• CCSS Inks Distribution Deal in Nordic Region

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  CCSS, the British maker of systems management and monitoring tools for the i5/OS and OS/400 machines, has announced that it has inked a partnership with Pulsen Systems Solution, a distributor of IBM systems and software as its sales and support agent for the Nordic region. CCSS is trying to expand into growth markets in Asia and Europe, where the System i platform is doing better than in other geographic regions. In January, CCSS opened up an office in the Philippines to sell its wares into Southeast Asia, where multinationals from the United States and Europe are expanding their

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• SPEC Launches Java Messaging Benchmark

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Getting a sense of the performance of applications on various server platforms has been made more problematic since the advent of distributed computing a decade ago. But real distributed computing–the kind driving Web-based applications today–is not just about separating application serving and database serving, which was complex enough. It is about having many different applications and pieces of middleware mashed up into a new kind of application that is inherently more complex than a simple two-tier or three-tier architecture. To help company’s better assess how iron performs in this more complicated hardware and software environment, the techies and vendors who

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• SAP Boosts Sales and Profits in the Third Quarter

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Enterprise application software giant SAP reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2007 last week, and revenues, earnings, and earnings per share grew in the double digits for the company. SAP’s recent decision to offer software as a service through its Business ByDesign product, which is not going to be ready for primetime for a while, did not put a damper on perpetual software license sales. In the third quarter, SAP booked total sales of 2.42 billion euros, up 9 percent as reported and up 13 percent at constant currency. Software license sales in the quarter grew by

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• Symantec Survey Says DR Planning and Testing Are Inadequate

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s a story you hear over and over again in the data center. Disaster recovery plans are only as good as the changes you make after you test the plan and see that it fails. According to a study performed by Symantec, which sells the Veritas stack of file systems and related tools used in clustered Unix, Windows, and Linux environments, IT departments have some work to do on their disaster recovery plans. The Symantec study indicates that 91 percent of the IT organizations polled that have disaster recovery plans carry out full scenario testing of those plans, but

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• Good Reasons to Use Unrequired Correlation Names

  October 24, 2007 Ted Holt

  Correlation names are alternate names given to tables in an SQL command. Sometimes correlation names are required. Other times they are optional, but helpful. I would go so far as to say that it is good practice to use correlation names as often as possible, even when they are not obligatory. Let me share two good reasons to do so. But first, let’s review the basics of correlation names. A correlation name follows a table name in the FROM clause. The table name and correlation name must be separated by white space. You may also include the filler word AS

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• Externally Described Database IO through Data Structures

  October 24, 2007 Ted Holt

  Eons ago, IBM enhanced the RPG compiler by allowing program-described files to define data formats using data structures instead of Input and Output specs. I have taken advantage of this ability from time to time since then, and would be willing to testify in anybody’s court of law that I don’t miss I and O specs one little bit. It was much later, in V5R2, that IBM decided that data structures should be allowed for externally described files as well. I was not so excited about this decision until recently, when I realized that the use of data structures for

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• Admin Alert: The System i High Availability Roadmap

  October 24, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  I’ve recently been involved in a high availability (HA) project where the goal is to be able to switch processing from a failed System i box to a Capacity Backup (CBU) machine within one hour of failure. Growing from that experience, this week’s column is the first of an occasional series where I’ll discuss HA concepts and how i5/OS administrators can expedite continuous availability procedures in their shop. What Does High Availability Mean To a System i Shop? Although there are more complicated definitions for high availability, my favorite explanation is that high availability consists of whatever you do to

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• Talend Adds i5/OS Support to Open Source ETL Tool

  October 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  A software company called Talend is trying to do for extract, transform, and load (ETL) data integration tools what MySQL and SugarCRM have done for databases and CRM applications–namely, leverage open source development techniques, free downloads, and a procession of chargeable add-ons, to build a successful business. Talend came one step closer to that goal yesterday when it announced support for DB2/400 databases with Talend Open Studio version 2.2. Talend Open Studio is a free download that helps organizations move and integrate disparate sources of data. Uses of the tool are as varied as real world application and server topologies.

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• VAI to Deliver Flexible Computer-Telephone Integration, Thanks to iMS

  October 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  VAI is close to starting beta tests on a new offering that allows its customers to integrate their phone systems with their i5/OS ERP applications. The integration is the result of VAI’s partnership with iMessaging Systems, experts in i5/OS computer telephony integration (CTI), and will give their System i customers the flexibility to move from traditional PBX phone systems to newer voice over IP (VoIP) systems at their own pace, without making any changes to their ERP system. CTI is not a new technology. For decades, large corporations have been computerizing their call centers and hooking their back-office applications

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• LogLogic Delivers Fine-Grained User Activity Monitoring

  October 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  LogLogic delivered a new release of its user activity monitoring appliance this month that delves much deeper into the actions of individual users than previous releases. With the capability to track and correlate all user actions across all major platforms–right down to which files they accessed–LogLogic version 4.2 helps organizations not only by collecting detailed forensic evidence in criminal cases, but by serving as a virtual surveillance camera that (hopefully) deters users from stealing information in the first place. LogLogic is a San Jose, California, company that sells log collection and reporting software pre-loaded onto inexpensive, rack-mountable X86-based appliances. More

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