System iNetwork

September 2008

September 30, 2008 12:32 PM

Get Smart!

A quartet of companies--IBM, Systech, Talend, and Key Information Systems (Key)--have combined powers to offer one of the most exciting new appliances the i world has seen in quite some time: a combination data warehouse and analytics solution that runs native on the i. The new Smart i Appliance is a bundle of an entry level System i 515 or Power Server 520 Express, open-source software featuring an ETL tool integrated with IBM's DB2 Web Query, and a two-week implementation and training program to kickstart customer operations.

The new offering is the brainchild of Pete Elliot at Key and Alberto Saavedra from Systech Solutions. The System i market veterans have worked together in previous jobs for more than 20 years. Both of them were becoming frustrated with the number of applications leaving the i box. “It felt like we were watching an island sinking in the Pacific,” says Elliot. The two men knew that they had to do something to revitalize our beloved i. After listening to a seminar on DB2 Web Query, Elliot and Saavedra started thinking about how they could make it easier for an i to communicate with a database server. “We wanted to offer SMBs a flexible solution that underscores the core strengths of the i,” says Elliot. And what better way to help plan for a company’s future than with analytics that tell you which direction a business needs to move.

“The System i was designed to be a database platform from day one,” explains Saavedra. “In the early and mid 90s, the company I was working for was implementing it left and right as database warehouses. It was so popular, affordable, and reliable that we even installed one at Disney.” Saavedra goes on to describe many companies who were using separate data warehouses to run analytics. Although they work just fine, the costs can be astronomically high. “No one has had a complete stack to provide both data warehousing and analytics in a cost-effective way until Smart i.” True to its word, Key, a Premier IBM business partner, is offering the new solution for $50,000, although some installs may cost even less.

In fact, one company that Key was not at liberty to disclose became frustrated with its purchased Microsoft solution for warehousing and analytics and decided to make the switch to Smart i. After months of struggling with the previous install, the company was up and running with the new appliance in just weeks.

So here are the basics: Smart i is composed of DB2 Web Query from IBM. This provides the BI front end and is the real “numbers cruncher” when it comes to analyzing data, Talend’s Integration Suite brings with it open-source ETL tools that drill out and extract the real guts of databases running under V5R4 or newer versions, as well as databases running on Linux or Unix. Rounding out the solution is Systech, which provides support for the new application as well as installation and consultation. Smart i’s drag and drop interface has whittled down training to a measly two weeks (sometimes less). Basically, Systech sets up the data model, creates a mini data warehouse, and produces some custom sample reports based on the user’s needs. After that, the training wheels are off and customers are moving ahead all on their own. Says Saavedra, “Users really don’t even need a database administrator” to successfully use Smart i.

But wait! As an additional benefit, the Smart i includes a 4mm 36/72GB tape drive for backup, so when it’s not in use as a BI appliance, customers can utilize the appliance as a disaster-recovery solution. Also, the Smart i is scalable from the 515 or 520 up to the newest models of Power Systems. Disks can scale from 350GB to multiple terabytes. Notably, users can port existing IBM Query/400 programs onto the appliance to protect existing investments.

With hardware, software, and services, the Smart i appliance is positioned for a top score.

--Erin Bradford, systems management & availability editor

Posted by ebradford on September 30, 2008 at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2008 12:40 PM

Dojo Brings Mojo to Zend

Zend's got mojo now. Oh, yeah. Here's how it played down.

Zend Technologies and the Dojo Foundation have cooperatively created an out-of-the-box solution for building Ajax-based PHP web applications with Zend Framework (ZF) and Dojo Toolkit, a modular open-source JavaScript library. The new Zend Framework 1.6 is the first version to feature this PHP and Ajax integration.

"This is the first time a major server-side framework has collaborated with a major client-side framework," reports Wil Sinclair, development manager for Zend Technologies. "Dojo provides the components that let you have rich interfaces on web applications."

Jim Dillard, IBM alliance manager for Zend, points out that RPG programmers in large System i enterprises are usually strapped for time. "Anywhere they can find chunks of code they can use saves them valuable hours. Zend Framework provides exactly that, so System i programmers can much more rapidly construct web applications and employ them on IBM i."

