Alex Woodie
Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.
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Arpeggio Creates an IBM i Client for Dropbox
October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
If you’ve ever wondered how the file sharing capabilities of Dropbox could be worked into an IBM i environment, wonder no more. Last week, Arpeggio Software announced ARP-DROP, a new, Dropbox-certified IBM i client that enables users to move files back and forth between their IBM i servers and the big Dropbox in the sky.
ARP-DROP which is free, gives organizations another way to automate and manage the sending, receiving, and synchronization of IBM i files, objects, and backups. After installing and configuring ARP-DROP on the IBM i server, a user can pull up the green-screen ARP-DROP interface to move
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RevSoft Takes Server Management Mobile with Rev Web
October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
RevSoft recently rolled out a new offering called Rev Web that enables users to interact with its suite of cross-platform system management and monitoring tools from any device equipped with a Web browser and an Internet connection. The idea is to give managers the capability to oversee critical IT tasks, such as the execution of jobs on an IBM i server or escalating an error message on a Windows box, from anywhere in the world.
RevSoft’s suite of systems management and monitoring tools–including Rev Scheduler, Rev Message, Rev DataFlow, Rev Messenger, and Rev View–are designed to run equally well on
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Red Oak Adds SSL, Macros to 5250 Emulator for iPad
October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
Red Oak Software was ahead of the market last year when it shipped one of the industry’s first 5250/3270 terminal emulators for the popular Apple tablets. With last week’s deliver of Legacy Mobile 2.0, Red Oak filled in many of the functional gaps that existed in version 1, including support for SSL and macros.
The lack of SSL/TLS encryption in the first release of Legacy Mobile would not have been a deal-breaker for every organization looking for a way to access 5250 applications from an iPad. But for corporations that value security–either because of a strong culture of adopting best
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Infor All Up In the Cloud with New E-Commerce and ERP Upgrade Programs
October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
Infor last week made two notable product-related announcements that feature the cloud front and center. This includes a new e-commerce storefront called Rhythm that will live in the cloud, and a new ERP upgrade program called UpgradeX that–you guessed it–will enable existing Infor customers to simultaneously upgrade their ERP software and move run it in the cloud.
UpgradeX is designed to entice Infor customers running older ERP software to upgrade to the latest 10x versions of their ERP, and to move them to the cloud. This is an interesting twist on Infor’s efforts to get customers onto more current releases
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TECA Data Safe Launches VTL Backup Appliance
October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
Disaster recovery solution provider TECA Data Safe recently launched Rapid Rebound, a virtual tape library (VTL) designed to hold up to 96 TB of data from IBM i and other servers, and to replicate it across the cloud to TECA’s data center.
TECA (Technology Equipment Coverage and Availability) Data Safe has been providing DR services for its customers’ IBM i, Windows, Linux, Unix, and VMware servers since the company was founded eight years ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The vendor’s specialty is providing full, hands-on DR services for small and mid-size organizations that can’t afford the big price tags that contracts
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LaserVault Backup Goes to Europe
October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
Electronic Storage Corp. says that its disk-to-disk LaserVault Backup offering is helping IBM i shops in the UK eliminate their reliance on tape and move to a more streamlined backup environment.
LaserVault Backup is a software product that’s designed to enable IBM i environments to be backed up and stored on non-IBM i environments, including NAS, SAN, or dedicated appliances, such as the Universal Backup Device (UBD) that Electronic Storage Corp. also sells. This makes it easy to move the data offsite, while maintaining the capability to restore the data to the iSeries quickly when needed.
Electronic Storage Corp. is
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Halcyon Adds VIOS Monitoring to AIX Systems Management Toolset
October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
Halcyon Software last week announced that it’s shipping a new “lite” version of its Network Server Suite that brings the capability to monitor Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) on IBM Power Systems servers. The vendor also updated its full Network Server Suite, which is used to monitor AIX, Linux, and Windows environments.
IBM introduced VIOS with the launch of IBM i 6.1 in 2008. The software virtualizes the disk and network adapters, and eliminates the requirement that IBM i LPARs have actual adapters dedicated to them. This not only reduced the number of physical adapters required in a Power Systems server,
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UCG Reports Two More Vault400 Customers
October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
United Computer Group has been on a roll lately with its Vault400 online backup and disaster recovery solution. In the past couple of weeks, the company has announced two new customers, including Tredit Tire & Wheel Company and the city of College Park, Maryland.
Tredit Tire & Wheel Company is a large distributor of trailer tires and wheels to trailer manufacturers throughout the country. The Elkhart, Indiana-based company uses the Infor10 Distribution Enterprise i (A+) ERP software from Infor to manage operations at six locations around the U.S.
The company purchased the Vault400 backup and DR service from UCG to
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Big Data Gets Easier to Handle With IBM i TR7
October 14, 2013 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops are struggling to adapt to big data, just like organizations that use other types of servers to store their data. Whether it is email messages, social media posts, or a sequential list of invoices dating back to 1978, you will find it squirreled away inside of some DB2 for i database, somewhere. Keeping up with the growing volume of data sets should be easier as a result of the enhancements IBM will deliver next month with IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 7 (TR7).
The IBMers in Rochester refer to the really big databases using the acronym VLDB,
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Help/Systems Delivers First Major Upgrade of CCSS Tools
October 8, 2013 Alex Woodie
Help/Systems last week unveiled updates to two of its products under the CCSS banner. This includes QSystem Monitor (QSM) version 13, which expands the breadth of IBM i operations that it monitors, and QMessage Monitor (QMM) version 8, which gives customers more automated responses to IBM i messages.
QSM 13 and QMM 8 are the first new versions of the CCSS product lines in years, and, it goes without saying, the first new releases of the IBM i system management tools since Help/Systems acquired CCSS almost exactly a year ago.
QSM gives administrators real-time performance data about their IBM