Alex Woodie
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Oracle Takes JD Edwards Into the Rental Business
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreJD Edwards ERP software has been used in a lot of industries over the decades, including the manufacturing, energy, pharmaceutical, retail, and media industries. This month, JDE owner Oracle took the venerable brand into a new industry: equipment rental.
The new EnterpriseOne Rental Management offering is a customized version of the ERP system designed for use by companies that rent a variety of gear, including heavy equipment, medical equipment, oil and gas equipment, mining equipment, and construction equipment.
The software manages many aspects of running a rental business, including writing rental contacts and agreements, reservations for future rentals, inventory management,
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Do ‘Non-Standard’ OSes Like IBM i Pose Security Risks?
November 17, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreAs an IBM i professional, you’re familiar with the platform and comfortable working around it. But you’re also aware that the IBM i is different from other systems, and that it makes some people uncomfortable. According to new report from the SANS Institute, the mere existence of “non-standard” operating systems such as IBM i has the potential to introduce a security risk in the data center.
In its October paper Data Center Server Security Survey 2014, the SANS Institute attempted to learn how organizations are implementing security in the data center, to define some best practices, and to
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SAP Agrees To Pay Oracle $359 Million To Settle TomorrowNow Suit
November 17, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe long-running lawsuit between ERP giants Oracle and SAP is finally over after SAP agreed to pay Oracle about $359 million in exchange for dropping its suit over the TomorrowNow third-party support business.
The amount is significantly less than $1.3 billion award that a federal court jury initially awarded Oracle back in 2010. But it’s a bit more than the $272 million Oracle had on the table in 2011 after a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California threw out the $1.3 billion award, calling it “grossly excessive.”
The lawsuit stretches all the way
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IBM And ISVs Fight POODLE Vulnerability In SSL 3.0
November 10, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM is among the software vendors working to issue patches to address the newly discovered POODLE attack, which exploits a vulnerability in SSL 3.0 to overcome encryption and view actual content. IBM has issued a patch for Domino and is currently working on a patch for WebSphere Application Server for IBM i. IBM i ISVs are also responding to the new threat.
The POODLE attack, which stands for “Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption,” was first described in September by a group of Google researchers. If successfully executed, the POODLE attack requires a perpetrator to make just 256 SSL 3.0
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Vision Gets Serious About Hosted HA with MIMIX 8
November 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreHosted high availability (HA) has been one of the top solutions that managed service providers (MSPs) have sold to IBM i shops over the past five years. But the HA market’s leader, Vision Solutions, has largely sat on the sidelines due to overly complicated licensing. The company hopes that starts to change with today’s launch of MIMIX 8.0, which introduces metered billing designed specifically for cloud HA.
The new metered billing feature in MIMIX 8.0 should make it easier for MSPs that are Vision’s business partners to sell hosted HA, says Becky Hjellming, senior manager of product strategy for
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Homebuilder Repels the Tape Monkey with Crossroads VTL
November 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreA new virtual tape library (VTL) from Crosssroads Systems is helping to keep the tape monkey at bay for Meritage Homes, a $1.8 billion homebuilder headquartered in Arizona. While the company hasn’t totally eliminated tape from its data protection scheme, the introduction of a 20 TB SPHiNX appliance has reduced the incidence of failed backups, increased data retention, and shortened backup times.
Meritage Homes is a growing company that has built more than 84,000 upscale homes since it was founded in 1985, mainly across the southern swath of the country. The publicly traded company relies on the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
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Halcyon Tackles IBM i Security with New Products
November 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreHalcyon Software moved further into the IBM i security business last month with the release of two new products, including Exit Point Manager and Password Reset Manager. The new software will help organizations secure their IBM i environments, while giving Halcyon additional products to sell to its customer base.
Halcyon’s new Exit Point Manager helps protect the exit points that IBM provides to enable applications to access external resources, such as FTP, ODBC, and TCP/IP that didn’t exist (or weren’t in widespread use) when the AS/400 was invented way back at the dawn of time in 1988. However, when a
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Attachmate Emulators Run Natively on iOS and Android
November 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreAttachmate yesterday unveiled a new release of its Reflection terminal emulation software that allows users to access servers from mobile devices using an SSH client that runs natively on the Android and iOS operating systems.
The new iOS and Android editions of the Attachmate Reflection for UNIX suite are targeted at IT administrators who need to access to Unix and Linux servers from smartphones and tablets. The apps, which are available on the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store, provide VT emulation and uses SSH to secure sessions.
According to Attachmate product manager Kris Lall, the apps have several
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Storwize Gets Faster Pipes, Encryption at Rest
November 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM i shops that need to move a lot of data really fast may want to check out the latest Storwize V7000 and Storage Volume Controller (SVC) arrays, which now give customers the option of using 16 Gb Fibre Channel adapters. IBM also brought support for encryption at rest to the V7000.
The Storwize V7000 is the high-end of the Storwize family, the X86-based storage area networks aimed at midsized and large enterprises. The arrays run SAS-based disks across clusters of up to 20 enclosures. Properly configured, clusters can exceed 4 PB of storage.
IBM last week announced that the
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Zend Delivers Mobile App Enhancements to PHP Developers
November 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read morePHP developers will get new goodies for building mobile apps with the latest release of Zend Technologies‘ integrated development environment, Zend Studio 12, which was unveiled last week at the ZendCon conference in San Francisco. The company also unveiled a beta of Zend Server 8, which becomes generally available on open systems platforms next month.
Zend Studio 12 brings a mess of new capabilities for building Web applications that are housed on servers and features user interfaces for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Chief among them are support for three open source frameworks for building mobile Web apps,