• IBM Kills Off VXA, Older Tape Drives for Systems i5s

  February 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Buried in the System i5 announcements from February 6 was a note from IBM that explained the vendor was going to be killing off its entry VXA tape drives for the System i5 line. This may come as something of a surprise to System i5 customers looking for inexpensive but reasonably fast tape technology for their systems. The VXA tape drive is a descendant of the very popular 8 mm Sony tape drive that was commercialized for the computer business by the formerly independent and once high-flying Exabyte, which was acquired by rival Tandberg Data. Tandberg, of course, supplies

  …

  Read more

• CoralTree Gives Away Renaissance App Dev Framework for System i

  February 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s something that came to us from a poster in our IT Jungle Forums. CoralTree Systems, a System i5 application modernization specialist based in Fareham (a burg in Hampshire, England), has taken an RPG-Web application framework that it developed and released it as a freebie tool to the i5/OS and OS/400 community. That framework, which is called the Renaissance Framework, is distributed under the Mozilla MPL license. The framework includes elements of ILE RPG IV, service programs, JavaScript, HTML, and the integrated Apache Web server on System i5 and iSeries platforms that allow programmers to create Web front

  …

  Read more

• Tango/04 Taps Moores Rowland Consulting for Distribution in India

  February 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tango/04 Computing Group, the Barcelona, Spain, provider of systems management, monitoring, and security software for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform, said last week that it has inked a deal to begin distributing its products in India. The deal was done with Mumbai-based Moores Rowland Consulting, which is a unit of a conglomerate called the Haribhakti Group, an accounting firm that was founded in 1951 and which has expanded into a large, multifaceted accounting and consulting firm that spans the gamut of business and technology services. The Moores Rowland Consulting unit provides information technology consulting and information systems risk

  …

  Read more

• Shield Advanced Solutions Is Looking for European Resellers for JobQGenie

  February 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Canadian i5/OS and OS/400 systems management software provider Shield Advanced Solutions, which is based in Toronto, is looking for some help to expand sales of its JobQGenie product into Europe. Back in April 2006, Shield Advanced Solutions announced JobQGenie Version 5, an update of its add-on for i5/OS and OS/400 systems that helps monitor and manage batch jobs. Such management is particularly tricky in high availability clusters that failover or are rolled over manually when batch jobs are running or are poised to start. To help build out its European partner network, the company has launched a new Web

  …

  Read more

• Magic Puts Focus Back on eDeveloper with Giveaway, Contest

  February 22, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Magic Software announced last week it will give away copies of eDeveloper, its development environment for writing applications for Windows, the Web, and i5/OS servers, as part of an effort to boost the product’s visibility, especially among young programmers and students. The company also announced a contest to see who can create the “coolest” applications with eDeveloper, with the winners receiving Apple iPods, which are undeniably cool. Times have been rough recently on Magic Software, a publicly traded company based in Israel with U.S. headquarters in Irvine, California. Following poor financial results and management missteps in Europe, the company embarked

  …

  Read more

• Get Connected with Remote Systems Explorer

  February 21, 2007 Susan Gantner

  If you are a user of Remote Systems Explorer, then you have certainly created a connection resource so you can interact with libraries, objects, and members on your System i along with jobs, commands and Integrated File System. Your connection resource contains information about which system you will interact with when using RSE or other parts of WebSphere Developer Studio Client (WDSc) and what user profile and password should be used when creating the RSE server job on the host system (that is, when activating the connection). Have you ever considered whether you need more than one connection to the

  …

  Read more

• A Handy Tip for Testing Batch Job Streams

  February 21, 2007 Ted Holt

  Recently, I had to make some changes to a job stream that had a lot of hard-coded output queue names. Even though I was able to use a test system that was a copy of the production system, some of those OUTQs were live. The OUTQ for the fax server is a prime example. Holding the OUTQs for extended periods of time was not practical. Neither were holding or stopping the writers. Fortunately, there was an easy way to test the job stream without distributing the spooled output. I started another green-screen session just for the test. Before calling the

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Automatically Moving Printed Spooled Files Between Output Queues

  February 21, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  A reader recently wrote in looking for an automated technique to move spooled files between i5/OS output queues after printing. His goal was to retain spooled files in an output queue with a longer retention date than the printer output queue that the files were originally printed to. This week, I’ll look at a utility program that performs this function and the benefits it can provide your shop. The Basic Template In my research, I found that IBM didn’t seem to offer any APIs to perform a function similar to what I was looking for with this utility. This led

  …

  Read more

• Fujifilm Introduces Tape Cases for Secure Media Transport

  February 20, 2007 Alex Woodie

  When executives at Fujifilm U.S.A. looked at the way backup tapes were being transported, they weren’t impressed. They found instances of backup tapes falling out the backs of trucks, putting millions at risk of identity theft. They’ve heard horror stories of tapes being jostled to death in transport, rendering their data unreadable . . . or tapes being ruined when shipped in containers that were left out in the rain . . . or disgruntled employees or snooping couriers getting their hands on tapes . . . maybe your tapes. In short, they found a critical business process rife with

  …

  Read more

• Vision Begins Product Transition with iTera HA 5.0

  February 20, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Vision Solutions last week announced the availability of iTera High Availability version 5.0, the first new product from i5/OS software house since the merger with former competitor, iTera, was finalized in November. iTera HA 5.0 marks the beginning of an ambitious, multi-year transition for Vision Solutions, which is seeking to move its legacy installed base to the remote journaling-based iTera product line while simultaneously keeping its large customers happy and opening new markets with a low-end HA offerings. Before we get into Vision’s current and future product plans and how the iTera products fit into it all, let’s recap the

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles