data centers for six decades, and it is not about to go away in the seventh. Vendors are still fighting over control of the prolific, if only moderately profitable, market for tape drives and tape libraries. IDC recently issued market-share report cards for the tape market, and IBM and Hewlett-Packard were the top of the class. IDC says HP had a 29 percent share of both shipments and revenues for tape drives bearing its label in 2004; IBM had only 17 percent of tape drive shipments in 2004, but because it tends to sell more expensive drives (particularly for mainframe and iSeries customers), actually raked in 33 percent of revenues. Dell and Certance (the former tape drive unit of disk maker Seagate Technology and, with IBM and HP, one of the three key developers behind the LTO tape standard) were cited as dominant tape drive sellers in 2004. If you don't think that adding the Compaq server line to the HP tape business hasn't been helpful to HP, you're wrong.

In the tape library market, HP accounted for 26 percent of shipments and 23 percent of revenue for automated tape loaders and full tape libraries. IBM also had 23 percent of revenues in this segment, but only had 22 percent of shipments--again, IBM sells bigger boxes to its bigger customers. StorageTek, which has just been eaten by Sun Microsystems for $4.1 billion, and ADIC were cited as the other dominant tape library suppliers in the IDC report.

Server Vendors Promote Command Line Standard for Server Management

DataMirror Secures $8 Million Credit Line from RBC

Midrange high availability and data transformation software maker DataMirror last week said it has secured an $8 million (Canadian dollars) revolving credit facility with the Knowledge-Based Industries division of Royal Bank of Canada. DataMirror, which is based in Markham, Ontario, says it does not need the cash, but Peter Cauley, the company's chief financial officer, noted that with the consolidation going on in the midrange industry and in the high availability and data transformation markets that DataMirror plays in, having the credit line in addition to its own $33.3 million in cash and equivalents allows DataMirror options when and if acquisition opportunities arise.

In its fiscal first quarter ended April 30, DataMirror posted sales of $10.75 million, up 9 percent, and swung to a profit of $800,000 after reporting a loss of $620,000 in the year-ago period. As is the case with all companies sitting on a pile of cash that is relatively large compared to annual revenues, the pressure is undoubtedly on DataMirror to either acquire a company that can contribute growth or distribute the cash to shareholders.

Loss of Citigroup Tapes Renews Calls for National Security Breach Law for Consumers

Calls for a national security breach policy, similar to SB 1386 in California, gained more urgency this week when financial services giant Citigroup announced that the personal information of almost 4 million of its customers has been lost. Citigroup said the integrity of its customers' personal information was compromised when the United Parcel Service lost a package containing tapes from the company's CitiFinancial unit that were being shipped to a credit-reporting bureau in Texas. UPS confirmed it lost the tapes, which contained the names, social security numbers, account numbers, and other private information of 3.9 million Americans, but there was no evidence the tapes had been stolen. Wide-scale breaches of consumers' private data seems to be a weekly occurrence this year, with Citigroup joining the ranks of MCI; Bank of America; Wells Fargo; Polo Ralph Lauren; the University of California, Berkeley; ChoicePoint; and other companies that have opted to inform their clients when they lose their data. Many large corporations are complying with the intent of SB 1386--which requires organizations to inform California citizens if their private data has been compromised--on a national basis, even though Congress hasn't yet passed a law requiring them to do so.

Big Blue Promises to Open Up Cell Processor Specs

It is a coincidence of timing, but IBM and its partners in the Power.org consortium held a summit in Barcelona, Spain, last week, the same week that Apple said it would be moving off the PowerPC platform and onto Intel processors for its computers. IBM is obviously very keen to put the best face forward on PowerPC after Apple, one of the original PowerPC partners, split, and to that end IBM announced 11 new partners in the Power.org, adding to the 17 companies who formed the organization in December 2004. The new members are: AboveMicro, Anyka Cayman, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Celestica, DAFCA, Forte Design Automation, Rapport Incorporated, Teak Technologies, TimeLab, Universal Scientific Industrial, and Venture Corporation Limited. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is the clear anchor member in Europe, having recently built a cluster from IBM's PowerPC 970-based BladeCenter JS20 blade servers in Madrid. This machine has 3,564 of IBM's 2.2 GHz PowerPC 970 chips, and delivers 20.5 teraflops of sustained number-crunching power. Most of the other members are chip designers, software firms that sell chip design applications, or provide turn-key electronics that use processors. The original Power.org members include: AMCC, Bull, Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Culturecom, IBM, Jabil Circuit, Novell, Red Hat, Sony, Shanghai Belling, Synopsys, Thales Computers, Tundra Semiconductor, and Wistron. Interestingly, Thales is announcing a dual-processor embedded system based on the PowerPC 970 chip aimed at the avionics industry.

In addition to adding new members to the Power.org consortium, IBM said it would provide the specifications for the "Cell" processor, a future chip derived from Power cores that it has been working on with Sony and Toshiba for computers and consumer electronics such as game machines and HDTVs. The Cell chip is at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 3 console, and is expected to be used in a variety of electronics. IBM is also planning to provide certain software libraries to make use of the Cell chips as open source software, including a software development kit and maybe even a version of Linux tweaked for the chips.