• Big Blue Pits PureData Appliance Against Ellison’s Exadata

  October 15, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is settling into a spring-fall cadence for system announcements, with some wiggling here and there as machines come out early or a little late. We got the first Power7+ machines on October 3, and the new “Project Sparta” PureData appliances for “big data” and “cloud” came out last week on October 9. I get the big data part of the PureData announcements, but after analyzing the announcements and getting briefed by Big Blue, I still don’t get the cloud part. And I don’t get why the names on all of this stuff need to be so complicated. The Project

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• As I See It: Chasing The Impulse

  October 15, 2012 Victor Rozek

  What if there was a simple experiment that could predict the trajectory of a 4-year-old’s life. Seems improbable. After all, toddlers are no more fully formed than Greek economic policy. But such an instrument exists and it involves marshmallows. The experiment was the brainchild of psychologist Walter Mischel and it dates back to the 1960s when experimentation of any sort usually involved drugs. It was conducted at a preschool on the Stanford University campus with the children of faculty members and graduate students, which suggests that the little dauphins were strangers to privation. The test was simplicity itself, and the

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• IBM i Workloads Now Supported On IBM Private Cloud Software

  October 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week unveiled SmartCloud Entry for Power version 2.4, a new release of its software for helping organizations deploy and run a private cloud environment on Power Systems servers. With version 2.4, the company has followed through on its pledge to support the management of IBM i workloads with the software, which continues to require AIX. SmartCloud Entry for Power builds upon the capabilities in PowerVM and Systems Director VMControl to deliver a Web portal interface where administrators can create, modify, and delete virtualized slices of their server. The software delivers self-service provisioning for end users; provides security, auditing,

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• IBM Adds A Bunch Of I/O Devices To Power Systems

  October 15, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the Power7+ chip, the new Power 770+ and Power 780+ systems, and IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 5 were the dominant parts of the October 3 announcements, IBM made a bunch of changes to its lineup of I/O devices–both storage and networking–that have an effect on the entire Power Systems range and that keep the product line moving forward along with the relentless tide of ever-increasing capacity that sweeps us along in the IT racket. The I/O enhancements from IBM for the Power Systems machines were all rolled up in announcement letter 112-180. Perhaps the most exciting of

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• IBM Carves Out Upgrade Paths To New Power7+ Systems

  October 15, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It was not a foregone conclusion that there would be upgrades available from Power6 and Power6+ systems to Power7+ machines, although many of us were guessing that there would be upgrades between the Power7 iron to Power7+ machinery. As it turns out, IBM is being pretty generous with its upgrade policy, or at least as generous as it can be within the confines of the very strict accounting rules that govern upgrades and the preservation of serial numbers on IT gear. You may not be aware of it, but there are in fact accounting rules that stipulate how much of

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• Spinnaker Offers JD Edwards Reporting Tool from ReportsNow

  October 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Spinnaker Support, a growing provider of third-party maintenance and support for JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne users, recently announced that it has expanded its partnership with ReportsNow, a provider of reporting tools for JD Edwards shops. As part of the partnership, the companies will send referrals to each other. ReportsNow was founded by Christopher Bruce in 2003 with the goal of developing easier-to-use reporting tools for JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne ERP systems. The company came up with a tool called Data Access Studio (DAS) that’s specifically designed to access JD Edwards data stores. DAS enables users to

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• Infinite Corp. Goes ‘Cloud’

  October 9, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Infinite Corporation last week announced Infinite Cloud, a new suite of software designed to repurpose IBM i applications for deployment from the cloud, and to transform 5250 green screens into Web interfaces along the way. Infinite Cloud includes two components, including middleware that works with Web application servers and an on-the-fly GUI transformation component. The company claims that the software can take existing RPG and COBOL applications and deploy them to “the cloud” without doing any coding or buying new hardware. Infinite Corporation (formerly California Software) says the middleware component works with standard Web application servers such as Apache Tomcat

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• Rimini Adds Hyperion to 3rd Party Support Business

  October 9, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Rimini Street entered the dragon’s lair last week when it attended the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. There, the Nevada company announced that it now intends to poach maintenance business from its host–that is, from Oracle–for the Hyperion business intelligence product line and the customers that use it. Rimini, which hopes to go public soon, also announced that it had another financially successful quarter. Rimini says it will provide third-party maintenance and support services for the breadth of Oracle’s Hyperion products. This includes Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Financial Management, Financial Close Management, Strategic Finance, and Financial Management Analytics products.

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• Attachmate Hooks Fraud-Fighting Tool to SIEM

  October 9, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Attachmate has given its customers better tools for fighting fraud. With last month’s update to Luminet, the company is hooking the user-monitoring and anti-fraud software to network security tools, specifically security information and event management (SIEM) software, thereby enabling better sharing of information and, hopefully, better detection of coordinated attacks on enterprise applications. Luminet is an anti-fraud software solution that uses “sniffer” technology to capture all screen displays, keystrokes, and messages communicated between workstations and servers. The software, which is based on software Attachmate OEMs from Intellinx, has been deployed in the financial services industry, and is designed to

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• Agilysys Gives Hotels iPad Check-In with LMS 7.2

  October 9, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Hotels that use the IBM i-based Lodging Management System (LMS) from Agilysys will be able to check guests in and out of their properties with iPads when they upgrade to the latest release, version 7.2, which was unveiled last week at Global Gaming Expo 2012. LMS is an ERP system designed to automate the business processes of large hotels and casinos. The core system streamlines common hotel operations, such as reservations, credit card processing, accounting, housekeeping, while add-on modules provide functionality in the areas of activities scheduling, attraction ticketing, food and beverage sales, online reservations, remote check-in, and spa scheduling.

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