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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SoftLanding Turbo Charges IBM i Disk Utility
January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie
Data storage volumes are doubling every 12 to 18 months for the average organization, which means it’s more important than ever to keep on top of production storage resources. On the IBM i platform, a new release of the Supermon Disk product from SoftLanding Systems should help organizations monitor disk usage.
Regular maintenance of production storage environments is critical to ensuring smooth operations. On the IBM i server, where disk storage and memory combine to form one single-level storage pool accessible by programs, it’s perhaps even more critical to keep DASD below a certain utilization threshold (usually about 85 percent). …
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SAP Sending Mixed Messages On ERP Platform Support
January 13, 2020 Alex Woodie
Thousands of SAP Business Suite customers around the world are awaiting clarification from the German software giant about whether their chosen ERP software will continue to run on their chosen platform in five years. SAP is strongly hinting that it may move forward just with S/4 HANA, which at the moment is a Linux-only affair. But its actions suggest a more diverse array of databases and operating systems may be accommodated in the future.
Questions about SAP’s intentions originated with a statement it made in 2014. At that time, SAP announced that it would fully support its current flagship …
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Reading The IBM i Tea Leaves For 2020
January 6, 2020 Alex Woodie
When the calendar flipped over from 2019 last week, the IBM i platform began its fifth decade, an amazing feat of longevity in our current age of punctuated technological equilibrium. As we set out to foresee what may become of IBM i in 2020, we have a couple of avenues we can take.
On the one hand, we can try to guess what sorts of moves IBM will make with the platform. IBM isn’t in the habit of telegraphing its moves too far in advance, so this would be an act of speculation. On the other hand, we can look …
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2019: An IBM i Year To Review
December 16, 2019 Alex Woodie
And. . . stop! Put down your pencils, class. The test is over. We have made it through another year. Well, okay, we have almost made it through most of this year. But with just two weeks left, now is the time to wrap it all up and revisit the biggest IBM i stories to make news in the year that was 2019.
It all started back in January, when…
IBM jacked up the prices on IBM Lab Services engagements by more than 10 percent. Whereas it used to cost $3,125 per day to have the benefit of an IBM …
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Get Your PHP on IBM i, Hold the Zend
December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie
PHP was one of the first open source technologies to make an impact on the IBM i server. But due to the arrangement that IBM made with Zend, the PHP technology has been tied to a specific software distribution controlled by Zend. But now, IBM i shops that want to use PHP but don’t want to pay for the Zend Server distribution after the first free year of support is up now have a free option available – and it’s from the Zend folks themselves, no less.
On December 2, the folks at Zend posted a repository for Community PHP …
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Syncsort’s Pitney Bowes Deal: All About Good, Clean Data
December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie
Syncsort completed its $700 million acquisition of Pitney Bowes’ software and data business last week, just in time to get a piece of the end-of-year IT spending extravaganza. As Syncsort CEO Josh Rogers sees it, the deal will bring a host of benefits to existing Syncsort customers, particularly as it relates to feeding next-gen analytics systems with good, clean data.
The Pitney Bowes deal brings Syncsort new solutions that it can sell to business intelligence and data analytics organizations, including data quality, data cleansing, data matching, and data discovery tools. It also brings master data management (MDM) capabilities to Syncsort, …
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Three IBM i Vendors Who Are Still Announcing Things in 2019
December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie
It’s that time of year when the holidays beckon and work starts to slow. We notice that here at IT Jungle, as the fruitcake deliveries heat up and the pace of news comes to a grinding halt. Here are three IBM i software vendors that aren’t letting the calendar get in the way of making announcements.
The fun starts out with Raz-Lee Security, the Nanuet, New York, company, which unveiled a pair of new IBM i security software bundles last week. What’s more, it is also offering discount pricing for those who act fast.
The first bundle, the …
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Moving Off Big Iron? Be Very Careful, Gartner Says
December 9, 2019 Alex Woodie
IBM i and mainframe professionals who have grown weary of defending their systems against people who want to replace them with more “modern” X86 and cloud platforms found an unlikely ally in the form of Gartner, which earlier this year published a report that cautioned against making rash, emotionally charged technological decisions when it comes to big iron migrations.
“Replacing existing systems because people perceive them to be old can be a costly mistake,” Gartner senior analyst Thomas Klinect and vice president Mike Chuba wrote in a March piece titled Considering Leaving Legacy IBM Platforms? Beware, as Cost Savings May …
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Nagios Solidifies Role in IBM i Monitoring
December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that are looking for monitoring solutions would do well to add Nagios to their short list. The open source software has been embraced by IBM i shops, and thanks to a new SQL connector added by IBM with the latest technology refreshes and plans for monitoring the HMC, Nagios connectivity to IBM i is on the upswing.
Nagios Core is a free, open source software project that’s been adopted by thousands of customers around the world to monitor servers, storage, software, services, networking gear, and anything else that can be connected to the network. The software is …
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HelpSystems Bolsters Data Loss Prevention with Clearswift Buy
December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie
HelpSystems completed the first acquisition of the Kate Bolseth era this week with the purchase of Clearswift, a UK-based provider of data loss prevention (DLP) solutions. The software will play nicely with HelpSystems’ existing managed file transfer (MFT) offerings for IBM i and other platforms, according to new CEO Bolseth, who indicates that more and bigger acquisitions are on the horizon.
Clearswift develops what it calls adaptive DLP, or A-DLP, technology that can automatically stop sensitive data from leaving the digital bounds of a company. When installed on a network gateway, the software will analyze the content of the documents …
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