iSeries servers don’t require a lot of muss and fuss. They typically just keep running, day after day, which can be bad if you’re in the support business (remember the Maytag Man?) or in the server business (IBM secretly wishes your trusty old AS/400 would die so you’d finally upgrade to a new iSeries). While the OS/400 ecosystem is, in a way, the victim of its own success, customers such as the USDA and Sun National Bank benefit by running lean and mean.

With 2,441 AS/400s in use, the USDA’s Farm Service Agency has to be one of the

Any company doing tape backup lives with the ramifications of taking its system down for as long as it takes to perform the backup. Reducing downtime is a big reason alternative backup methods are being considered, and lost data between tape backups, should an unplanned downtime occur, adds unwanted drama to IT staffers lives. Products such as Lakeview Technology‘s MIMIX dr1 provide an alternative, and Lakeview has extended its services to reach more customers in the small the medium size business (SMB) market.

MIMIX dr1 is promoted, primarily to SMB companies, as a disaster recovery solution. And, indeed, it

Imagine being able to manipulate and query iSeries, Unix, Linux, and Windows databases using the same tool, and to do so comfortably from an iSeries-centric environment. It may sound like a pipe dream, but it became a reality last week when Advanced Systems Concepts launched a new release of SEQUEL, its database query and analysis tool for the iSeries.

SEQUEL is a data access tool that provides a range of capabilities, not the least of which is replacing IBM‘s Query/400 software. In addition to running Query/400 objects, users can generate and distribute reports, build “executive dashboards,” drill down into

Kisco Information Systems last week announced new software for moving OS/400 spool files between iSeries servers, or OS/400 partitions. SpoolMover/400, as the new FTP-based product is called, only needs to be installed on the sending machine, which makes distributing reports to many servers easy, the company says.

Rather than installing and configuring FTP on each OS/400 server that needs a copy of a report (such as a corporate sales report, for example), the new SpoolMover/400 product could do the same job from a central location. Once SpoolMover/400 is installed on the source server, it’s a simple matter to distribute that