After years of working for others inside and outside of the IBM i community, Glenn Marchesani is now branching off on his own. His new venture-debt funded startup, called Accur8 Software, is now selling a tool that, among other things, enables power users to quickly and easily build SQL-powered apps by providing a data virtualization layer atop existing systems and databases, including DB2 and IBM i.

Marchesani is only 44 years old, but he has more experience than developers who are much older. The son of DB2/400 subject matter expert Skip Marchesani, Glen grew up around the AS/400, attending

The future of HyperSwap on IBM i became a little more clear this month with IBM‘s October 5 announcement. That’s when IBM shared details on a new Technology Preview for HyperSwap supporting independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs), which will allow more fine-grained failover of IBM i environments that are protected in PowerHA Enterprise Edition environments.

HyperSwap is a data resiliency feature that IBM debuted in its PowerHA Express Edition last year with the launch of IBM i version 7.2. The technology, which was originally developed years ago for System z mainframes, relies on the peer-to-peer remote copy (PPRC) synchronous

Insufficient data is the cause of all sorts of bad stuff. It could be the reason that two-thirds of IBM i shops have no network exit point programs in place. It’s not that information on exit point security doesn’t exist at tens of thousands of IBM midrange shops. But it is a lack of awareness that results in serious security weaknesses. With no steps taken to secure exit points, popular protocols like FTP and ODBC are potentially exposed.

PowerTech, the IBM i security software vendor under the HelpSystems umbrella, advises that monitoring the exit points is critical because the

You may have tough security policies and follow IBM i security recommendations to the letter. But if you’re in a regulated industry, that’s not good enough–you need to actually prove you’re doing things right, and that means auditing. IBM i shops that face these requirements may want to check out the latest release of IBM‘s Security Guardium software, which includes new capabilities for IBM i.

Buried in IBM’s October 5 announcement for IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 11 and IBM i 7.2 TR3 were several snippets about Guardium and IBM i’s relationship to it. The new TRs mesh with

One of the great things about the IBM i platform is how it grows and adapts to the companies that use it. Businesses can start with a small Power Systems server, and as the scale of their operations grows over the course of years, they can expand their IBM i processing footprints in a relatively easy manner. This pattern has played out time and time again, and the latest to use it is the German distributor HANSA-FLEX.

Based in Bremen, Germany, HANSA-FLEX is one of Europe’s top distributors of hydraulic parts. The $450 million company maintains a catalog of 95,000