• LiveRebel 2.5 Accelerates the Java Deployment Cycle

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  ZeroTurnaround recently announced LiveRebel 2.5, a new release of its continuous integration enablement tool for accelerating the Java application deployment cycle in agile development environments. LiveRebel provides the “last mile” connectivity for continuous integration and agile development environments. Once an agile team has finished its latest scrum, the software takes the Java code from there, and automates the process of setting up a test bed, running test scripts, and finally promoting the software into production. Agile is great, because developers bring new features to market quickly, “rather than hiding under a blanket for two or six months before coming out

  …

  Read more

• Arpeggio Launches Free Encryption and SFTP Tools for IBM i

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Organizations looking to encrypt and move their IBM i backups offsite have another option to accomplish those tasks using new software from Arpeggio Software. The company is rolling out two new products, including an SSH-based FTP product called ARP-SFTP and an encryption and compression product called ARP-SAVE, that together can be used to protect IBM i data and backups. Best of all, the native IBM i software is entirely free. ARP-SAVE replaces the save and restore commands of IBM i OS with new save and restore commands that execute Arpeggio’s encryption and compression routines. It is built on the

  …

  Read more

• Agilysys Kills Guest360 Hotel System, Launches New Project

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Agilysys has killed Guest360, its next-generation property management system that was originally designed to help Agilysys sell software to midsize hotels and casinos. With the Guest360 code firmly in the can, Agilysys executives have given the green light for a new group of developers to create a new property management system for midsize properties, most likely using Java. Agilysys revealed Guest360 to the world more than four years ago. The software, which was being developed primarily in the Visual LANSA fourth generation language (4GL) development environment from LANSA, was slated to provide a multi-platform alternative to Agilysys’ IBM

  …

  Read more

• Infor SEC Filing Hints at IPO

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Infor made in August in connection with the refinance of old debt suggests the company is getting its affairs in order in anticipation of an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in the near future. The prospectus included with the filing detailed the company’s business strategy, but made no mention of IBM i or Infor’s many applications for the platform. The 409-page S-4 filing dated August 23 contained a detailed prospectus, and was made in concert with an exchange offer that Infor recently made with nearly $2 billion in privately

  …

  Read more

• EMC and IBM Extend Pact, Unveil New IBM i Storage Technology

  October 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM and EMC yesterday announced an extension of their partnership concerning the IBM i server through 2017. The companies also announced a new D910 interface that allows IBM i shops to utilize the latest Virtual Partitioning and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST VP) technologies in the EMC VMAX disk array, without running into limitations that previously were there. IBM and EMC have worked together to support EMC’s external disk arrays on the IBM i platform since the companies laid down arms and signed a partnership deal in 2006. In 2010, the companies signed another five-year extension of that deal

  …

  Read more

• IBM Punts New PureFlex Racks, Offers PDU Deal

  October 15, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The 19-inch rack hasn’t changed all that much in decades, and like Ethernet, anything that comes up against it with better technology finds itself smashed and absorbed. Or both. But, that said, even things like racks need to be tweaked to fit new server, storage, and networking designs, and so it is with a line of racks tailored for the PureFlex modular systems that IBM announced in April. To fit all of the hairy cables coming out of the backend of the Flex System chassis, IBM has tweaked the PureFlex rack to be 10 percent deeper (1.1 meters instead of

  …

  Read more

• Employment Up! IT Jobs Down?

  October 15, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Jobs, and the lack of them, are big news in the United States. And by now most of us have probably heard that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had some encouraging news in its September jobs report, revealing the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent, marking the first time the jobless rate has been below 8 percent since December 2007. If that wasn’t enough to reinvigorate job seekers, the BLS also revised its July and August job reports, confirming the creation of jobs in those months was actually higher than originally reported. Great news, on the surface, but the

  …

  Read more

• Vital To The i: The Thirst of Youth

  October 15, 2012 Dan Burger

  There’s some truth in the remark that as we get older we get more set in our ways. And along that same line of thinking is one of my favorite reflections that “wisdom arrives with old age . . . but sometimes old age arrives alone.” Things like this come to mind when I think about the age demographic of the IBM i community. The other day I got an email from Laura Ubelhor, president of the Southeast Michigan iSeries User Group and the assistant director of the COMMON Education Foundation (CEF) board of directors. Laura is full of energy,

  …

  Read more

• Data Center Count Shrinks As The Big Get Bigger

  October 15, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  So how many data centers, server rooms, and data closets do you think there are in the United States? You guess maybe 20,000? Maybe 100,000? Try 2.94 million, at least according to the box counters at IDC. This is a much larger number than you might expect, and considering there are tens of millions of small businesses in the U.S., maybe you were guessing the number should be larger. But I was surprised that the number was more than a couple hundred thousand myself, assuming that most businesses did as I did for many years, which is tuck a

  …

  Read more

• What Happens In Vegas . . . Comes Back To The Office

  October 15, 2012 Dan Burger

  Encouraging employees to upgrade skills used to be emphasized a lot more than it is these days. I don’t think there’s any debate about that. It was more widely believed that learning to do more with the on-premise hardware and software was directly related to increases in productivity and a better return on the overall IT investment. There are still companies that believe investing in people is money well spent, but you could probably make a case for them becoming an endangered species. One place you can glimpse these increasingly rare organizations is at the IBM Power Systems Technical University

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles