• Tributary Gets Closer to Quantum with Hardware Deal

  September 27, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Tributary Systems, a developer of storage virtualization software for IBM i and z/OS systems, unveiled a tightened partnership with storage hardware provider Quantum last week. Under the new partnership, Tributary will be selling Quantum’s DXi-Series line of data de-duplication appliances, as well as its Scalar line of tape libraries, into its IBM i and z/OS customer bases. The DXi-Series deal will provide Tributary a solid platform upon which to build virtual tape library (VTL) solutions. Tributary Systems is a Bedford, Texas, company that has a long history developing storage technology for minicomputers and mainframes. In 2009, Tributary entered the

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• Public Sector IBM i Users Living in the Cloud

  September 27, 2011 Dan Burger

  A lot of people would say that government organizations lag behind private industry when it comes to efficiency. But here is some evidence that in the IT arena that may not be true. It also goes to show that the IBM midrange community is not necessarily mired in the past. Let’s take a quick look at one of the largest IBM i-based clouds in North America, where governmental organizations using SunGard Public Sector’s NaviLine software is being protected by Maxava disaster recovery and high availability software. SunGard has a specific division referred to as SunGard Public Sector that serves primarily

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• Aldon’s LMi Gets a Web Portal, Mobile Device Interface

  September 27, 2011 Alex Woodie

  New software unveiled by Aldon last week allows IBM i developers to manage and monitor the code deployment process from any location–even the neighborhood pub. Thanks to new Web portal and mobile device user interfaces unveiled by the Rocket Software subsidiary, many of the administrative tasks that previously required a 5250 green-screen interface can now be handled in a friendly Web GUI, or even on the go from an iPhone or Android device. The new functions delivered in Aldon Web Portal Plus should make life easier for harried development managers, who are constantly worried whether the rollout of code changes

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• Not All Telecommuters Are Getting The Job Done

  September 26, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  I must be doing something wrong. I have been working from home for eight-plus years, and I can easily spend an entire day at my desk trying to get everything done. I find myself coming back into the office in the evenings, and even wandering in on weekends to try to get a jump on the upcoming week. I habitually check my email to make sure nothing’s come up that requires my attention. Or maybe it’s just that I like, and value, my job. But not all telecommuters are quite as fired up to get things done at home, at

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• Modern RPG, App Dev, and DB Topics Popular at Omni Conference

  September 26, 2011 Dan Burger

  Just a couple weeks ago, the Omni User group, based in Chicago, presented its annual one-day technical conference. So I checked in with Jerome Hughes, an Omni User board member, for a quick review of how things went. From an attendee standpoint, speakers and topics are what put people in the seats and in Hughes’ judgment there were several top speakers. This included Scott Klement, one of the best-known and best-liked presenters on RPG topics. “There are always a lot of meat and potatoes RPGers attending our conferences and they pick up a lot of information from Scott,” Hughes says.

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• Weather Report: Enterprise Email Partly Cloudy By 2020

  September 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies are as addicted to their email as their end users are. But corporations are going to give serious consideration to moving their email out there on the cloud. That is the word from on high from Gartner, who says that cloud-based email only makes up about 3 or 4 percent of the market (presumably counting seats) at enterprises with more than 5,000 seats, the company expects cloud email to be 20 percent of the market as 2016 comes to a close and 55 percent by the end of 2020. It is worth noting that Google currently has about

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• Northern Europe Gets Power Systems Cash Back Deal

  September 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the economy a bit jumpy all over the globe, even in what seemed to be unstoppable China, IBM has to do what it can to calm down CIOs and CFOs and get them to spend on new Power Systems gear. Big Blue last week put out another deal aimed its Northern European customers. In this one, detailed in announcement letter ZA11-1048, is a cashback program for customers who buy application software for either AIX or IBM i and are putting that software into their companies for the first time. If they buy from the approved list of applications

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• So Long Then, QuickTransit Emulator

  September 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There were so many interesting possibilities for the QuickTransit emulator created by upstart Transitive, founded by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer science professor at the University of Manchester. But after being absorbed into IBM‘s Power Systems division nearly two years ago, little has been heard of the innovative emulation technology, which could have been put to many uses in the service of the Power Systems platform–particularly those of us who make a living with IBM i. Transitive came out of stealth mode in 2004 after four years of serious development and five years before that of tooling around by grad

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• Oracle Tries To Woo Midrange Shops With Database Appliance

  September 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past two years, Oracle has been pitching its Exadata parallel database clusters and Exalogic parallel application server clusters to large enterprises, the kinds that normally buy big RISC, Itanium, or mainframe servers to run their back-end databases and applications. These machines, while interesting, are about as useful to an SMB as a Power 795 or zEnterprise 196. To go after small and medium businesses, Oracle needs to think smaller. Thus, the company last week rushed out its announcement of the Oracle Database Appliance, a pretuned cluster of two X86-based rack servers designed to run the company’s 11g Enterprise

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• As I See It: Celebrating Ignorance

  September 26, 2011 Victor Rozek

  At one time, bloody bandages were hung on poles to dry after patients were bled by physicians. It was the origin of the now innocuous red-striped barber pole. Of course, the association of barber poles with primitive medical practices has long been lost because bleeding is no longer an unchallenged medical practice. But that’s the way of certainty: it crumbles like a stale cookie. Certitude is a beast with a short life span. What people believe, what they live for, die for, and kill for, changes as surely as the seasons. Truth is mutable and yesterday’s facts become today’s folly.

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