By the end of March, most Wal-Mart suppliers will be required to start participating in GS1-based item alignment, sending Wal-Mart product information via the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN). This initiative to improve supply chain efficiency, along with the significant advances for GS1-based Item alignment in the healthcare and food service industries, is good news for LANSA, which has established a comfortable niche in the market for GS1-1SYNC-GDSN item alignment software, with more than 300 installations of its LANSA Data Sync Direct product, according to company officials. But for LANSA, the retail supply chain is just the beginning of

Tripwire has built its reputation providing configuration assessment, change auditing, and compliance tools to 7,000 customers, including a handful of organizations running i/OS servers, which has been supported since last year. Now, the Oregon company is looking to build on that solid base of log management expertise with today’s launch of Tripwire Log Center, a new security information and event management (SIEM) software product designed to protect customers’ computer systems from attacks by cybercriminals and malicious software.

The recent high-profile attacks on Google, Cisco Systems, Adobe Systems, and others (via an Internet Explorer vulnerability that Microsoft rushed

Systems administrators can monitor the state of their servers and networks from Twitter as the result of a recently released update to the OpManager network management software developed by ManageEngine.

ManageEngine, a subsidiary of Zoho, develops a range of tools designed to monitor various aspects of the data center, from individual servers and networking components to open source server software and proprietary ERP applications. The vendor, which seeks to be the low-cost alternative to the “Big Four” systems management vendors BMC Software, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, supports the i/OS platform within its OpCenter and

CCSS last week unveiled the addition of MIMIX monitors to QSystem Monitor (QSM), its systems monitoring and management software for the System i server. With the MIMIX monitors in place, administrators can receive warnings of errors with the high availability software through the QSM product, as opposed to logging onto the high availability product itself to check for problems.

With so many moving parts, high availability systems are notoriously difficult to keep 100 percent shipshape. One of the biggest dangers is that data replication can get out of synch between primary and backup servers, which would compromise the capability to

Shield Advanced Solutions this month issued a major new release of JobQGenie, its i/OS utility that ensures the contents of job queues can be recovered following an unexpected outage by enabling job queues to be replicated through standard high availability (HA) software. With version 5.1, Shield has completely rewritten the software, and bolstered the product with new features and capabilities.

JobQGenie was created to address a functionality gap that exists in all i/OS HA products, according to Chris Hird, president of the Toronto, Canada, software vendor. While the HA products are good at replicating data and objects and managing failovers,

New specifications were released last week for the fifth generation of the Linear Tape-Open (LTO), and it’s not what we were promised. The LTO Gen 5 design calls for storing 1.5 TB of data on a single cartridge, which is almost double the storage capacity of the LTO Gen 4 specification, but less than the 1.6 TB that had been advertised. Native data transfer rates will be 140 megabytes per second, significantly less than the 180 MBPS that had been expected, and a lackluster 17 percent improvement over the 120 MBPS currently offered with LTO Gen 4 tape.

LTO is

New Generation Software (NGS), the Sacramento, California, company that’s best known for its business intelligence software, recently issued an update for its other line of products: the Concert Series, its suite of accounting software for i/OS servers.

Concert Series is an integrated package of financial software that includes modules for accounts payable (A/P), accounts receivable (A/R), general ledger (G/L), payroll, and human resources activities in mid size organizations. The software is available with green-screen and Web interfaces, and there is also an Excel plug-in called ConcertPro that allows users to interact with Concert Series data in a spreadsheet.

Earlier this

One of the UK’s five biggest banks has selected test automation software specialist Original Software to be on its preferred list of suppliers for “agile” development projects around the world, Original announced last week.

Original did not disclose which of the so-called “Big 5” British banks–a list that includes Barclays, Lloyds, the Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, and HSBC–recently put Original’s products on its list of preferred testing solutions. Only one of those banks appears on Original’s client list: HSBC, historically a big AS/400 shop with more than 10,000 developers.

We don’t know which bank it is, but we do

FalconStor Software last week announced version 2 of its File-interface Deduplication System (FDS), a post-processing de-duplication software product that works on NFS and CIFS data stores. The new release brings performance enhancements and new management features and policies that will make the product easier to use in enterprise environments.

FalconStor launched FDS last year to augment the existing data de-duplication features found in its IPStor software, which is used in its own virtual tape library (VTL) offerings, as well as the VTL offerings of FalconStor’s OEM partners. By de-duplicating the data arriving over the network file share (NFS) or common

Getting Lotus Notes content on your mobile phone was all the rage at least week’s LotusSphere conference in Florida. IBM kicked things off by announcing the capability for users to securely send and receive e-mail on the iPhone with its new Lotus Notes Traveler Companion software. But IBM wasn’t the only vendor going gaga for all things mobile at the annual gathering of Notes and Domino professionals.

Lotus Notes is no newbie to the mobile phone craze. In 2008, IBM unveiled Lotus Notes Traveler to fill the gap between the full Notes client, which requires the computing power of a