Sinclair describes the Dojo community as an active one that is similar to Zend's in terms of philosophy and licensing. "People from their core group contribute to Zend and vice versa," Sinclair says. "This is something really unique. What we are doing with Dojo is a collaboration, not just a consumption of the framework. We are looking at ways to best build the server side integration points. They are working to build the client-side integration."

ZF is a set of software components written in PHP the delivers platform-independent PHP technology and support to the i. "It's a rapid application development framework that runs very well on the i and provides a new environment for creating web applications," Sinclair explains. "The framework is the next mile for application development. It builds a lot of common components that most applications need."

He notes that the Zend community has developed about half of the features of Zend's open-source project, with the Zend team members themselves responsible for the other half. "It's very important for us to keep the community involved."

As a bonus, Zend Framework 1.6 includes other goodies such as SOAP support and Captcha spam prevention.

Sinclair emphasizes, though, that the Dojo integration definitely gives the mojo to the new release. "It's a technology that lets you write some very cool applications."

In case you missed ZendCon, the largest annual gathering of PHP folks, here's a rundown of the partner initiatives and product updates that Zend Technologies announced:

--A collaboration with Adobe to make it easier to develop rich Internet applications (RIAs) based on PHP and the free, open-source Flex framework. This functionality complements Zend Framework's Dojo Toolkit support to give developers a choice of Flex, Ajax, or both when building their RIAs with ZF.

--The immediate availability of Zend Core for i5/OS 2.6, the latest certified PHP stack specifically designed for the i and used to deploy business-critical web applications on i platforms.

--A new version of Zend Studio (6.1), the PHP IDE that lets developers take advantage of a sophisticated, feature-rich Eclipse IDE platform to write PHP programs with ZF, Dojo, Ajax, and JavaScript or to also plug in Adobe's Flex Builder and use it with Zend Sutdio to build RIAs in ZF with PHP and Flex.

Vicki Hamende, application development and database editor

Posted by vhamende on September 16, 2008 at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2008 12:15 PM

Printing with Ricoh: No Strings Attached…

Ricoh has finally gone and done it--they’ve taken the wildly successful DocumentMall, a software-as-a-service on-demand solution that lets users store, retrieve, manage, and share electronic files and scanned paper documents online, and made it available with new print-on-demand features.

Available since 2001, DocumentMall is now offered in conjunction with transactional printing via Ricoh. As a result, System i users can print their data using Dataworks for ASCII or flat file data or IPDS for AFP/IPDS data. Dataworks downloads two preformatted layouts in either 8 ½ x 11 or 8 ½ x 14 to a user's PC. The user then chooses to print monthly reports in either portrait or landscape layout. Data works automatically reformats the data for optimal viewing. (IPDS also accepts pre-defined IPDS formatted data). Either way, users can preview and approve the data in its printed form before agreeing to the print order. Ricoh then routes the order into DocumentMall, where it is routed for printing, stamping, and then mailing to the specified recipient. Ricoh also automatically bills the customer's credit card.

Mostly notably, the entire service, including 30, 60, or 90 days of secure storage, is available to clients without requiring them to sign a contract, so it is immediately available for users to sample without commitment. Printing is priced on a print-per-use basis, and Ricoh sends potential customers an estimate of the cost per page (averaging between 12 and 15 cents) before purchase. Michael De Benedetti, Project Manager for Ricoh, says that the new printing option caters directly to System i customers. “At the last COMMON, I spent time speaking with attendees about their printing needs, and most people agreed that they were looking for a way to print documents for less than 15 cents per page. This solution does just that.”

When documents near their deletion date, Ricoh notifies the owner, who may want to have all files deleted. Ricoh also directs owners to the Document Mall online site for more information about becoming a DocumentMall customer and storing files beyond the allotted free storage timeline.

Ricoh is looking for System i customers to participate in the Alpha/Beta program for the Virtual Print Center. To learn more about the Alpha/Beta program, email Michael DeBenedetto at michael.debenedetto@ricoh-usa.com.

--Erin Bradford, systems management and availability editor

Posted by ebradford on September 15, 2008 at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

One Guy's View on Web Services Trends

Many industry sectors--such as transportation, insurance, health care, and manufacturing--rely on web services to conduct business with their clients. But just how pervasive is this technology? Aaron Bartell, senior developer at Krengel Technology, recently weighed in on the topic. Here's his two cents.

What seems to be the trend for System i shops implementing web services?

We find the norm for System i shops is to only implement XML web services when there is a trading-partner requirement to do so, though many are seeing the benefits of cross-platform communication and embracing the technology out of return on monetary investment.

As organizations implement web services, are you seeing any particular issues arise?

XML web services are catching on more and more throughout many industries, but as with any new technology, everyone has his or her own interpretation of how it should be implemented, and that has caused integration issues. We are also finding that some methods previously considered purist (i.e., SOAP) are being realized for what they really are, which is unwarranted overhead in most cases.

Are there times when System i shops should consider using something other than XML when implementing web services apps?

We are coming to a point where people have done their first round of web services and are looking to do their second and third. There is often the case where XML is way overkill (i.e., in black box applications where you own both ends of the spectrum), and instead of implementing a more efficient technolgy stack, XML is still used.

--Cindy Bushong, RPG editor

Posted by cbushong on September 15, 2008 at 9:40 AM | Comments (1)

Let Your Users Securely Reset Their Own Passwords and Profiles

Here's a problem you've probably experienced both as an IT pro and as a user: Your user account gets disabled because your password expires or you've forgotten it. As a System i user, you can't reset it yourself, so you have to send a request to the help desk and wait. iSecure, a new product from AS/SURE Software, tackles this problem by letting users securely reset their own profile and password, saving user and help-desk time. I spoke with AS/SURE's vice president of technology, Gary Barnes, to get the scoop on how the newly released iSecure helps you reduce demand on your help desk, reduce downtime for users locked out of your system, and easily display and manage password system values from one screen.

What inspired AS/SURE to create iSecure?

Barnes: One of the problems we see in shops is user profiles being disabled and passwords being reset, which burns a lot of employee time when the help desk isn't around. So we took a page out of the Internet just to make the System i more friendly. I'm a huge proponent of the System i, and one of the ways we can all extend the life of the box is to adopt ideas like this one from the Internet and other systems.

iSecure offers a way to let your users reset their own passwords and disabled user profiles. iSecure lets users establish challenge questions, which are common in Internet password resets. So if users' profiles get disabled, they can do a standard user profile sign on, and if they have a challenge question set up, they can answer the challenge question. iSecure then resets the profile and gives the user a temporary password (it can be randomly generated, or it can be a static profile that the security officer puts into iSecure). iSecure expires the password, so the next time the user signs on with the new password, the system says the password is expired and forces the user to create a new one.

This functionality that iSecure brings is new for the System i even though it's prevalent on the Internet and other systems. We provide the challenge questions and an audit log, so that whenever anybody uses anything in iSecure, it logs who uses it and what the person did (date and timestamp), but it doesn't record any passwords.

Tell me about iSecure's other features in addition to its password-reset capability.

Barnes: The other aspect of iSecure has to do with management of passwords from a security officer standpoint. We feel like the System i's functionality in that respect is a little difficult in that some shops don't have someone dedicated to security. So the administrator who handles security doesn't know how to use the System i parameters to make users create strong passwords. iSecure system maintenance provides one screen that shows all the password-related system options and their current values and lets that person go directly from that screen and into changing those parameters. The advantage is that this person doesn't have to know these 15 parameters and use the CHGSYSVAL command and find the 15 password-related options. So a person doesn't have to be a security expert to go in and easily implement fairly strong passwords for his or her company.

There are about 30 different rules you can enforce. IBM's change-password screen simply asks for the old password and the new password and then has the user key in the new password one more time. The screen doesn't show anything about the rules. Users who change their password every six months can't remember the many different rules they have to follow to create an acceptable password. All they know is that the system won't accept their new password, and then they go to the help desk. iSecure's screen shows all the rules so users can easily set a valid password.

Anything else you'd like to tell our readers?

Barnes: Our website, as-sure.com, has iSecure screen shots and also offers a free 30-day trial of the product.

--Linda Harty, security & networking/connectivity editor

Posted by lharty on September 15, 2008 at 8:40 AM | Comments (2)

September 8, 2008 9:10 AM

Encrypt Your Tapes! Encrypt Your Tapes! Encrypt Your Tapes!

