• As I See It: The Many Faces Of Creativity

  November 12, 2012 Victor Rozek

  One of the challenges of writing a bi-monthly column is continually coming up with interesting ideas. In the Internet age, it is humbling to discover that hundreds of writers have already explored a particular topic I believed was original. For that matter, just finding a fresh take on a subject like computing–which returns 375 million Google hits–is about as tricky as electing a third-party candidate. Which is why, I suppose, there is a truism among writers: “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” Software development is a lot like writing, only it often requires mastery of multiple languages. And given the

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• Where In The World Is Web Query?

  November 12, 2012 Dan Burger

  Web Query may be the most underused business intelligence software available. Although it is thought to be owned–complete with licenses and maintenance contracts–by tens of thousands of IBM i customers, it sits on the shelf, like good whiskey waiting for the right occasion. For those who don’t know a good thing when they don’t see it, Web Query was introduced by IBM in 2007 as a Web-based query and report product to replace the aged but beloved Query/400. In its version 1 release, it was highly promoted by IBM as one of the many modern features being added to what

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• IBM Unveils New LTO6 Gear And A Storwize SAN

  November 12, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced a variety of new LTO6 products, including a full-height SAS tape drive, a half-height SAS drive, a new LTO6 autoloader, and support for LTO6 drives in three tape libraries. The company also announced the versatile new Storwize V3700 storage array, which offers midrange shops various SAS drive and connectivity options. The new TS2260 Tape Drive Model H6S is a half-height, SAS-connected LTO6 drive that can be installed in a rack or stand by itself. The TS2260 has a 512GB internal memory buffer, includes 16 KB cartridge memory, uses the Linear Tape File System (LTFS), and supports

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• Big Blue’s Power Systems Get Some Itanium Competition

  November 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It hasn’t been an easy couple of years for IBM in the RISC/Unix midrange and enterprise server market. And it has just gotten a bit harder and stands to get even more difficult in the next year. Not only did Intel finally get its “Poulson” Itanium 9500 processors into the field, which will be picked up by Hewlett-Packard for its HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop systems, but it made a broader commitment to converge the high-end of the Xeon processor line with the Itanium line with the next generation “Kittson” processors. And Oracle is working on its next-generation Sparc T5 processors

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• AquaFold Power Tool Gets Hip to Big Data

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Programmers and administrators faced with big data movement tasks may find the job a little easier with the latest release of AquaFold Aqua Data Studio, a power tool that provides graphical access to major databases, including DB2/400. Aqua Data Studio is a Java-based utility designed to provide programmers, database developers, and systems administrators with a single, consistent interface to work with databases. The product’s GUI lets users administer, explore, and query their databases and create SQL scripts. Additionally, it offers an entity relationship modeler; brings comparison tools for analyzing differences in files, directory structures, and database schemas; and has an

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• EMC Grabs Silver Tail to Fight Cyber Crime

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The world of cyber fraud and cyber warfare is undergoing a period of rapid transformation and expansion, and with last week’s acquisition of Web fraud detection company Silver Tail Systems, EMC shows that it plans to be in the thick of the battles. Cyber criminals are increasingly using sophisticated technology and novel approaches–such as blended attacks and polymorphic malware–to gain an edge over the good guys and crack the security of the good guys. The problem is that traditional signature-based security tools are no longer sufficient to differentiate between regular Web sessions and malicious Web sessions. This is especially

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• Halcyon Delivers Japanese Version of Management Tools

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i systems management tool vendor Halcyon Software last month announced that its software is now available in the Japanese language. The U.K. firm says its complete line of products are now available in Japan, the second largest IBM i market in the world, after the United States. Halcyon says it did the development work of modifying its software to support double byte character sets (DBCS), while its Japanese partner SOLPAC, a Tokyo-based software and consulting firm that caters to the IBM midrange market, did the translation work. SOLPAC will sell Halcyon products in Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. “Halcyon

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• Zend Debuts Studio 10 Beta

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Zend Technologies used its annual ZendCon conference last month to unveil beta releases of three products, including Zend Studio 10, Zend Server 6, and Zend Server Gateway. While Zend wants customers to use all three products together, IBM i shops will be most interested in the beta of Zend Studio, which brings new cloud, mobile, and productivity features. Zend Studio is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment that provides a spectrum of tools for rapidly writing rich Internet applications, with PHP back ends, JavaScript and JQuery front ends, and REST Web services connecting them. Studio offers productivity features like code

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• Infor Gives EAM an iPad Interface

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Organizations using enterprise asset management (EAM) software from Infor can now interact with that software through an iPad, the company announced last week. EAM Mobile provides an extension to several Infor EAM products, and will be particularly beneficial to workers in the field or remote locations. Infor offers several EAM products, including EAM Enterprise, EAM Enterprise Sustainability, and MP2. All of the products are based on the MP2 software that Infor obtained with its Datastream acquisition in 2006; it rebranded it EAM Enterprise in 2007. Both products run only on Windows and Unix servers, but as Infor10 applications, they can

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• MSPs Expand IBM i DR and HA Practices

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  If there’s a silver lining to the giant cloud that was Superstorm Sandy, it’s that it has shined a light on the need for companies to establish and practice disaster recovery (DR) plans. IBM i shops are increasingly turning to managed service providers (MSPs) to assist with their DR and high availability (HA) planning. In recent weeks, three MSPs, including Corus360, Recovery Point, and DataStorage Corp., announced upgrades to their DR and HA practices. Corus360 is a large Atlanta, Georgia-based value added reseller (VAR) with a subsidiary called RES-Q that provides a range of DR and business

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