After months of speculation, IBM today formally made its announcement for the version 7.1 release of i/OS, which will become available Friday, April 23. The new release brings lots of goodies in a variety of areas, including enhancements to the PowerHA high availability software, native support for storing XML and column level encryption in DB2/400, and the new Open Access capability that will provide a new route for modernizing user interfaces for RPG applications.

Ian Jarman, IBM’s manager of Power Systems software, was kind enough to provide a last-minute briefing of the i/OS 7.1 announcement to IT Jungle. Jarman’s

Zend Technologies yesterday announced the general availability of Zend Server 5.0 for i/OS, bringing the most complete stack yet of PHP software to the IBM midrange platform. With Zend Server running under i/OS, customers gain more streamlined implementation and deployments, application monitoring and optimization, error detection, security, and compliance. Two editions of Zend Server are available for i/OS, and Zend and IBM will begin phasing out older PHP stacks.

Zend announced that its enterprise-strength Zend Server stack of PHP software would be coming to the System i server in October 2009, when the company launched Zend Server 5.0. While

Information Builders unveiled a new release of its flagship business intelligence platform WebFOCUS yesterday that could change how its customers view business intelligence (BI) applications and data. For starters, the company will give non-technical users access to “pseudo” ad hoc reporting tools. Customers will also get the capability to customize and share their BI apps and creations–including predictive analytics built with the newly integrated open source R engine–while new data quality tools will keep an eye out for bad data.

In previous eras, BI software was the strict domain of the board room, where business executives would pore over reports

Organizations that are looking to streamline their purchasing and invoice reconciliation activities by adopting purchase-to-pay (P2P) processes may want to consider b-pack, a French developer of P2P and purchasing software that has enjoyed success in Europe over the last decade. The company recently established a North American office in Atlanta, Georgia, to sell and support its P2P software, which is delivered as a service over the Web, or installed locally on System i and other servers.

The phrase “purchase-to-pay” and the ideas behind it began in the 1990s, when the smartest minds in business and technology decided that everything

i/OS software developer Sentinex is offering users of Infor‘s ERP A+ an iPhone application that allows them to view data and reports from the ERP application, the company announced recently. The software, which is based on the company’s i2i (iPhone to System i) offering, is free of charge to A+ users.

Sentinex has been developing its i2i software since Apple released the iPhone a year and a half ago. The company’s i2i collection is composed of four pre-built “connector widgets” that install on the i/OS server and provide connectivity to mobile phones equipped with Web browsers (not just the

System i professionals who might be wondering how they can use Twitter may want to check out the latest release of Kisco Information Systems‘ SNDTWEET utility. With version 2, Kisco is allowing users to submit i/OS queries and commands via the social networking service. While it may not replace a 5250 emulator anytime soon, the Twitter function is a surefire way to impress coworkers and Web friends alike.

Kisco unveiled SNDTWEET one year ago as the Twitter service was just beginning to gain popularity. The first version of the product offered only one-way communication, and users were restricted to

i/OS high availability software provider MaxAva this week will announce a partnership with Databalance, a System i consultancy based in The Netherlands. Under the partnership, Databalance provides *noMAX users with software implementation services, and even hosts HA replication services and backup System i servers for customers in its data center.

While MaxAva and Databalance are announcing their partnership this week, the two companies have been working together for quite some time. In fact, Databalance has worked on more than a dozen *noMAX installations for customers in the transportation, manufacturing, retail, and insurance industries, MaxAva says. These installations have involved

Express, a $1.8 billion chain of clothing stores across the U.S., has picked CCSS and its i/OS systems management software to monitor the availability of its System i server, the software company announced last week.

Express supports 550 stores and 20,000 employees with a single Model 570 server carved into two LPARs. All of its core back office applications are run off that server, making it a critical component of its livelihood and success.

“Our complete logistics, fulfillment and financial procedures depend on our iSeries availability,” says Andrew Bracken, IT operations manager for Express. “We could potentially lose millions should

IBM last week announced a new external storage device that combines DVD and DAT or LTO tape technologies into a single unit. The rack-mountable offering, which IBM officially calls the “IBM System Storage 7214 Tape and DVD Enclosure Express,” give users an external option when internal storage bays on customers’ POWER 5-7 servers are full.

The 7214 Express is ideal for organizations that are facing a space crunch with existing server and storage systems, but still need to grow their removable storage capabilities for long-term and archival storage. The device, which becomes available April 16, offers two bays that can

There are a lot of reasons to use IBM‘s Systems Director Express for x86 version 6.1.2, which was unveiled last month, if your organization needs better control of virtual X86 server environments. But users of IBM’s proprietary Power Systems and System z servers can also benefit from the software, thanks to its capability to monitor electricity usage and heat generation on these platforms.

Systems Director Express for x86 is primarily aimed at helping organizations monitor and manage X86 server environments, including physical (non-virtualized) servers as well as servers that have been virtualized with hypervisor software from VMware , Microsoft