In a conversation I had with Martin Pladgeman, president of BOSaNOVA, a company that specializes in tape backup security as well as thin clients and network appliances, the most important message I came away with was that businesses need to encrypt their backup tapes or risk losing not only their data but potentially their reputation and lots of money. Read on for some hardcore information that will convince you to get going on tape encryption today. It's not as difficult or as expensive as you might think. I also snagged a networking tidbit or two for you from Pladgeman.

What is happening in security and connectivity these days?

Pladgeman: In security, we've seen a lot more people interested in backup security in general. It used to be that you had to put the fear of God into people first and then rescue them afterward. But people now understand there's a security risk and that they need to do something about it--mostly due to regulatory pressure (e.g., the PCI pushing people to encrypt their backups) and the many publicized cases of data breaches from lost or stolen backup tapes. I still think people don't really understand the risk they run, but they're being pressured into doing something about it by regulations.

In connectivity, we've seen a lot of renewed interest in twinax connectivity, because IBM isn't providing twinax connectivity in the new POWER6 machines. Companies sometimes have system printers that they want to keep. If you want local twinax, there's no way to do it in the new POWER6 machines, apart from BOSaNOVA's local twinax controller, e-Twin@x Controller. Typically a lot of companies have twinax for distribution warehouses and other uses that don't require lots of GUI or PCs. Dumb terminals and twinax (using AnyNet) allow a TCP/IP connection to a WAN so that companies can still run the old SNA controllers at the remote sites. AnyNet encapsulates SNA into TCP/IP. In 6.3, IBM will discontinue SNA support, so AnyNet won't work (or using datalink switching won't work), so companies will have to move to e-Twin@x or throw away their dumb terminals and printers and start over. e-Twin@x is one of our core products in the legacy market. We've seen an increase in this business because there's no real technical benefit to moving away from dumb terminals and printers in these situations, so it's better to stick with the old technology--you can't get viruses, people can't load programs you don't want them to, etc. With 6.3 coming out, you need to replace the remote controller with one that runs IP only or get rid of it completely and move to thin clients or PCs, which costs additional money, of course.

In the thin client/desktop PC world, we're hearng a lot of noise about virtualization. To answer that market call, as well as react to Microsoft's closing the gap between MS Terminal Services and Citrix's enhanced Terminal Services offering, Citrix acquired XenSource, adding the ability to create a virtual desktop environment (Xen Desktop), to its existing business model of enhancing and securing the terminal services experience, which is currently the backbone of its business.

Virtualization overcomes a lot of the shortcomings of the terminal services environment, so there has been renewed interest in moving to a server-centric environment. In a virtual environment, you can use a connection broker, which gives you a way to connect your thin client to the appropriate server. The broker makes sure you stay connected to the right place and to the server with the least load. To facilitate that connection, BOSaNOVA provides a client for the connection broker on most models of its thin client line.

The trend of moving to a virtual environment is actually taking a bite into the PC world. Thin clients require only 15 to 20 percent of the power of a PC. The amount of power things take is actually starting to make a difference in decisions. Schools, for example, want to give students more access to technology, which means the schools have to provide more desktops in classrooms, and sometimes the older classrooms aren't capable of providing the power to run that many PCs, so thin clients are working in these situations. A typical PC draws about 100 watts, and most thin clients draw around 20 watts, some as low as 7 watts.

Now let's talk some more about tape encryption. Tell me about BOSaNOVA's Q3 storage security encryption appliance and how it can help businesses.

Pladgeman: The important thing is to try to get people up-to-speed on the real risks they're running with data at rest. People really still don't believe that anyone without a System i can read their backup tapes. We have a video that Bob Cozzi did in which he demonstrates how easy it is to read data from an unencrypted System i backup tape.

The Q3 is a tape encryption device that provides security for backup tapes. It sits between the data path and the tape device, and you just plug it in and forget it, which is its biggest selling point. The amount of money people spend on security in no way outpaces the amount of money they could lose in the event of lost or stolen data. Look at what happened to TJ Maxx. That data loss occurred over two years, but if they had lost one backup tape (800 GB of compressed data), the same amount of data they lost over a period of two years would have been lost in one go. All the company's data is usually leaving the building every day in the form of backup tapes carried offsite by FedEx, UPS, Iron Mountain, or some other delivery company, and businesses are under the illusion that somehow the delivery system gives them protection, but it doesn't. An organization's security people generally don't even think about unencrypted tapes leaving the building; it's not on their radar because they're looking at people trying to hack the network, people using sticky notes to remember their passwords, and so on. When you think about the risk and how much your data is worth, you realize that it's essential to encrypt your tapes.

