EMC yesterday announced that it now supports IBM i with its FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) technology, which enables data inside EMC arrays to be automatically moved between traditional disk and solid state disk (SSD) for the best bang for the storage buck. Among the many other announcements made at the annual EMC World extravaganza was the Symmetrix VMAX 40k, a hulking beast of a SAN that immediately becomes the largest and fastest disk array in the world.

As data ages, it typically becomes less valuable to an organization. Because of this, organizations have historically moved

Business intelligence on IBM i goes beyond DB2 Web Query or Cognos and it goes well beyond the most commonly used reporting tool, the old Query/400. If that’s all you know about BI on i, then you need to know about New Generation Software (NGS), which used the recent COMMON conference as a springboard to announce a new BI software development tool that costs less than $500.

NGS has marketed its products as the more affordable option to IBM software and is eager to demonstrate a better return on investment, which the company suspects will jump start business intelligence deployments.

Companies that are struggling to find the resources to meet their security and compliance reporting requirements may be interested in a new managed services offering unveiled yesterday by SkyView Partners. As part of the Managed Services for Compliance Reporting (MSCR) solution, SkyView will do much of the hard work associated with maintaining security policies, addressing exceptions, and managing compliance for IBM i and AIX servers on an on-going basis.

When a company faces a new regulation such as PCI or the Hi Tech Act for the first time, there’s usually a big push on the part of the IT

Over the last few years, Surround Technologies has been building out its collection of Microsoft .NET-based user interface controls for applications that run on the IBM i server. At the recent COMMON conference held at Disneyland, Surround Tech displayed the latest new UI goodies that developers can play with.

Surround Tech’s flagship product, Accelerator for .NET, allows developers to create modern Windows, Web, and mobile interfaces for existing IBM i applications. The software, which functions as a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio, features a collection of pre-assembled components and wizard-driven code generators based on the latest user interface technologies, including

Vision Solutions is a much different company than it was five years ago. Aside from running three major IBM i high availability software lines, Vision is also doing a brisk business with HA and DR software for Windows, Linux, and Unix servers thanks to its DoubleTake acquisition. Vision executives plotted out the rest of the year’s roadmap during the recent COMMON conference in Southern California.

Vision has already made one major HA announcement this year. In March it launched MIMIX Availability for IBM i version 7.1, which brought a boost to replication performance, especially for more complex environments. At the

Software Engineering of America was one of 75 vendors demonstrating their wares at the recent COMMON conference at Disneyland. And while SEA is a regular at COMMON, this was the first time the company was talking about Centerity, a new systems management tool that it’s selling into its IBM i and mainframe customer bases.

Centerity is a monitoring and management solution designed to provide IT departments with a real-time view into the health and availability of their applications and business services. SEA says the product offers comparable functionality to established enterprise management tools, but with less cost and complexity.

The

Crossroads Systems unveiled a new release of its SPHiNX virtual tape library (VTL) device at the recent COMMON conference at Disneyland. With SPHiNX version 8.3, Crossroads is giving users the capability to automatically trigger other events upon completion of an activity in the VTL.

Few processes stand by themselves in today’s IT environment, and backup is not one of them. When a database is successfully backed up, IT administrators often need to accomplish other tasks, such as replicating data to another server, applying encryption, activating post-process compression or de-duplication, or writing to tape.

With the upcoming release of SPHiNX version

Tributary Systems has introduced its latest version of Storage Director, its software offering that provides backup storage virtualization. Storage Director version 3.04 introduces support for IBM i 6.1, 7.1 and VIOS, as well as enhancements to its remote data replication function that should reduce network latency.

Storage Director was designed for fault-tolerant, high availability computing environments like IBM i, but its capabilities to work in heterogeneous datacenters make it particularly useful. In addition to IBM i, it works in Windows, Unix, Linux, z/OS, NonStop, and OpenVMS environments.

Among the benefits of Storage Director touted by Tributary are automated backup and

Data Storage Corp. recently added more IBM i processing power to its Massachusetts data center in preparation for expanding its portfolio of cloud services, which range from data protection to production hosting.

DSC last week announced that it has completed the first two phases of its three-part expansion plan at its SAS70 type II data center in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company now has a range of Power5-, Power6-, and Power7-based servers in place to address the IBM i computing needs of its customers.

Data protection continues to be DSC’s forte on the IBM i platform, particularly after its 2010 acquisition

Bill Hunt, the principle product manager for the 2E and Plex development tools at CA Technologies, died May 1 after a battle with cancer. He was just 47.

For the last 12 years, Hunt had been the driving force behind the 2E/Plex product line at CA. He was very active in the 2E/Plex community, and worked closely with customers and partners who use the high-level development tools, which continues to have a loyal following in the IBM i community.

The following statement was posted to the CA Plex CA 2E Global User Community website by Marie Godfrey, senior director