• MSP SIaS Waves a Magic Xand

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIaS), a managed services provider (MSP) based in New York, has selected Xand as one of its new data center operators. Melville, New York-based SIaS manages Power and X86 servers for clients as part of its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business, including IBM i, AIX, Linux, and Windows environments. On the Power platform, SIaS provides cloud hosting as well as high availability and disaster recovery as a service. It utilizes logical mirroring software from Maxava and Vision Solutions as well as IBM‘s PowerHA as the backbones for its HA and DR services. Earlier this spring, SIaS announced

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• Managing IBM i by Exception: Entering a World of Help

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  How are IT services managed in your organization? If you work at a smaller company, you might be able to get away with running a single layer of management software, according to a recent white paper by HelpSystems. But if you work at a larger outfit, you’ll need multiple levels of software to manage services. Stitching those levels of service together is not always easy. In an April whitepaper titled “ITSM by Exception–It’s Just the Ticket!,” HelpSystems lays down the basics for managing the gaps between various levels of management tools. According to the 11-page paper, large companies rely

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• Formtastic Learns New Barcode Tricks

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Quadrant Software says it added support for two new barcode formats and one new automated payment format to Formtastic, its document management software for IBM i. Support for QR and 2D DataMatrix barcodes and the ACH CCD+ data format in Formtastic version 5.4.5 will help customers address requirements. Formtastic is a suite of IBM i and Windows software designed to merge variable print stream data originating from IBM i servers with pre-defined document templates, enabling customers to use standard laser printers to generate custom forms, labels, and checks, and to eliminate pre-printed forms. In addition to generating forms and barcodes,

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• CloudFax/400 Licenses Free Through End of Month

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  International Presence is giving away copies of its CloudFax/400 offering to IBM i customers as part of a promotional deal that ends June 30. The software, which normally costs $2,500 for a P05 machine, is a fax over IP (FoIP) offering that allows customers to eliminate fax servers, cards, and telephone lines, and instead pay a fee for access to the FoIP service. International Presence, the original developers of the TeleFax/400 software sold by IBM for many years, announced its hosted CloudFax/400 offering two years ago. The FoIP offering allows IBM i shops to maintain business processes and application

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• Linoma Gets a Handle on Complex Workflows with MFT

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Do you remember when people talked about “e-business” and the huge impact the Internet would have? Well, the predictions came true, and today the Internet is deeply embedded into almost everything companies do. In this new e-business world, managed file transfer (MFT) products have become the go-to tools for getting stuff done. With a recent update, Linoma Software‘s MFT offering can do even more. MFT tools have always been FTP tools on steroids. In addition to simply moving files, the products often can trigger processes on remote machines, such as kicking off a batch reporting job on a Windows

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• IBM i Security Assessment: How About Now?

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Ignorance is no longer an excuse. In this day and age, after so many mega-breaches like Target’s and so many warnings, you can no longer honestly claim that you didn’t know your IBM i server was so vulnerable–especially with the availability of free security assessment tools, like the one that PowerTech recently updated. PowerTech has probably done more than any other IBM i vendor to pop the bubble that so many organizations live in when it comes to security on the platform. Its annual State of IBM i Security reports regularly showcase the amazing lack of awareness that most professionals

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• What HANA on Power Means to IBM i

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The recent news that IBM and SAP are working together to run HANA on Power piqued the interest of the SAP on IBM i community. While HANA won’t run directly on IBM i, just getting the in-memory data store on the Power Systems frame can bring new capabilities to organizations that run SAP on IBM i. A week ago, we reported that IBM and SAP were getting serious about running HANA on Power and have started a test and evaluation program to analyze exactly what that venture entails. The program, which targets SAP’s preferred SUSE Linux distribution, is aimed squarely

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• IBM’s New HyperSwap a Head Scratcher for Some

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  One of the new features that IBM added to its PowerHA suite with the launch of IBM i 7.2 is HyperSwap, which allows a production IBM i LPAR to be moved from one DS8700 SAN array to another and restarted almost instantly. While HyperSwap protects against the failure of a SAN in a single data center, its inability to work in a geographically dispersed manner had led some in the IBM i HA community to question its usefulness in a true disaster. HyperSwap is a data resiliency feature that IBM is making available to IBM i shops as part of

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• Modernization Train Makes A Run Through Europe

  June 16, 2014 Dan Burger

  The era of modernization is upon us. There are projects in the planning stages, in midstream, and completed—all indicators that IBM midrange shops interested in adopting new technologies where there are good reasons to do so. COMMON Europe recently concluded an IBM i Enterprise Application Modernization Tour that highlighted many of the topics and technologies that the IBM i community is showing interest in adopting. There’s a multitude of ways to approach modernization, and no one knows that better than Tim Rowe, business architect for IBM i application development. Rowe, the designated modernization evangelist, provided the IBM presence on the

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• Sundry I/O Enhancements For Power8 Servers

  June 16, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In addition to the new four-core Power8 system aimed at IBM i customers that came out last week, IBM made a bunch of I/O and storage announcements relating to the new machines. In announcement letter 114-094, which came out on June 10, IBM said that it was making its existing two-port communications adapter (that is feature 2893 and 2894) orderable for machines running IBM i. These replace the two-port asynchronous communications adapters (features 5289 and 5290) that were announced with the new machines back in April. Those cards are now not going to be supported. IBM does not yet

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