Tony Day knows a thing or two about effective use of IT. The general manager of technical services at U-Bix Konica Minolta of New Zealand recently accepted an iSeries Innovation Award at the COMMON conference in Chicago for his company’s capability to hook its back-end BPCS system up to its customers’ copiers in the field, and to its own Palm Pilot-wielding field techs. Day sat down with IT Jungle at the show to discuss another successful IT project: his company’s use of the Q4bis reporting software.

The iSeries is critical to U-Bix Konica Minolta, as the platform holds the company’s

eStorage, the only provider of internal disk for the iSeries line besides IBM, is now in external iSeries disk business, too. The company is now shipping its first virtual tape library (VTL) offering, the Maxback 4576, a disk appliance that, with up to 2TB of storage, will provide a good amount of RAID-protected headroom for small and midsized OS/400 shops looking to augment their current tape backups with faster disk-to-disk technologies.

VTLs are the most exciting thing to happen to iSeries backups since the advent of the independent ASP (auxiliary storage pool). By emulating a standard IBM tape

Security for iSeries 5250 emulation is getting a closer examination as companies are becoming wise to the fact that a majority of security breaches are internal rather than external. To address this issue, Better On-line Solutions (BOS) has enhanced its 5250 Client software, BOSaNOVA TCP/IP, with the added security of 128-bit SSL Encryption, a centralized manager module, and single sign on. The new product is named BOSaNOVA Secure, however, existing BOSaNOVA TCP/IP users can also add the security features to their existing systems.

The SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption makes use of a private key that allows it to encrypt

SPSS in April will start shipping ShowCase Suite 7.0, a new version of its collection of business intelligence software for the iSeries server. Based on an OS/400 port of the Essbase 7 multidimensional database that SPSS partner Hyperion first delivered over a year ago, the new ShowCase release is expected to deliver scalability and performance improvements, as well as new data viewing and analysis components to help companies get more usable information out of their data.

Running online analytical processing (OLAP) and multidimensional database workloads on iSeries servers has gotten a bit of a bad rap lately. Many customers and