Raz-Lee Unloads New Products at COMMON

May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

Raz-Lee Security has been on a roll lately. Earlier this year, it launched DB-Gate, which makes external databases like SQL Server, Oracle 11g, and MySQL accessible to IBM i programs. Then at the COMMON show last week in Southern California, the Israeli software vendor launched two more products, including a change management system for the IBM i server and multi-LPAR support for its products. It also provided a glimpse into a product to be released later, called iCommand.

Raz-Lee says its new Change Tracker software automatically traces software modifications to IBM i programs at both the source and object levels. The product does this by monitoring the QAURDJRN log over time, which allows it to record every revision of source or object code, including changes to file structures.

The new product is aimed at filling a gap left by the traditional change management software (CMS) vendors, according to Raz-Lee. The company says that, while traditional CMS products typically do a good job tracking the changes and revisions that occur during the various stages of development, Change Tracker is very good at detecting any changes that make it into production.

What’s more, Raz-Lee says that Change Tracker doesn’t let any change by without being noted, whereas there are ways to bypass traditional CMS products to get changes into production. In this manner, Change Tracker can be used as an extra set of checks for those customers that have already invested in a CMS.

Shmuel Zailer, CEO and CTO at Raz-Lee Security, says the software is well-suited for small and midsize businesses that can’t afford a full-blown CMS system. Change Tracker also suits “large entities which use a CMS as a verification tool to ensure that all changes were properly recorded,” Zailer stated.

Change Tracker outputs reports in HTML, PDF, CSV, or outfile formats. These reports can be modified to support the needs of the auditor and the industry regulation at issue.

Also unveiled last week was a new feature that is common to all of Raz-Lee’s products: multi-LPAR support. This new feature (it’s not really a product) helps to ensure that security configurations are the same across all of a customer’s LPARs or separate IBM i servers.

Multi-LPAR support ensures that Raz-Lee profile definitions, user passwords, and system values are the same between different LPARs and systems. Group or individual system values can be replicated from one master system across the various systems, thereby providing continuity across multiple production systems, development machines, and high availability (HA) backups.

Raz-Lee says multi-LPAR support only works with its own products at the moment, but Zailer says he’s looking at ways to make the technology more widely applicable. This would be very useful, especially as users begin to spread LPARs far and wide with the new live partition mobility (LPM) feature that IBM will deliver with IBM i 7.1 TR4.

Lastly, Raz-Lee provided a glimpse into yet another new product called iCommand that will provide granular control over the execution of commands on the IBM i server. While there are other command-control products on the market, Zailer doesn’t think they go far enough in locking down the system.

For more information on Raz-Lee’s products, see the vendor’s website at www.razlee.com.

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