FHS Volume: 5 Archives

Arcad Adds Dashboard GUI to Lifecycle Management Suite

December 13, 2005 Alex Woodie

One of the companies hoping to capture some of the forecasted increase in SOX solution spending next year is Arcad Software, a French developer of application lifecycle management (ALM) utilities for OS/400 applications. The company recently unveiled a new release of its integrated suite of tools, including a new graphical dashboard aimed at helping programmers and managers quickly determine the status of code remediation projects, new cross-reference capabilities, and improvements to its regression-testing tool.

The goal of Arcad and its products is to help development shops implement controls for their source code and programming projects. The company does this

…

Robot/CONSOLE Keeps an Eye on iSeries Processor Usage

December 13, 2005 Alex Woodie

iSeries servers are expensive machines, no doubt about it. While you wouldn’t think twice of operating a PC server at 10 percent capacity, the high cost of processor capacity on OS/400 servers is powerful incentive to stretch your CPW dollar as far as you can, without breaking it. A new release of Help/Systems‘ Robot/Console systems management tool adds new capabilities for helping OS/400 shops keep on top of their iSeries CPU usage, including watching for runaway jobs.

Robot/CONSOLE is a message management utility designed to alleviate the burden of having human eyes filter through the hundreds or thousands of

…

IBM Delivers Scaled-Down Content Manager for iSeries

December 13, 2005 Alex Woodie

As it promised a year and a half ago, IBM has delivered a scaled-down content management system designed for small and medium-sized OS/400 shops. Beginning at a price of $6,900, users can get a centralized repository for storing and distributing documents, reports, e-mail, Web content, images, and other content with DB2 Content Manager Standard Edition version 8.3, a new product that IBM started shipping December 5.

IBM had previously offered an industrial-strength content management system, called DB2 Content Manager for iSeries, which is currently at version 5.3. However, this product was overkill for most small and medium-sized OS/400 shops, so

…

DataMirror Updates High Availability and Data Replication Software

December 13, 2005 Alex Woodie

North American IT managers are finally starting to take disaster recovery seriously, according to a new study from IT research firm Gartner. The Connecticut analyst group found a 650 percent increase in the number of IT managers backing up their data in the last year, either to a tape or to another disk through data replication. This is good news for high availability software providers, including DataMirror, which recently unveiled new releases of its iCluster and Transformation Server offerings.

In September 2005, Gartner interviewed 105 IT managers of North American companies about their backup and recovery practices. The

…

NetManage Cuts Complexity and Cost of iSeries Product

December 6, 2005 Alex Woodie

In a bid to get more AS/400 shops involved in application modernization, NetManage has simplified the way it packages OnWeb for iSeries, a middleware product that reformats 5250 screens and applications into GUIs or Web services that can be accessed over the Internet. The company has also slashed the starting price from approximately $20,000 to about $6,000, and moved the suite’s server component to the iSeries’ PASE environment, eliminating the need for an additional server.

While NetManage previously offered the server component for OnWeb for iSeries on Unix, Lintel, and Windows platforms, most customers ran it on Windows servers, says

…

ACOM To Launch No-Frills Content Management System

December 6, 2005 Alex Woodie

ACOM Solutions threw its hat into the content management software ring last week with the unveiling EZContentManager, a new Windows-based application it is developing. When EZContentManager ships early next year, it is expected to help companies centralize the storage of documents originating from a variety of locations and sources, including iSeries and Windows servers, while providing access to the documents from any desktop or Web browser.

ACOM is billing EZContentManager as a low-cost and no-frills content management system that will satisfy the basic content management needs of most of its clients, which are predominantly mid-size companies. Company officials accept that

…

Capgemini Finds Tango/04 a Cure for Systems Management Woes

December 6, 2005 Alex Woodie

When the Dutch office of Capgemini Outsourcing needed a systems management tool to manage an iSeries server it was running for a client, the company first considered bringing the iSeries under the fold of its existing enterprise-level systems management framework. While the well-known framework excelled in a Unix environment, it left much to be desired on the iSeries. The consulting firm’s product search eventually led it to a Spanish ISV named Tango/04 Computing Group, which specializes in iSeries systems management.

Capgemini manages a range of servers for its customers, including large OS/400 and Unix systems. In the OS/400 family,

…

ProData Goes ‘On Demand’ with DBU

December 6, 2005 Alex Woodie

ProData Computer Services last week introduced new way for customers to obtain its DB2/400 database utility: on-demand licensing. Instead of spending a minimum of $2,000 for a full Database Utility (DBU) license, OS/400 shops can now gain temporary access to the versatile tool for $10 per day, as long as they spend at least $300. On-demand licensing is one of the new features in DBU version 7.0, which ProData announced last week.

DBU is a handy utility that makes it easy for programmers, administrators, and even non-technical users to view and access any file in the iSeries database, without programming.

…

QlikTech Targets iSeries Base with Business Intelligence App

November 29, 2005 Alex Woodie

OS/400 shops on the hunt for a new business intelligence tool may want to check out QlikView from QlikTech, an up-and-coming Swedish software house. QlikView is a Windows-based program that gives users the capability to create graphical reports, perform data manipulations, and view key performance indicators (KPIs) for data originating from a variety of sources, including DB2/400. With last month’s release of QlikView 7.2, the scalability factor has been ramped up, and the product now supports billion-record data sets with its in-memory associative database.

QlikTech positions its QlikView business intelligence software as an easier-to-use and more-affordable alternative to on-line

…

Bytware Adds Disk Monitoring to MessengerPlus

November 29, 2005 Alex Woodie

In the grand scheme of things, there are minor crimes people commit against iSeries servers, and there are major felonies. Most administrators commit the occasional misdemeanor, such as skipping a nightly backup or a PTF, without causing great harm. But when it comes to major offenses that have serious repercussions, such as running out of disk space, there are lots of excuses, but no good reasons. A new disk monitoring feature in Bytware‘s MessengerPlus utility can help administrators avoid this unpleasant and unnecessary situation.

Most administrators have better things to do than watching the message queues on an OS/400

…

Search for:

Content archive

The Four Hundred
Four Hundred Stuff
Four Hundred Guru

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search