FHS Volume: 14 Issue: 18 Archives

IBM Drops Tech Refreshes for IBM i 7.1 and 7.2

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

Just before this issue of Four Hundred Stuff went to press yesterday IBM announced technology refreshes for both IBM i 7.1 and 7.2. At first glance, the two updates appear to carry similar features, including native support for REST-based Web services.

We all expected IBM to make IBM i-related announcements during its Enterprise2014 conference, which is taking place this week in Las Vegas. IBM normally makes big announcements on Tuesdays, but for whatever reason this time it dropped the big news on Monday.

The big news with IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 9 (TR9) and IBM i 7.2 TR1 appears

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Reader Feedback: ‘FLRTing with Disaster,’ Indeed

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

Before you start using the new Fix Level Recommendation Tool (FLRT) from IBM, you may want to hear about the experience that this Dutch IBM i administrator had with the product.

Two weeks ago, we ran a story about the new FLRT offering from IBM. To quickly review, FLRT is a Web-based tool that provides cross-platform compatibility information and fix recommendations for a variety of IBM products. For IBM i, it recommends which PTFs to apply to your system to keep it up-to-date, with an eye toward avoiding incompatibility issues.

While the product appears simple and easy to use,

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ARCAD Protects Test Data with Anonymizer

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

The specter of Russian super hackers breaking into corporate servers may be enough to give your CIO the willies. But there are many other ways data can walk away from your headquarters, including poorly protected test environments. Now ARCAD Software is helping IBM i developers secure that sensitive test data with a new product called Anonymizer.

The new ARCAD-Anonymizer product does pretty much what its name implies–it anonymizes data. It’s designed to be used in test environments where developers often use copies of production data because it closely replicates the real-world conditions the application will see when it completes testing.

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IBM i-Supported Version of IBM Connections Now Available

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

IBM last week started shipping a new release of IBM Connections 5.0, its business social media solution. The big new feature in this release is support for the IBM i OS.

IBM Connections is a social media tool designed to allow teams of users to collaborate through Web spaces, blogs, wikis, forums, and shared libraries (file syncs). The software sports hooks into the Lotus email, contacts, and calendar software; integrates with IBM’s various BI and content management systems; and is supported on a variety of mobile devices.

IBM originally shipped Connections 5.0 in July. However, while IBM had previously

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PowerTech Puts a Pretty Face on Network Security

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

When it debuted in 1996, PowerTech‘s Network Security was the first commercial tool to lock down network exit points that posed security risks in OS/400. The product has proven its value in the field with thousands of deployments over the years. And with last week’s Network Security update, the product’s decidedly green look and feel was freshened up with a new Web-based UI.

Network Security is designed to prevent unauthorized access to IBM i resources over the network. Its main function is to monitor and control access to more than 30 exit points in the IBM i OS, including

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MQ Light Debuts from IBM

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

IBM last week formally launched MQ Light, a lightweight version of IBM MQ (previously called WebSphere MQ and MQ Series before that) designed to allow Web-based applications to communicate via discrete messages instead of complex TCP/IP.

According to IBM, MQ Light is a simple API designed to make it easy for Web application developers working in PHP, Python, Node.JS, and Ruby to incorporate asynchronous messaging into their applications. The software is based on Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) 1.0, an open wire protocol, and uses open source client libraries.

IBM envisions a few use cases for MQ Light. If a

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Database Modernization Gets A Lift From Midrange Dynamics

October 7, 2014 Dan Burger

Modernization projects in the IBM midrange community are one of the most talked about business decisions that companies are facing. It’s been a difficult problem to solve and has stopped many companies in their tracks as they wrestle with new technologies, investment costs, risk, staffing, and skills. Application modernization has been in the spotlight, but database modernization is quickly gaining recognition. And underlying both aspects of modernization is change management software.

A recent announcement from CMS vendor Midrange Dynamics is an indicator or how the modernization process is possibly evolving to take database modernization into consideration. Its latest enhancements are

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JAMS Scheduler Gets Workload Viz

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

It should be easier to see how your workloads are running with the new dashboards that are included in the latest release of the JAMS Job Scheduler from MVP Systems Software.

JAMS is Windows-based job scheduler that can be used to coordinate and execute jobs running on a variety of platforms, including IBM i, Unix, Linux, and OpenVMS servers. The software, which has sported an IBM i agent since 2009, can automate the execution of jobs in a variety of manners, including date-based scheduling and reactive workflow processing.

With JAMS 6.2, MVP has delivered several dashboards that show users

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iCluster Monitoring and Management Goes Mobile

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that use Rocket Software‘s iCluster can now monitor and manage their high availability setup remotely from the comfort of a smartphone. The new HTML5 interface delivered last week with iCluster version 7.1 TR2 is the first dedicated smartphone interface from Rocket, which plans to add new functions in the months and years to come.

The new mobile interface, which Rocket calls Mobile Monitor, lets users monitor and manage their iCluster environments without needing a PC or a 5250 console, says Mike Warkentin, the senior manager of engineering for the iCluster product. “Now customers can use an

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IBM i Shops Turn to Vault400 for Protection

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

A pair of New Jersey companies have adopted United Computer Group‘s Vault400 service to store backups and protect their IBM i environments, the vendor announced recently.

Hi-Tech Health, a healthcare claims servicer based in Hackettstown, and Congoleum, a flooring manufacturer based in Mercerville, are the latest success stories touted by UCG, which is based near Cleveland, Ohio.

Vault400 wasn’t the first backup as a service (BaaS) plan used by Hi-Tech Health. According to UCG, the company had a relationship with a separate BaaS provider, but it failed to get the company back up and running in an acceptable timeframe

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