Simply Continuous recently unveiled a new release of its online disaster recovery (DR) offering, Data Recovery Vault, that allows users to recover the most important data first. Called RecoverNow, the new offering gives users the tools to decide which data sets are the most crucial and should be restored first–an important issue in the first minutes following a disaster. The company, which has been offering its online DR offering since June, also supports OS/400 data through Laservault.

Simply Continuous was founded in San Francisco in 2006 with the goal of filling what its founders, CEO Tom Frangione and CTO

ManageEngine, an Indian developer of systems management software, expanded its i OS repertoire last month with the launch of Applications Manager Release 9. Users of the new software can monitor applications and systems running on IBM i OS servers alongside a range of other operating systems, databases, application servers, and ERP systems. This provides organizations that use System i and Power Systems servers with a powerful solution for monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, trend analysis, and planning capacity in their heterogeneous IT environments.

In the olden days of IT, when organizations ran monolithic business applications on a single server, troubleshooting performance

System i shops that are concerned about the high level of access granted to systems administrators and others, but are hesitant to put controls in place for fear of slowing down transaction times, may want to consider trying out a new agent-less user activity monitoring (UAM) solution that is coming to the platform. PacketMotion recently rolled out support for TN3270 with its appliance-based UAM solution, called PacketSentry, and is close to beginning beta tests for a similar offering that will support the IBM i OS via TN5250.

The practice of over-allocating user credentials is a universal problem. It has been

Pat Botz sees security from the perspective of an entire IT environment. Looking for solutions from a platform-specific point of view is a stumbling block that trips many organizations that attempt to go at this issue from within their platform silos. “When you start looking at where the security issues tend to be,” he says, “they are at the seams where different applications, different platforms, and different networks meet. That is almost always because there is seldom one individual looking at security from an integrated point of view.”

Botz is an ex-IBMer who has worked with a lot of IBM

Christmas came early this year for customers of New Generation Software (NGS). This week the business intelligence software company unveiled a year-end release of its flagship NGS-IQ suite that contains several handy enhancements, such as generating Excel and PDF reports from i OS data on the fly, and new developer options for embedding queries directly into Web portals and Web sites. The enhancements will go well with all those smartphones stuffed into Christmas stockings this year.

It’s been about six months since NGS debuted NGS-IQ version 7. That release was aimed almost entirely at boosting the product’s capability for the

“All we are saying, is give EGL a chance.” You can almost hear the folks in IBM‘s development tool organization in Raleigh, North Carolina, chanting this variation of the old protest song in the hopes of convincing large i OS customers and ISVs to adopt Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) for their application modernization projects. And at least one ISV–trucking software developer TMW Systems of Cleveland, Ohio–is heeding the call, and will give EGL a chance in a pilot project.

TMW develops two RPG-based applications that run on the Power Systems (System i, iSeries, AS/400, i5) platform, including the TL2000

CCSS scored a big customer win recently when it announced Connectria, an outsourcing firm with more than 1,000 clients, will be using CCSS software to monitor and manage their System i servers.

Connectria has become a big name in System i outsourcing, and considers System i hosting one of its core specialties. Dozens, if not hundreds, of System i shops have outsourced their entire System i environments to Connectria, or just utilize the company and its nearly two dozen U.S. data centers for disaster recovery purposes.

Now, the St. Louis, Missouri, company is adopting software from systems management software

Lawson Software last month rolled out separate updates to its i OS-based M3 ERP suite that pertain to its customers in the equipment and rental industry and the clothing industry. A new release of Lawson for Equipment Service Management & Rental (ESM&R) brings configuration enhancements that should speed deployments, while a standardized interface between M3 and Lawson’s product lifecycle management (PLM) software for the fashion industry should boost supply chain efficiency.

Lawson rolled out the ESM&R version of the M3 ERP suite a year ago to help companies in this field automate industry-specific processes pertaining to sales, claims and warranty

Atlantic Detroit Diesel Allison (Atlantic DDA), a distributor of heavy equipment in the Northeast, has benefited from the use of Attunity data collection and replication software, which captures changes made to a DB2/400 database and forwards them to an Oracle-based system. According to the customer, revenues in the service department have doubled as the result of the improvements in application response times.

From its headquarters outside of New York City, Atlantic DDA sells and services a full line of Detroit Diesel, Mercedes-Benz, and MTU engines, as well as Allison transmissions. The company operates eight locations, employs more than 200

First Option, a System i outsourcer-turned-software developer, is now selling access to its iSeries Watchdog systems monitoring software as a service over the Internet. Version 2.0 of the product, which was recently announced, also brings several new i OS monitoring capabilities requested by customers.

Massachusetts-based First Option debuted the iSeries Watchdog as a new business venture in spring 2008. The company, which makes most of its money by running System i and iSeries servers for its clients, decided to market and sell the entry-level server monitoring software it developed to monitor its customers’ environments.

The first release of