To try to get people to wake up to the fact that when they lose a tape, it's a big deal, we have a non-product-related website, losttapes.org. We use that site to educate the public and publicize generic facts about lost tapes, such as how easy it is to recover information from lost tapes. Anybody can read that tape--no System i needed. People need to sit up and take notice that this is a huge security hole, and we're quite happy to prove it to them and help educate them on how to close it.

--Linda Harty, security & networking/connectivity editor

Posted by lharty on September 8, 2008 at 9:10 AM | Comments (2)

September 5, 2008 3:21 PM

"Portal" Is the Magic Word for Metadata Management

Medium to large-sized enterprises implementing the i certainly aren't lacking for data. The problem is managing explosions of information and knowing what’s there and how to leverage it. How do businesses avoid an onslaught of data redundancy? Can you spell "portal"? Embarcadero Technologies can, and the company has a new self-service workbench for querying and reporting that awaits any i shop searching its own system to unlock its caches of resources. Whether you’re a warehouse steward, a software application developer, or a business analyst, you want an easy-to-open gateway to find the facts and figures you need, right?

Embarcadero's database tools support IBM i databases, and the vendor’s ER/Studio Enterprise solution can reverse-engineer those databases, store them in a repository, and communicate the information to you through the company’s new ER/Studio Enterprise Portal. This search engine provides global visibility into corporate data assets and paves the way for company-wide collaboration.

"What the portal will do is give you the ability to scan the i and look for data that may already be in existence," explains Greg Keller, chief evangelist for Embarcadero. "If you can find and sort it, you can save your applications to it. This results in a major saving of time and money and eliminates the propagation of data."

An analyst may be working on a line of business and may only manage a specific segment or product in the enterprise. The analyst needs to find and access relevant information to write a report. "The portal gives him a heads-up on where that data exists in order to source it," Keller says. "We've tried to make the product as simple and easy as possible so that even the casual layman can find a specific type of data. Users can browse, search, and report on metadata quickly and accurately."

Keller reports that customers asked Embarcadero, which offers CodeGear and DatabaseGear product lines, to develop some kind of portico. "Data architects are under the gun to show value. They're being peppered all day with data questions, but they don’t have the time to write custom reports every hour on the hour. Instead of having them spend their own time and money, we build the product and hand it to them, and they basically become heroes. Now they have a painlessly easy search engine that eliminates Word documents and Excel spreadsheets."

With a price tag of approximately $6,000, ER/Studio Enterprise Portal is "a download, try, and buy product," according to Keller. He adds that it took only minutes to justify the product to the company's board. "We're doing for metadata what Google did for web search."

Vicki Hamende, application development and database editor

Posted by vhamende on September 5, 2008 at 3:21 PM | Comments (0)

Krengel Technology Offers XML Web Services Course for RPGers

Web services is a hot technology that many companies are working to embrace, but getting there may not be easy, especially if you're an RPG programmer. "[RPG shops] are looking for a way to implement XML web services in a fashion that's native to RPG," explains Jeff Skistad, marketing manager for Krengel Technology. Skistad says that he has seen better adoption from RPG folks to do XML, but they want a way to consume, utilize, and understand XML from a pure RPG perspective.

For RPGers who count themselves in this camp, Aaron Bartell, senior software developer at Krengel, has written and published a comprehensive course called "XML Web Services for RPG Programmers." According to Skistad, Bartell uses an unbiased, third-party approach (sans the marketing pitch) to explain when you should and shouldn't employ web services, what web services options are available, and how to create and implement XML web services using RPG. The course provides source code, labs, and video tutorials.

--Cindy Bushong, RPG editor

Posted by cbushong on September 5, 2008 at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

September 3, 2008 5:08 PM

Straight Talk About Getting Your Company into Compliance

I visited with John Earl, CTO and VP of PowerTech, and picked up some important tidbits about how you can get your company compliant with data security regulations. So sit back and listen in as Earl shares his advice and also offers important information about the latest trends in security and compliance.

What trends are you seeing in the security space in general?

