Alex Woodie
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Vision Preps New Release of iTera Availability
November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreVision Solutions is gearing up to deliver a new release of its iTera Availability high availability software in early 2013. iTera Availability 6.1 is already in limited release, and when it becomes generally available next quarter, it will bring enhancements in several areas, including faster replication through expanded use of remote journaling, new auditing and reporting features, and improved installation and configuration processes, Vision representatives say.
iTera Availability is one of three high availability products for IBM i servers offered by Vision Solutions. The remote journaling-based product is geared toward the small and midsize business (SMB) end of the market,
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Staples Finds Its Own Easy Button with Help/Systems
November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreStaples, the $25 billion office supply retailer, has simplified the jobs of its IT help desk staff by using IBM i automation software from Help/Systems, the software vendor announced last week.
Before implementing Help/Systems products, Staples’ IT staff struggled to do anything beyond day-to-day maintenance tasks. The company relied on an operations run book to guide Staples’ IT staff through the manual steps required to maintain 34 IBM i LPARs, which house critical applications, including point of sale, credit card authorization, inventory, and warehouse management.
Using a run book wasn’t a particularly efficient form of management, especially considering the
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Liaison Connects to Clouds with Updated EAI Offering
November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreLiaison Technologies is close to shipping new versions of Electronic Commerce Server (ECS) and Delta, two components of its enterprise application integration (EAI) offering. The big feature here is a new cloud connector in ECS 7.0 that will simplify the process of integrating cloud-based applications and data with on-premise resources.
ECS and Delta offer complementary capabilities in the area of application integration, and together make up a complete EAI solution. ECS is the engine that moves data across platforms and protocols; it also includes managed file transfer (MFT) functionality. Delta, meanwhile, is a universal data mapping and translation solution that
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Vacation Plans Get in the Way of Maxava v. Vision Trial
November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreA pre-paid vacation has gotten in the way of the trial scheduled to begin next April in Maxava‘s trade libel case against Vision Solutions. The two-and-a-half week vacation for a lawyer for Sirius, a co-defendant in the case, caused the parties to delay the trial date from early April to late May.
In a status conference on September 17, lawyers for Maxava, Vision, and Sirius agreed to a trial date of April 2, and a pretrial conference date of March 21. However, the trial date conflicted with the pre-paid, two-and-a-half week vacation of Sirius lawyer Friedrich Seitz.
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STORServer Updates GUI Management Console for Backup Offering
November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreSTORServer, a developer of backup arrays based on Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), recently unveiled a new release of its GUI console used for managing its backup offerings and controlling the TSM environment. The new console features support for client-node replication, among other features.
STORServer sells a line of integrated backup appliances that include all the X64 hardware and TSM software needed to back up data residing on a variety of servers, including the IBM i server. The STORServer offerings also include a GUI called the STORServer Console (SSC) that simplifies TSM tasks that otherwise would require the use of
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m-Power Tested in NiSUG’s Mobile Challenge
November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe folks at mrc‘s U.K. office are talking up the mobile prowess of their m-Power tool after participating recently in an IBM i development challenge sponsored by NiSUG.
NiSUG (National iSeries User Group) held its first annual development challenge, called the “Application Modernisation Shoot Out,” at the COMMON GB event it put on in October 2011. Six vendors participated in that challenge, including mrc, which was very vocal about its success, along with competitor Profound Logic.
When the NiSUG held another IBM i challenge at the 2012 International Power event in London earlier this month, mrc was
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Jinfonet Speeds In-Memory OLAP with ‘Push Down’ Technology
November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOrganizations slicing and dicing data using Jinfonet Software‘s JReport software should see a speed boost when they upgrade to version 11.1, which was unveiled earlier this month. The new release features new “push down” technology that Jinfonet says will greatly speed up OLAP creation and analysis.
JReport is a lightweight suite of business intelligence tools that includes four core modules, including a drag-and-drop report designer, a report distribution and management tool, an ad-hoc reporting and multi-dimensional module, and a dashboard module, which was unveiled earlier this year with JReport 11. The software runs on any Java-based Web application
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Microsoft Targets IBM i, z/OS Migrations With PMA Program
November 26, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreYou may recall that, several years back, Microsoft ran the Midrange Alliance Program (MAP) and Mainframe Modernization Alliance (MMA), two marketing and awareness campaigns focused on moving applications and workloads off IBM‘s iSeries and mainframe servers. While the MAP and MMA fizzled away, Microsoft has a new group called the Platform Modernization Alliance (PMA) that is gaining attention with IBM partners and customers.
It is not news that the so-called “distributed” Wintel and Lintel server platforms are dominant in the IT industry. They have been for a while now; the war ended years ago. Consider these numbers:
Out of
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Maxava Says HA Cloud Business Is Booming
November 19, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe hosted high availability (HA) software business is taking off in a big way for Maxava. The company claims to have between 150 and 200 customers utilizing its software through the cloud, and that cloud deals now account for half of its sales pipeline. This led the company to lay claim earlier this month to being the number one provider of cloud-based HA software in the IBM i market.
IT Jungle spoke with Maxava’s senior vice president Simon O’Sullivan last week to give him a chance to back up the big claims Maxava was making about its presence in
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LANSA Launches LongRange University
November 15, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreLANSA last week announced LongRange University, a series of free online videos aimed at helping customers learn how to make the most effective use of LongRange, the IBM i-based mobile application development tool that it launched earlier this year.
LongRange enables IBM i developers to use their RPG, COBOL, and CL skills to develop mobile applications that run natively on iOS and Android. The software–which consists of a server component for IBM i, a development studio that lives in Windows, and a mobile client device–works by transforming DDS display files residing in IBM i programs into graphical displays that are