• LaserVault Goes SCSI with New Backup Device

  June 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The ongoing flood of data and the low-cost of storage are leading customers in all industries to rethink their backup strategies. In the IBM i world, one backup vendor that’s building momentum in the field of tape displacement is Electronic Storage Corp., the Oklahoma company behind the LaserVault products. Last week, El Store announced the LaserVault UBD SCSI Express, a new edition of its Universal Backup Device product. El Store launched its first UBD appliance in late 2010 to provide IBM i and Linux customers with a low-cost and easy-to-use alternative to a virtual tape library (VTL). The appliance

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• Italian Stock Exchange Protected by Maxava

  June 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

  A critical component of the Italian Stock Exchange that runs on the IBM i server is protected from downtime by high availability software from Maxava, the software company recently revealed. Cassa di Compensazione e Garanzie (CC&G), or the Clearing and Guarantee Fund, serves as an assurance system as a central counterparty for equity markets and derivatives managed by the Italian Stock Exchange. The organization is responsible for providing efficient, secure, and accurate processing of trading, clearing, and settlement transactions on a real-time basis. “Every day CC&G keeps track of thousands of transactions,” Mauro Fonzo, head of systems management at

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• BCD Spruces Up Web and Doc Management Tools

  June 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

  WebSmart customers will find a few new features aimed at programmer productivity in the version 10.2 release, which BCD Software unveiled at the recent COMMON conference in Florida. The Chicago subsidiary of Quadrant Software also updated its Catapult and Nexus Portal tools. WebSmart 10.2 brings several features that will appeal to RPG or PHP programmers; the product, you will remember, is available in both ILE and PHP versions to fit the needs of both types of customers. For starters, the WebSmart IDE now highlights matching parentheses and braces, which will make it easier for programmers to find and fix coding

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• Textile Manufacturer Gets EDI Help from Robot

  June 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

  When Standard Textile decided to move its EDI translator from IBM i to Windows, the company knew it needed a solid way to make the new Windows-based EDI talk with its core JD Edwards system running on IBM i. The company found what it needed in the guise of the Robot/SCHEDULE software from HelpSystems. Standard Textile makes a variety of textile products–including sheets, blankets, window treatments, upholstery fabrics, uniforms, workwear, and napery–and sells them to customers all around the world. The Cincinnati, Ohio-based company is privately held, and employs about 4,000 people. About 80 percent of Standard Textile’s orders

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• Jinfonet Adds Geo Analysis to Reporting Software

  June 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Users who are interested in working with their data from a geographic standpoint will find the new version of Jinfonet Software‘s JReport to their liking. JReport version 13 introduces a new Geo Analysis component that allows users to work with and visualize their data in a geographic manner. Users can scroll up and down in the maps and see how their data stacks up by different geographic region, including cities, counties, states, and regions. JReport 13 brings the new Geo Analysis capabilities. Jinfonet says the new Geo Analysis feature, which works with maps from OpenStreetMap and Google Maps, extends

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• DSI Targets IBM i Shops with VTL Solutions

  June 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Dynamic Solutions International (DSI) last month announced that it’s targeting IBM i shops with its line of virtual tape libraries (VTLs). DSI entered the midrange radar in December when the Englewood, Colorado, company unfurled a partnership with IBM i juggernaut HelpSystems. As part of the deal, the companies planned to integrate their respective products, and jointly sell an integrated backup solution to IBM i shops. DSI’s May announcement of the new VTL solutions for IBM i shops signals that the company is ready to get down to business. That business, of course, is replacing tape drives at IBM i

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• Threading The Needle Of Power8 Performance

  June 2, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I am going to take a break from the price/performance comparisons between earlier Power machines and the new Power8 systems and talk about something a little bit different from but still intimately related to the performance that customers can expect from the latest IBM i operating system releases as they run on the new iron and on older Power7 and Power7+ machines. The issue is threading, and IBM has done some pretty clever things to help the operating system and processors juggle more work and boost throughput. Most modern processors have some form of simultaneous multithreading, or SMT,

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• Virtualization and Analytics: Recurring Power8 Themes

  June 2, 2014 Alex Woodie

  If you struggled with virtualization with your Power7 box, you might want to improve your skills in that regard with Power8, which brings an even more heavy reliance on virtualization. On the plus side, the massive compute and I/O capacities of Power8 open up new possibilities in the analytics world. For IBM i shops, that means taking seriously the potential to run new analytics workloads right next to your transactional loads. Analytics and virtualization were the highlights of a recent conversation on Power8 with Tim Klubertanz, a senior IBM Power Systems architect at Evolving Solutions, and formerly of IBM

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• IBM i 7.2 Tightens Data Access And Security

  June 2, 2014 Dan Burger

  Row column access control (RCAC) is the new set of security tools in town. They were released because the IBM midrange systems are not Fort Knox in a box. Even shops that have their security policies dialed in (and most of them don’t), RCAC, which became available in IBM i 7.2, is another layer of security that provides options to counter measures that are more expensive and detrimental to performance. If regulatory compliance concerns you, RCAC is particularly valuable. Even if data leaks and security audits aren’t your biggest concerns, there are lessons that are better learned before trouble

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• As I See It: The Dream Changer

  June 2, 2014 Victor Rozek

  Jack Kennedy joked that he had the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and a Yale degree. I have neither. Nor, I’ll wager, do you. Which means that if you’re a recent graduate you’re already lagging behind the competition. That wasn’t always the case, but sometimes good timing is more valuable than a good education. Take me for instance. Like others of my generation, I rode the crest of the American experience. My life was formed (and transformed) by the availability of affordable housing, low-cost education, jobs with perks, and medical care that didn’t require choosing between illness and

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