• LANSA Takes the Pulse of the Midrange, Gives Away iPads

  October 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  LANSA is trying to gauge the health of the global IBM i community in its iPulse survey, which is currently in its second year. If you’re interesting in participating–and who wouldn’t be, considering LANSA is giving away three iPad 2s–you have until October 31 to fill out the questionnaire. LANSA is trying to top last year’s inaugural iPulse survey, which attracted 1,700 individual participants from IBM i shops in 50 countries and set a baseline for comparison for this year’s questions. The questions LANSA is asking include: What is the “threat level” is to the IBM i platform in your

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• ExaGrid Adds Support for IBM TSM with D2D Appliance

  October 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  ExaGrid Systems last week announced that its disk-to-disk (D2D) backup and data deduplication appliance now works in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) environments. ExaGrid sells a line of Linux-based backup appliances that feature RAID-protected SATA drives connected to servers via NAS. The appliances feature byte-level data dedupe routines can shrink the size of daily backups by 20 to 50 times, according to the vendor. Customers can replicate data among multiple ExaGrid appliances connected through its “grid,” providing disaster recovery capabilities. When IT Jungle talked to ExaGrid just over a year ago to discuss its new support for backing up IBM

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• ALK Technologies Updates Routing Software for Trains

  October 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Railroad companies that use ALK Technologies software to route their trains will appreciate the new AutoRouter function available in PC*MILER|Rail 18, which enables companies to avoid or favor certain railroad interchanges. PC*MILER|Rail is a Windows-based routing, mileage, and mapping application that’s used by many of the largest railroad companies in North America. The software automates many aspects of routing and scheduling railcar deliveries–such as fuel calculations, managing equipment, rail car mileage auditing, carrier selection, rate determination and negotiation, and ad valorem tax reporting. PC*MILER|Rail has six routing methods, including shortest, practical, fuel surcharge, auto racks, intermodal, and coal/bulk. With Release

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• On ‘GTFM’ and a Place for Experts

  October 25, 2011 Richard Shearwood

  IT Jungle‘s executive managing editor Dan Burger last week wrote: “But if all the manuals are Web-based, what will I do with all that space on my book shelves?” More importantly, what will you do when you are trying to work out why your Internet is down? Or, as often happens to me, working on a server in a DC screened for mobile signals and with no Internet access at the machine? Even more importantly: have you USED the IBM support portal? Unusable results and a clunky interface mean that even IBMers use Google to find stuff. It has

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• IBM Gooses Power Systems Storage and Networking

  October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we discussed in last week’s issue, on October 12 IBM rolled out some new entry and enterprise Power7-based systems with double the maximum memory capacity and with support for PCI-Express 2.0 peripheral cards, doubling up the bandwidth per slow. But there were a bunch of other enhancements to storage and networking adapters, too, and these are useful for all Power Systems shops on reasonably recent machinery. The new SAS disk and flash drive controllers are the most interesting new devices that IBM put out in the October announcements. With solid state drives now coming into vogue to boost

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• Power Systems Carries That Weight In IBM’s Third Quarter

  October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite the impending launch of new Power7-based machines that came out on October 12, the Power Systems business on which IBM i customers depend nonetheless booked another great 13 weeks in the third quarter of 2011. Even though IBM was short $103 million compared to what Wall Street expected it to do in terms of aggregate sales, profits were right on target and Big Blue was confident enough in the fourth quarter to raise its earnings guidance for the third time this year. In the quarter, IBM’s sales rose by 7.8 percent, to $24.2 billion, with net income under a

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• IBM Bolsters PowerHA with New Replication Options, GUI

  October 24, 2011 Alex Woodie

  One of the October 12 IBM announcements that we didn’t cover in last week’s The Four Hundred was new PRPQ features added to the PowerHA SystemMirror for i offering, which is IBM’s hardware-based disk clustering solution. IBM announced that PowerHA customers can now replicate data across additional external storage systems, including the Storwize V7000 midrange array and the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) appliance. PowerHA also got a new GUI and new command-line functionality. PowerHA SystemMirror for i, in case you forgot, was officially unveiled as part of the IBM i 7.1 launch in April 2008, and is the follow-on product

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• As I See It: One Cabbage Leaf

  October 24, 2011 Victor Rozek

  Nations are typically organized around a set of founding principles and enduring personality traits. France initially coalesced around the rallying cry of the revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and later embraced overpriced food and rude service. America united in its support of individual rights and unlimited use of fossil fuels. And Canada stood unabashedly for real maple syrup and hockey. But whether it’s settling a frontier, relieving a monarch of his head, or deposing whatever crony the CIA chooses for you, once governments achieve their basic mandates, the wise ones seek new ways to improve the lives of their citizens. By

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• RPG Open Access Availability Expands Modernization Efforts

  October 24, 2011 Dan Burger

  Earlier this month, looksoftware became the third IBM i ISV to set up a distribution program for IBM‘s Rational Open Access: RPG Edition that coincides with the purchase of the company’s lookserver Open Access, a product that provides the integration layer for creating composite applications, generates XML clients, and supports browser-based devices. By distributing Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, looksoftware is avoiding the complicated and frustrating ordering process that companies have experienced when attempting to order the ROA product from IBM. Other application modernization tool vendors, Profound Logic and ASNA, have previously taken the step to handle distribution

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• IT Spending Growth To Slow In 2012, Says Gartner

  October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is very difficult for IT spending to grow faster than gross domestic product in any country or globally for very long. While the economies of the Western world are by and large still growing, at least at the crudest levels that we can measure with the economic tools we have, that growth is slowing. And consequently, the people who make a living calling the IT market are beginning to think that growth will slow a bit in 2012. Gartner hosted its Symposium/ITxpo last week, and Peter Sondergaard, a senior vice president at Gartner and the head of its global

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