i365 now supports IBM‘s IBM i operating system with its EVault Remote Disaster Recovery (RDR) service, the company announced today. EVault RDR gives customers access to i365 data center resources to run critical i, AIX, Linux, and Windows applications in the event of a disaster. The new service, which starts at $800 per Power Systems server per month, will be enticing to the 1,000 System i customers that already rely on EVault for online backups.

i365 launched its EVault RDR service two years ago, and has attracted about 50 customers so far, according to i365 product manager Karen Jaworski.

In an ideal world, every IBM i shop would have its own dedicated development box. But as IT budgets shrink, it’s hard enough to get management to update the production server, let alone provide a playground for developers to experiment with new tools and technologies. But now that www.idevcloud.com is nearing completion, IBM i developers will soon have a place to try out the latest RPG, PHP, and Java tools against a live System i machine, for a very reasonable fee.

In the next few days or weeks, you will be able to go to www.idevcloud.com and sign up to

It will be easier for organizations to deploy the Reflection 2011 emulator released last week by Attachmate if they’re using the App-V application virtualization software from Microsoft. According to Attachmate, the new emulator is the first third-party product to natively support the App-V file format on Windows 7, which should save administrators hours of configuration time. But if virtualization trends continue, Reflection 2011 won’t be the only native App-V product for very long.

With Reflection 2011, (which Attachmate announced in June but which didn’t ship until last week), Attachmate has taken a lot of the work out of preparing

CCSS recently unveiled a dozen new features for QSystem Monitor version 12, its monitoring software for IBM‘s IBM i operating system. The addition of 12 new data definitions introduce a range of new functionality to the product, such as checking the status of IP connections or jobs kept on hold, and will save System i administrators the time and effort of chasing down the information themselves, the British software company says.

QSM is a popular i5/OS and IBM i utility that helps Power Systems and System i administrators keep better track of their servers through the automation of the

Aldon has beefed up its new Report Manager software with two new features designed to help IBM i development shops better track their code promotion activities. Aldon unveiled the updates last week as part of Report Manager version 1.2.

The version 1 release of Report Manager was introduced last October as a way to help users of its Lifecycle Manager (including IBM i and open systems versions) products get a better handle on what their developers are doing, and to prepare compliance reports.

The fact that Report Manager presents information in a Web 2.0-style interface, as opposed to a green

High Point Furniture Industries (HPFI) has gotten a handle on its paperwork in part through a new content management system from Quadrant Software. After automating several back office processes with IntelliChief, the MAPICS shop reports greater efficiencies, and fewer customer service headaches.

HPFI manufacturers upholstered seating, desks, and tables from its two factories in High Point, North Carolina. In business since 1958, the company, which operates 440,000 square feet of production space, has received environmental accolades for its use of recycled materials and raw material sourcing, while maintaining quality.

Despite the green push, the company was drowning in paper,

IBM on Thursday will make a new release of Lotus Sametime available for purchase. Sametime version 8.5.1 introduces support for the latest releases of desktop and smart phone operating systems, as well as support for Linux on the desktop, and Linux running on the System z mainframe.

Lotus Sametime is a “unified communications” software product designed to allow business users to communicate in real-time via the product’s instant messaging (IM) client, through voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, or using its audio and video conferencing software.

IBM delivered a major update to Sametime in late December with version 8.5, which introduced

Varsity Logistics, a developer of shipping automation software for IBM i servers, has signed up two new resellers, including Computer Alliance and Maximum Computer Systems (MCS).

MCS is an IBM business partner located on Long Island, New York. The company focuses on the distribution industry, and is a reseller of Infor‘s ERP A+ (formerly from Daly.Commerce) software. MCS, you might recall, acquired Al Barsa’s reseller business after he passed away.

Varsity’s director of business development, Vincent Taravella, says the partnership will be good for both companies. “It enables us to go to market in the Northeast region

Interested in moving your AS/400 workloads to Hewlett-Packard servers running Windows, Linux, or UNIX? If the answer is “yes,” then you might want to consider the services of Speedware, a Canadian migration specialist that recently announced a new partnership with HP to migrate older AS/400, iSeries, and System i applications to HP systems.

Speedware is a 30-year-old IT products and services company based in Montreal, Quebec. Today, the 50-person company focuses primarily on two segments: business intelligence, and providing application modernization and migration products and services that target the IBM mainframe and midrange servers, as well as older HP

The C.R. England trucking company will power down its System i servers in the near future, as the 90-year-old firm adopts new transportation and asset management systems based on the Windows operating system, the company’s application provider, TMW Systems, announced last week.

All five asset-based operating divisions of C.R. England will transition from IBM i-based systems to Windows-based systems as part of an IT overhaul at the Salt Lake City, Utah, company, TMW says.

“We’ve benefited for years from the reliability and flexibility of our AS/400 system, but felt it was the right time for us to move to