Anybody remember Buell Duncan, who presided over his iSeries flock with a smooth Texas drawl? Or Colin Parris, who brought a doctorate degree in electrical engineering to his IBM i tenure? If you’ve been watching IBM for very long, you’ll know the company shifts around its top executives on a regular basis. But where are those former IBM i execs now, and what are they doing? The news might surprise you.

Like lots of big, diverse companies, Big Blue likes to groom its leaders by giving them a wide range of assignments, which means that, over the past 20 years,

Mega-huge data centers are hot topics in the news, but mom and pop businesses often run their IBM i servers in cozy little data closets. This fact drove Crossroads Systems to launch a workstation version of its SPHiNX virtual tape library (VTL) that doesn’t require a rack. The Texas company also gave a preview of upcoming VTL features, including data de-duplication across the wire.

Crossroads debuted the SPHiNX WS at the Fall COMMON Conference and Expo last month. With 3 TB of usable storage (expandable to 6 TB) and a starting price point of $6,800, the new VTL with the

Much of the alignment of IT and business processes can be better served with automated monitoring and management. In the IBM midrange community, systems management is a highly desirable and sometimes implemented capability. But automation has moved beyond the parameters that were set when the AS/400 and iSeries environments were the workhorses in the stable. There are new frontiers being explored by companies such as Tango/04 and its Alignia lineup of infrastructure, middleware, and application monitoring software.

Tango takes the approach of managing infrastructure according to business needs. The company calls it business service management. It can be explained by

IBM i shops that would like to start using Splunk to analyze their log data, but don’t want the hassle of setting Splunk up themselves, have a new option available to them. Last month Komodo Cloud announced that it’s now offering a cloud-based analytics service designed specifically using Splunk with IBM i-generated data.

Over the past decade, Splunk has developed a solid reputation for its capability to analyze big data generated by machines. Its NoSQL-based software does the hard work of capturing, indexing, and correlating vast amounts of semi-structured data generated by servers, applications, network devices, mobile devices, and practically

“Who polices the police?” That’s the question many CIOs are asking as they clamp down on potential security exposures in response to increasingly strict regulations. Now Raz-Lee Security is working to reduce the suspicion surrounding IBM i system administrators (i.e., the server cops) by building self-auditing capabilities directly into its security tools.

In many IBM i shops, the system administrator is typically the most powerful user on the system. This jack-of-all-trades is often called upon to do the work that would be covered by a security officer in bigger shops running open systems. It’s common to give the “keys to