Alex Woodie
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Iowa MSP Teams with Vision for Hosted HA
November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIn the market for hosted high availability? There’s a new IBM i offering now available from Iowa managed service provider (MSP) LightEdge Solutions, which teamed up recently with Vision Solutions to put MIMIX and iTERA Availability on its private Power Cloud.
LightEdge Solutions is a 20-year old IT services firm based in Des Moines that hosts and manages systems on behalf of its clients. The company currently has two data centers, including a 20,000 square-foot facility in Altoona, Iowa, and another located in the underground “SubTropolis” business complex in Kansas City, Missouri. The company is currently building two additional
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How IBM i Fared in Top ERP List
November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreEvery year, Panorama Consulting comes out with a list of the top ERP systems and vendors. The list for 2016 has the usual suspects in it, as well as a decent representation of ERP systems that run on the IBM i platform.
While there’s no hard data on the matter, anecdotal evidence suggests that enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are the primary type of application that customers run on IBM i servers. Whether companies develop their own software or buy a shrink-wrapped product from a vendor, most companies that run the IBM i server bought it to run a core
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Cybersecurity Is Hot, But Don’t Overlook Physical Security
November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreCybersecurity played a major role in the run-up to yesterday’s presidential election, as Russian hackers leaked private communications and attempted to influence the outcome of the election. They weren’t successful, largely because elections remain mostly a manual affair in United States. But it did serve as a reminder of the need to protect critical American institutions in both the cyber and physical worlds.
In a recent report, the Department of Homeland Security identified 16 infrastructure sectors that are vital to the safety, security, and health of the United States and its people. You’ll find sectors you’d expect to find there,
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Imagine There’s No Spinning Disk (It’s Easy If You Try)
November 7, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe odds of finding a hard disk drive in your next storage array grows slimmer by the day as the cost of solid state disks continues to drop. The price/performance curve for SSDs has improved so much relative to spinning disk, in fact, that decision makers in IBM‘s storage division see a day when data goes straight from flash to tape as it cools, or what they term “FLAPE.”
“The 15K RPM drives are going away,” Gary Albert, business line executive for IBM Storage, tells IT Jungle. “There’s going to be one more generation [of 15K RPM drives],
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Questions Arise Over IBM’s New Cloud Backup for IBM i
October 31, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM raised some eyebrows with the recent release of its Cloud Storage Solutions for i, which enables IBM i shops to back up and archive DB2 and IFS data to its SoftLayer cloud. Much of the initial feedback to IBM’s first native cloud solution for IBM i was positive. But some IBM business partners are already questioning whether the solution will be actually useful for customers as it now stands.
Cloud Storage Solutions for i was a part of IBM’s big October 11 announcement for IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 1 (TR1) and 7.2 TR5. The software, which carries product
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Don’t Overlook These Network Auditing Improvements in IBM i 7.3
October 24, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWhat is going across those network cables connecting your IBM i server to the outside world? It’s not always easy to tell, and IBM hasn’t exactly made it easy. But thanks to new security event types and exit points released earlier this year in IBM i 7.3, you can get deeper visibility into network traffic and make your company’s SIEM system work better with your IBM i along the way.
The focus over the past few weeks has been on IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 1 and IBM i 7.2 TR5. There is a lot of good stuff in there,
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On Your IBM i Radar Now: GDPR
October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM i shops that have European customers, take note: In about 18 months, you will need to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or face hefty fines. That’s not much time to come to grips with a data privacy law that’s been called “PCI on steroids” and an “IRS audit of your data,” but that’s the reality nonetheless.
If you’re wondering what the heck this GDPR thing is, you’re not alone. A survey conducted by Dell last month indicates that fewer than 20 percent of company representatives were even aware of GDPR. But as the old saying goes,
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One on One with HiT’s Giacomo Lorenzin
October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreSome people say data is the new oil. If that’s true, then what better business to be in than selling tools to the data miners? That’s basically what HiT Software does. IT Jungle recently caught up with Giacomo Lorenzin, the managing director for the BackOffice Associates subsidiary, to talk about what’s driving business, the latest in data integration tools, and the state of the industry.
This is a condensed version of a Q and A that was conducted via email.
IT Jungle: First of all, how’s business? How are sales of IBM i software going?
Giacomo Lorenzin: The
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Customers React Positively to IBM i Alerting Tool from Kisco
October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWhen Kisco Information Systems launched its $400 alerting tool in 2015, there were questions whether a relatively simple product would resonate with IBM i shops. A year later, Kisco is delivering a second version of iEventMonitor, and customers are singing its praise.
Kisco launched iEventMonitor in March 2015 with a basic premise: provide monitoring and alerting of key IBM i resources like QSYSOPR and QSYSMSG queues, the job queue, message queues and storage and CPU monitoring.
While other vendors developed tools that could automatically respond to events on an IBM i server, Kisco eschewed the extra functionality that would increase
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Zend Preps Speedy New PHP and Runtime for IBM i
October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreZend today will officially launch the beta program for Zend Server for IBM i version 9 and the new PHP 7 language running on the Power Systems platform. The combination of the new language and runtime, which are being unveiled at the annual ZendCon 2016 show in Las Vegas this week, is expected to give customers a big boost in performance for their PHP applications, provided they don’t run into backward compatibility breaks that Zend built into the framework.
Performance is the definite headliner for the new PHP 7 language and Zend Server runtime. As we told you back in