• Admin Alert: One Year Out–Preparing For Your Next IBM i Upgrade, Part 2

  October 17, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  Two years ago, I wrote an article on how to start planning for an IBM Power i upgrade a year in advance. In that piece, I covered business partner evaluation, extended maintenance, third-party software, and budgeting for performance. Today I’m revisiting the topic and adding other hardware upgrade issues that require longer term planning and may need almost a year to complete. A Lot Of Ground To Cover In no particular order, here are the Power i hardware upgrade items that you can start planning for a year in advance of a hardware upgrade. Business partner evaluation–Evaluating your relationship

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• EMC and IBM Extend Pact, Unveil New IBM i Storage Technology

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM and EMC yesterday announced an extension of their partnership concerning the IBM i server through 2017. The companies also announced a new D910 interface that allows IBM i shops to utilize the latest Virtual Partitioning and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST VP) technologies in the EMC VMAX disk array, without running into limitations that previously were there. IBM and EMC have worked together to support EMC’s external disk arrays on the IBM i platform since the companies laid down arms and signed a partnership deal in 2006. In 2010, the companies signed another five-year extension of that deal

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• Infor SEC Filing Hints at IPO

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Infor made in August in connection with the refinance of old debt suggests the company is getting its affairs in order in anticipation of an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in the near future. The prospectus included with the filing detailed the company’s business strategy, but made no mention of IBM i or Infor’s many applications for the platform. The 409-page S-4 filing dated August 23 contained a detailed prospectus, and was made in concert with an exchange offer that Infor recently made with nearly $2 billion in privately

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• Agilysys Kills Guest360 Hotel System, Launches New Project

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Agilysys has killed Guest360, its next-generation property management system that was originally designed to help Agilysys sell software to midsize hotels and casinos. With the Guest360 code firmly in the can, Agilysys executives have given the green light for a new group of developers to create a new property management system for midsize properties, most likely using Java. Agilysys revealed Guest360 to the world more than four years ago. The software, which was being developed primarily in the Visual LANSA fourth generation language (4GL) development environment from LANSA, was slated to provide a multi-platform alternative to Agilysys’ IBM

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• Arpeggio Launches Free Encryption and SFTP Tools for IBM i

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Organizations looking to encrypt and move their IBM i backups offsite have another option to accomplish those tasks using new software from Arpeggio Software. The company is rolling out two new products, including an SSH-based FTP product called ARP-SFTP and an encryption and compression product called ARP-SAVE, that together can be used to protect IBM i data and backups. Best of all, the native IBM i software is entirely free. ARP-SAVE replaces the save and restore commands of IBM i OS with new save and restore commands that execute Arpeggio’s encryption and compression routines. It is built on the

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• LiveRebel 2.5 Accelerates the Java Deployment Cycle

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  ZeroTurnaround recently announced LiveRebel 2.5, a new release of its continuous integration enablement tool for accelerating the Java application deployment cycle in agile development environments. LiveRebel provides the “last mile” connectivity for continuous integration and agile development environments. Once an agile team has finished its latest scrum, the software takes the Java code from there, and automates the process of setting up a test bed, running test scripts, and finally promoting the software into production. Agile is great, because developers bring new features to market quickly, “rather than hiding under a blanket for two or six months before coming out

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• Fresh App Certs Posted at PureSystems Centre

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i ISVs are gradually gaining certifications that ensure their software can run on the new PureSystems computers from IBM. When IBM launched PureSystems back in April, there were about 150 applications certified to run on the PureFlex and PureApplication machines. Many familiar IBM i-based enterprise apps made the first cut, including those from Fiserv, HarrisData, Infor, Information Builders; Siemens Medical Solutions, and VAI. There were also some development and high availability tools from LANSA, Vision Solutions and Rocket Software. Today, the PureSystems application roll call has grown to 242

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• Halcyon Signs European Sales Partner

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i utility developer Halcyon Software is expanding its presence in Germany and Eastern Europe with a new partnership with pheron technologies. Based in Frankfurt, Germany, pheron technologies provides a range of software and services for IBM i and X86 platforms, including security, compliance, disaster recovery, and business service management. The company is an IBM business partner, and also runs its own channel of partners in Germany and Eastern Europe. The company will now be offering to European customers the breadth of Halcyon offerings, including its job scheduler, audit journal manager, authority swapper, storage manger, document management, message monitor,

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• Oracle Bolsters JD Edwards Business Accelerators

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Oracle has unveiled a new release of its Oracle Business Accelerator (OBA) for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne offering, which is aimed at helping customers get their ERP environments up and running more quickly. The software giant added new Business Accelerators for other industries, and made the software available in more countries. OBAs are a series of tools, wizards, videos, guides, scripts, and workflows that help business partners and consultants perform “rapid, best-practice implementations” of popular Oracle products for customers in certain industries and regions. The software guides the implementation team through the ERP setup, including defining business process and user roles,

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• Overland Launches LTO 6 Tape Drives

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Overland Storage last week became one of the first vendors to begin selling LTO 6 tape technologies when it introduced it as a supported option with its NEO series of tape drives and libraries. While LTO 6 drives don’t deliver the expected speed and capacity improvements, they nevertheless pose a notable improvement over LTO 5 technology. Overland is supporting LTO 6 drives across several NEO autoloaders and libraries, including the NEO S-Series, which supports from 7 TB to 300 TB, four LTO drives, and is designed for small offices and remote locations; and the NEO E-Series libraries, which support from

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