Alex Woodie
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Superstorm Sandy Puts DR Plans To The Ultimate Test
November 5, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWhen Superstorm Sandy roared ashore a week ago, residents of the Northeast knew they would be in for a wild ride. Sandy didn’t disappoint, as she brought a record storm surge to the New York City area and devastated the Jersey Shore. The storm also poked hurricane-sized holes in the disaster recovery (DR) plans of some businesses, like those that placed backup generators in flood-prone areas. For some IBM i shops and managed service providers (MSPs), DR plans were strained but not broken, and gained the Sandy stamp of approval for good DR housekeeping.
Before Sandy made landfall as a
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Knowledge Is Power When Assessing Your IBM i Legacy
October 29, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe IBM i platform can be both a blessing and a curse to you, the IBM i customer. While its integrated nature and reliability insulates you from tasks and expenses commonly faced by users of mainstream platforms, the “black box” and its longevity also tends to mask problems that may be lurking in your RPG code. So it’s not surprising that when you evaluate how to modernize your IT system, the lack of visibility into the inner workings of your system can lead to fear, panic, and, ultimately, uninformed decisions.
It is interesting to note how the IBM i platform’s
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Raz-Lee Tracks IBM i PTFs, Ships Password Reset Product
October 23, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOrganizations that struggle to keep track of IBM i PTFs manually may be interested in the new automated PTF tracking function unveiled by Raz-Lee Security last week. The company’s Change Tracker software can now track all PTF “apply” and “remove” actions in the IBM i environment, and report on the status of any PTF and all related objects. In other news, the Nanuet, New York-based company announced the release of Password Reset for IBM i.
Change Tracker, which Raz-Lee launched earlier this year at the COMMON show at Disneyland, tracks changes made to production code at the source and
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Lavastorm Adopts R for Better Big Data Understanding
October 23, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreAmong the slew of software vendors that for some reason chose last week to make big data announcements was Lavastorm Analytics, the developer of the versatile Lavastorm Analytics Platform. The company unveiled a new R Analytics Pack that enables the open source R statistical analysis programming language to work within the Lavastorm product. The company says the combination of R and Lavastorm’s visual approach of discovering and understanding data and processes will ease the challenges presented by “big data.”
The Lavastorm Analytics Platform offers an impressive array of features that spans reporting, ETL, SQL editing, cross referencing, data cleansing,
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QlikTech Adapts In-Memory Analytics for External Big Data
October 23, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreQlikTech made its mark in the business intelligence field by simplifying the BI experience and delivering results quickly from an in-memory associative database. But with the advent of “big data,” the company’s total reliance on in-memory technology was challenged. Last week, the company unveiled a new Direct Discovery mode that allows customers to process large data sets stored externally on disk, while keeping the associative data model in tact.
QlikTech has ridden the in-memory wave quite successfully over the last decade. While its big BI competitors like Oracle, SAP, and IBM have developed or acquired in-memory database technologies
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SAP Sends HANA to the Cloud
October 23, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreSAP last week announced HANA Cloud, a cloud version of its in-memory database that can be used to power cloud applications developed in Java or its NetWeaver technology. SAP also unveiled a hosted version of HANA that lives on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and will allow customers to quickly spin up HANA to run small workloads or for testing proof of concepts.
HANA was on full display last week at the SAP TechEd 2012 shindig in Las Vegas, Nevada. The popular in-memory database system, which can be used for both transactional and analytical workloads, is less than two
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Kisco Sends IBM i Reports to Google Drive Cloud Service
October 23, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreKisco Information Systems last week announced an update to WebReport/i that allows IBM i shops to send their reports and spool files directly to Google Drive, a new cloud storage and synchronization service that competes with Dropbox. The new feature will be useful for IBM i shops looking to expand their report distribution.
WebReport/i is an IBM i utility that automates the conversion and distribution of raw spool files from IBM i applications. The software can convert spool files to PDF, HTML, TIF, RTF, XLS, or CSV formats, and then distribute them via email, fax, FTP, or the Web.
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LogRhythm Goes Multi-Dimensional in Security Analysis
October 23, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreCyber criminals are getting more clever by the day, and so can the good guys with products like the new SIEM (security information and event management) solution unveiled by LogRhythm last week. The Boulder, Colorado, company claims that its solution is the first multi-dimensional security database capable of tackling “big data”-sized troves of information.
LogRhythm’s SIEM product, which is also called LogRhythm, gathers security-related data from many sources (including IBM i logs), and mixes it in an attempt to tease real and actionable information out of the noise. Like other products in the SIEM class, LogRhythm has sought a competitive
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Attachmate Excited with Combination of Reflection and Windows 7
October 23, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreAttachmate yesterday unveiled Reflection 2011 R3, a new release of its terminal emulation suite for accessing IBM mainframe, IBM i, Unix, and Hewlett-Packard NonStop hosts. The new release is certified to run Windows 8, which will become available later this week. But Attachmate expects more customers to run the software on Windows 7, as businesses upgrade from Windows XP.
Windows 8 brings a spiffy new user experience that’s designed to work the same whether the user is running a PC, a tablet, or a phone. However, Windows 8 is not expected to be widely adopted in the enterprise for some
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UK Firm Signs On to Resell looksoftware Modernization Tools
October 23, 2012 Alex Woodie
… Read moreAstech, an IT consultancy based in central England, has signed a partnership agreement with IBM i application modernization tool vendor looksoftware to resell look’s software across the U.K.
Astech specializes in providing IBM i and Microsoft expertise to private companies and government institutions in the U.K. The company says that its blend of IBM i and .NET programming skills enables it to take on client projects involving Web and mobile extensions to IBM i applications.
Some of those Web and mobile projects will now bare the mark of looksoftware, the Australian developer of IBM i modernization tools. Looksoftware has