More than 2,000 customers around the world are using PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i, says Steve Finnes, IBM‘s worldwide product offering manager for PowerHA on AIX and IBM i. And with new HA capabilities for small and midsize businesses arriving with the IBM i 7.1 TR6 release of the software, the number of customers running PowerHA on smaller systems like the Power 720 is likely to grow.

PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i is one product, but it actually refers to a variety of protection schemes that utilize different data replication mechanisms and are aimed at companies of varying sizes.

Despite all the auditing and journaling functions in the IBM i OS, it’s still possible for a user to issue commands without accountability. For example, when users start an interactive SQL session, they are basically invisible to the administrator until the session ends. To help thwart this black hole of liability, PowerTech has added a new feature to Authority Broker that uses screenshots of the 5250 session to all track activity, regardless of the tool they’re using.

PowerTech’s Authority Broker enables security administrators to temporarily grant users and programmers special authorities, such as ALLOBJ and SECADM, so they can perform

Vision Solutions last week unveiled new software and licensing models that should make it easier for public cloud providers to offer Vision’s disaster recovery and high availability solutions to Power and X86 customers. For Power customers, a key element of Vision’s new cloud strategy is metered billing for MIMIX, which Vision says will streamline licensing and billing in a cloud environment, to provide recovery as a service (RaaS).

Vision is no cloud newbie. In fact, its software has been running for at least a decade in the data centers of managed service providers (MSPs) to provide failover protection for their

IBM i security software developer Cilasoft last week unveiled enhancements to two of its products, including CONTROLER, its exit point monitoring solution, and EAM, its Elevated Authority Manager solution. Cilasoft says the capability to monitor two additional exit points in CONTROLER–the open database file and socket exit points–as well as new commands in the tool, will give IBM i shops a powerful new way to enforce data-centric security policies, which it claims is “an enormous breakthrough.”

CONTROLER is a network security tool that monitors and controls all inbound and outbound activity going through the various exit points that IBM built

ARCAD Software recently announced the release of ARCAD-Customer version 9.5, the latest release of its IT service management and customer request tracking tool.

ARCAD is best known for its application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, which provide the capability to track source code changes to applications running on IBM i and other platforms, and ensure they make it into production.

In the ALM cycle, the source code modifications are often initiated through user change requests, and that’s where ARCAD-Customer comes in. The product provides a system for accepting, analyzing, and tracking change requests originating with users of the applications. The software

In our lead story last week, “End of Tech Support Looms for JD Edwards Shops”, we reported that Oracle‘s JD Edwards World is dependent on i5/OS V5R4. In fact, Oracle has supported those World releases on IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 for at least two years. But most World shops who contacted IT Jungle plan to upgrade their ERP anyway.

Several IT Jungle readers wrote in last week to point out the fact that they do run JD Edwards World A7.3 and A8.1 on newer releases of IBM i, and have done so for some time.

IBM i development tool maker CNX has used the Ext JS JavaScript library from Sencha to develop Web and mobile interfaces with its Valence toolset for six years. Last week, CNX announced that it has been formally recognized by Sencha for its expertise in using these mobile tools in services engagements.

Sencha was created in 2010 when the popular JavaScript library projects Ext JS, jQTouch and Raphaël combined. Today, the privately held Northern California company is perhaps best known for Sencha Touch, a mobile application framework that speeds the creation of touch-enabled HTML5 applications for tablets and smartphones.

The Ext

Fresh off the acquisitions of two UK companies, Help/Systems last week announced that it has opened a new headquarters in London to serve as the base for the company’s growing European operations.

In 2012, Help/Systems acquired two IBM i software companies that were based in the UK, including CCSS, which developed systems management and monitoring tools exclusively for IBM i, and Safestone, which developed security and compliance tools for IBM i and other operating systems. Like Help/Systems, both companies had customers across Europe and around the world.

With the new European headquarters in London, Help/Systems is gearing up for a

When Dell acquired Boomi just over two years ago, the B2B integration firm was just starting to ramp up its cloud integration service. Today, Dell says its cloud business executes more than 1 million integration processes every day, which led a company executive to declare “the end of middleware as we know it.”

Boomi was an early participant in cloud-based integration business when it launched Boomi On-Demand back in 2007. The software as a service (SaaS) business model was just getting off the ground, and Boomi wanted to be there to help customers integrate their on-premise applications and data,

Pet Food Experts, a New England distributor of pet food supplies, has realized business process improvements as the result of an implementation of Infor‘s Distribution A+ on the IBM i platform, according to a newly published case study from IBM.

Rhode Island-based PFX distributes pet food and supplies to the Northeast region of the US out of its Pennsylvania warehouse. The company employs about 250, including about 25 salespeople.

Before implementing Distribution A+, Pet Food Experts (PFX) ran its business on a homegrown OS/400 application, which most recently ran on an i5 Model 520. The applications had served