• HiT Software Goes Mobile with Ritmo

  September 22, 2009 Alex Woodie

  HiT Software this month started a beta test program for Ritmo Mobile, a new data provider designed to connect .NET mobile applications running on a smart phone or PDA to access data residing on DB2 databases, including DB2/400. Ritmo is a development tool that integrates into Microsoft Visual Studio environments to help developers build high-speed data connections between .NET applications and DB2 databases, including DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (DB2 Louise), and its older brother, DB2 for i (DB2/400). Ritmo includes a C# toolkit that plugs into the developer’s IDE, and enables them to do all sorts of things,

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• Help/Systems Supports HP-UX with i OS Job Scheduler

  September 22, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Help/Systems last week announced that Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, its i OS-based job scheduling software, can now manage the workloads of servers running the HP-UX flavor of Unix from Hewlett-Packard. The announcement gives Help/Systems complete coverage of Unix, Linux, and Windows computing platforms with its enterprise job scheduler. Help/Systems announced Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise earlier this year to extend the coverage of its i OS-based job scheduling software to its customers’ other servers. The software, which is sold as an option to its core Robot/SCHEDULE product, includes Java-based agents that deploy to the target platforms and enable two-way communication with the job scheduler

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• CCSS Keeps an Eye on State of Backups with New BRMS Monitors

  September 22, 2009 Alex Woodie

  If your company runs its business applications on an IBM Power System i server, chances are good that it also uses the Backup, Recovery, Media Services (BRMS) utility that comes with the IBM i OS operating system. Now, with the latest release of the QSystem Monitor systems management tool from i OS software vendor CCSS, your administrators can keep a closer watch on BRMS activities, and get notifications more quickly when something is about to go horribly wrong. QSystem Monitor (QSM) helps System i administrators keep better track of their servers by automating the collection of error messages and

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• SmarteSoft Extends Automated Testing Support to 5250 Apps

  September 22, 2009 Alex Woodie

  System i and System z users were given another option for test automation this month when BlueZone Software inked a partnership deal with software testing specialist SmarteSoft to include its 5250 and 3270 emulators in SmarteSoft’s testing software. As part of the deal, BlueZone, which is a subsidiary of Rocket Software, will allow its terminal emulators to be packaged and sold with SmarteScript and SmarteX, SmarteSoft’s collection of automated application testing. The integration means SmarteScript and SmarteX users will be able to test applications that run on i OS and z/OS, the vendors say. Despite its name, SmarteScript does

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• PowerTech to Resell Pat Townsend’s Encryption Offering

  September 22, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Two i OS security vendors that have seen leadership changes in the last couple of months, Patrick Townsend Security Solutions (PTSS) and PowerTech, recently announced a partnership that will see PowerTech reselling PTSS’s Alliance line of AES encryption software for the i OS server. The security industry has seen a big boost lately in the form of the Payment Cardholder Industry Data Security Standard (PCI). One of the requirements of the PCI DSS is to implement strong encryption for credit card data, which is what many retailers are still scrambling to do to avoid paying big fines to the

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• Start Planning for Power7 Iron Now

  September 21, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s future Power7 chip may be just about done as far as the engineering is concerned, and its server designs might also be more or less completed as well. But there is plenty of time yet to tweak the boxes, and I doubt very much that the final packaging and pricing for the future Power7 machinery is anywhere close to being set. Which is a pity, really. With the fourth quarter nearly upon us and many companies finishing up their 2009 budgets and planning for their system upgrades in 2010, now is the time to start thinking about Power7

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• Oracle-Sun Exadata V2, Meet iDatabase V1

  September 21, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This will be a recurring theme for me in the next couple of years as I watch Oracle and its soon-to-be server, storage, and operating system division (formerly known as Sun Microsystems) preach to us about the benefits of an application development system with a consistent and tightly integrated software stack tuned very closely to iron. The recurring theme will be that I get really annoyed. As The Four Hundred told you last summer, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle teamed up to create something called the HP Oracle Database Machine, one of Oracle’s several forays into the hardware business, based

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• IBM to Sell U2 Database Business to Rocket Software

  September 21, 2009 Alex Woodie

  IBM is selling its U2 database and application development products to Rocket Software, the companies announced last week. The deal includes the UniVerse and UniData suites of “multivalue” database management systems, as well as associated programming tools, which together are referred to as U2. Rocket says it intends to keep the U2 teams and business model intact. Terms of the deal were not announced. Depending on how you apply the term “legacy” to IT products, U2 is either a dinosaur of technology that should be relegated to maintenance mode or another cutting edge product that’s been underutilized and under

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Big Blue’s Sun Strategy Gamble–IBM Without i

  September 21, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  Users and resellers of Sun Microsystems iron have been shaken up by Oracle‘s acquisition plans. IBM is trying to exploit the situation, picking off as many Sun accounts as possible. Big Blue says its Power-AIX systems have won over many customers and adds that its mainframes and System x products are making big inroads, too. What is missing from this picture is the i-on-Power line. This could prove problematic. IBM’s dropping the i may mean dropping business machines, too, opening market gaps that Oracle and Microsoft can exploit, even in accounts where IBM is nominally the prime vendor. IBM

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• Disk Sales Compressed in the Second Quarter

  September 21, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The non-stop boom in disk storage hit a wall six months ago, a wall called the economic meltdown, and sales of disk arrays are still slumping even as the economies of the world look like they are starting to stabilize a bit. The market analysts at IDC say that both internal disk arrays embedded in servers as well as external ones that link up to them from the outside in myriad ways have been impacted by the meltdown. All told, global disk array sales dropped by 18.7 percent in the second quarter, to $5.7 billion, but vendors nonetheless managed to

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