FHS Volume: 14 Issue: 13 Archives

IBM’s New HyperSwap a Head Scratcher for Some

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

One of the new features that IBM added to its PowerHA suite with the launch of IBM i 7.2 is HyperSwap, which allows a production IBM i LPAR to be moved from one DS8700 SAN array to another and restarted almost instantly. While HyperSwap protects against the failure of a SAN in a single data center, its inability to work in a geographically dispersed manner had led some in the IBM i HA community to question its usefulness in a true disaster.

HyperSwap is a data resiliency feature that IBM is making available to IBM i shops as part of

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Quadrant and BCD Re-Align Partner Programs

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

Quadrant Software and its new subsidiary BCD Software last month rolled out a new business partner program that’s aimed at re-aligning the two companies’ formerly separate reseller programs into a single program.

One of the benefits that Quadrant cited in its February acquisition of BCD was access to a broader product portfolio for both companies’ reseller channels. Quadrant has a big presence in the document management and fax routing business, with its Formtastic and QuadraDocV offerings, while BCD’s claim to fame is developing IBM i-based Web and mobile apps with its WebSmart platform (although it offers a number of point

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Oracle Brings Big In-Memory Speedup to JD Edwards Apps

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

Oracle says the new column-oriented in-memory capabilities of its 12c relational database will make JD Edwards and other compatible ERP applications run 100 to 1,000 times faster compared to using the traditional row-oriented version of the database.

The new in-memory options that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled last week are geared not only toward online analytic processing (OLAP) workloads but also online transaction processing (OLTP) that are the bread and butter of ERP workhorses.

Oracle says it clocked 100x to 1,000x speedups while it was testing its new Database In-Memory capability against certain modules of its E-Business Suite, JD Edwards,

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MSP SIaS Waves a Magic Xand

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIaS), a managed services provider (MSP) based in New York, has selected Xand as one of its new data center operators.

Melville, New York-based SIaS manages Power and X86 servers for clients as part of its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business, including IBM i, AIX, Linux, and Windows environments. On the Power platform, SIaS provides cloud hosting as well as high availability and disaster recovery as a service. It utilizes logical mirroring software from Maxava and Vision Solutions as well as IBM‘s PowerHA as the backbones for its HA and DR services.

Earlier this spring, SIaS announced

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Managing IBM i by Exception: Entering a World of Help

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

How are IT services managed in your organization? If you work at a smaller company, you might be able to get away with running a single layer of management software, according to a recent white paper by HelpSystems. But if you work at a larger outfit, you’ll need multiple levels of software to manage services. Stitching those levels of service together is not always easy.

In an April whitepaper titled “ITSM by Exception–It’s Just the Ticket!,” HelpSystems lays down the basics for managing the gaps between various levels of management tools. According to the 11-page paper, large companies rely

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Formtastic Learns New Barcode Tricks

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

Quadrant Software says it added support for two new barcode formats and one new automated payment format to Formtastic, its document management software for IBM i. Support for QR and 2D DataMatrix barcodes and the ACH CCD+ data format in Formtastic version 5.4.5 will help customers address requirements.

Formtastic is a suite of IBM i and Windows software designed to merge variable print stream data originating from IBM i servers with pre-defined document templates, enabling customers to use standard laser printers to generate custom forms, labels, and checks, and to eliminate pre-printed forms. In addition to generating forms and barcodes,

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CloudFax/400 Licenses Free Through End of Month

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

International Presence is giving away copies of its CloudFax/400 offering to IBM i customers as part of a promotional deal that ends June 30. The software, which normally costs $2,500 for a P05 machine, is a fax over IP (FoIP) offering that allows customers to eliminate fax servers, cards, and telephone lines, and instead pay a fee for access to the FoIP service.

International Presence, the original developers of the TeleFax/400 software sold by IBM for many years, announced its hosted CloudFax/400 offering two years ago.

The FoIP offering allows IBM i shops to maintain business processes and application

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Linoma Gets a Handle on Complex Workflows with MFT

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

Do you remember when people talked about “e-business” and the huge impact the Internet would have? Well, the predictions came true, and today the Internet is deeply embedded into almost everything companies do. In this new e-business world, managed file transfer (MFT) products have become the go-to tools for getting stuff done. With a recent update, Linoma Software‘s MFT offering can do even more.

MFT tools have always been FTP tools on steroids. In addition to simply moving files, the products often can trigger processes on remote machines, such as kicking off a batch reporting job on a Windows

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IBM i Security Assessment: How About Now?

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

Ignorance is no longer an excuse. In this day and age, after so many mega-breaches like Target’s and so many warnings, you can no longer honestly claim that you didn’t know your IBM i server was so vulnerable–especially with the availability of free security assessment tools, like the one that PowerTech recently updated.

PowerTech has probably done more than any other IBM i vendor to pop the bubble that so many organizations live in when it comes to security on the platform. Its annual State of IBM i Security reports regularly showcase the amazing lack of awareness that most professionals

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What HANA on Power Means to IBM i

June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

The recent news that IBM and SAP are working together to run HANA on Power piqued the interest of the SAP on IBM i community. While HANA won’t run directly on IBM i, just getting the in-memory data store on the Power Systems frame can bring new capabilities to organizations that run SAP on IBM i.

A week ago, we reported that IBM and SAP were getting serious about running HANA on Power and have started a test and evaluation program to analyze exactly what that venture entails. The program, which targets SAP’s preferred SUSE Linux distribution, is aimed squarely

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