Pat Townsend and BalaBit Pair Up to Cover System i Logs
December 11, 2007 Alex Woodie
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System i security software developer Patrick Townsend & Associates will resell open system log management software from BalaBit IT Security as part of an expanded partnership announced last week. By pairing BalaBit’s log management software with its own i5/OS product, it will bring a greater degree of coverage of system events for the increasingly open System i server, Pat Townsend says. Earlier this year, Pat Townsend launched Alliance LogAgent, a piece of i5/OS software that translates critical messages that hit the QUADJRN and system operator message queue into the syslog format. By supporting this standard, Pat Townsend was enabling its customers to monitor events occurring on the System i server using the same enterprise log management software they use to monitor their other servers. The only hitch in this plan is that, increasingly, many applications and environments that run on the System i server don’t use the native i5/OS message queues and journals to communicate critical events. For example, the HTTP Server (the one powered by Apache), the MySQL database, the PHP runtime, and the OpenSSH encryption environment don’t support native communication methods. So even if you have the QAUDJRN, QSYSOPR, and the assortment of other journals and queues covered with one of the many new i5/OS log management products on the market, there’s still a chance you could miss a critical error or security message. And that could mean your job. Pat Townsend is addressing this by reselling syslog-ng Premium Edition, the open system log management product developed and sold by BalaBit. “They will work together to provide a complete system logging solution for the System i,” said a Pat Townsend spokesperson. “Without support for open systems applications, a system logging solution [for the System i] is incomplete.” The partnership also calls for BalaBit to distribute Pat Townsend’s Alliance LogAgent along side syslog-ng, thereby providing the Hungarian software company with a complete log management solution for the System i. BalaBit IT Security’s business development director Zoltán Györkõ says the Pat Townsend partnership expands the company from its roots in the Unix and Linux markets to other segments. “Six months ago we announced the syslog-ng Agent for Windows and now, thanks to the partnership with Patrick Townsend & Associates, we are able to announce the syslog-ng Premium Edition for System i,” he stated in a press release. “Now we meet the central logging demands of companies having heterogeneous networks.” RELATED STORIES Pat Townsend Normalizes i5/OS Log Data for Security Analyses Patrick Townsend Brings 256-Bit AES Encryption to DB2/400 Data Pat Townsend Teams with iSoft for Native OS/400 AS2 EDI-INT Software PowerTech to Resell 256-Bit Encryption from Pat Townsend
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