Earl: Despite the fact that these are tough economic times and we see organizations paring their budgets, security isn't something that typically can wait, because many times folks are compelled by an outside influence. Nobody jumps out of bed in the morning and says, "I'd really like to buy security software today!" What happens is that they have a problem--a rogue programmer, say, or outside regulations--and security becomes an imperative. They're looking for how to do it well and how to do it as inexpensively as possible.

Some people have bought security software and never gotten around to implementing it, or they implemented it but never deployed or configured it because they didn't have the expertise or maybe the solution provider didn't have enough staff to provide expertise. So we're seeing a real trend of customers saying, "Solve the problem; don't just fling the solution at me."

PowerTech has a service offering that I like to call the "running start," which pairs you up with an engineer who has done this with many others and can get you where you need to be in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks. We're primarily a software company, but what we've discovered is that a lot of customers have a need for a solution, and that requires expertise in solutions.

On the software side, the core of our business, the big buzz is compliance and being able to comply with all kinds of regulations. It's fairly common to walk into a customer site and talk about a compliance issue, and the customer won't even know about some compliance regulations. Compliance has become a big concern for customers, and one of the things I think we do exceptionally well is help automate the complexity of compliance. You don't just get compliant on a single day and forget about it; you have to prove it over and over again. Our solution shines by automatically generating exception reports that demonstrate that your system is as secure today as it was yesterday.

Otherwise, in order to be compliant, you have to go in every day and manually check that your system values are the same and that you don't have any changes to your environment. Easing the burden of compliance is an important touchstone for us. Compliance is burdensome and was inflicted on IT shops by outside organizations, and being able to prove you're compliant now is really the big deal.

Auditors love to say, "I trust you. I know you're secure. Now prove it to me." And that's the big game changer for a lot of IT shops. Just you and me knowing we're secure is no longer good enough. We have to be able to prove it on a regular basis. Compliance is really the part of security that has taken center stage. If you look at why that happened from the perspective of the auditors, it's that they don't know whether you're secure or not--they don't have the expertise--so they've turned to industry standards and said, "Using these standards, demonstrate to us that you're compliant." Mainly what those standards do is prove that you're paying attention to security.

Are there any kinds of companies that have a harder time maintaining compliance?

Earl: I think for the most part, companies are having a hard time slipping into compliance in the first place. A lot of times, becoming compliant is more about changing your processes than it is about the technology. We have lots of technology to help, but many times the problems are process related. For example, all of a company's users have ALLOBJ authority, so the company asks us how it can get secure without taking ALLOBJ authority away. These companies are not going to slip out of compliance--they're going to have trouble slipping into it. Once a company has gotten over that hump, I haven't seen a lot of evidence of it slipping back.

Can you share a bit about PowerTech's long-term strategies?

Earl: Over the long term, we want to position ourselves to be the resource of first choice for companies trying to solve security and compliance problems on the System i. The idea there is that there are levels of complexity in security that many i shops just don't have the expertise or resources to master. So when we're doing our job really well, we're going to help organizations offload the security and compliance burden, and PowerTech becomes the security expert for i shops.

We have an open-source security policy that is downloadable from our website. It's a great tool for folks who don't have a security policy at all. If you haven't thought about how you should secure your i, this is a great document to start with. We also have those same concepts embedded in our tools, and they check against that and tell you about the settings that don't meet your own standards.

Let me tell you one drawback about our policy document: I can't sit here on the phone or over the web and describe what the correct policy is for your organization. At the end of the day, somebody in your organization has to get involved. But this policy document gives you a good foundation and helps you have that conversation with yourself. Look at your settings and ask yourself if things were set for a particular reason, and then you can have an intelligent process by which you evaluate your own security. Every organization has to have a policy because you can't be compliant unless you have a policy.

Earl also discussed the recent acquisition of PowerTech by Help/Systems. For more on that topic, check out "Business As Usual for PowerTech After Help/Systems Acquisition."

--Linda Harty, security & networking/connectivity editor

Posted by lharty on September 3, 2008 at 5:08 PM | Comments (0)

September 2, 2008 8:17 AM

A Vision for the Future

Recently, Vision Solutions has decided to take the plunge into the wide world of AIX. By doing so, they hope to capitalize on an oft-forgotten market: Power users.

In a recent announcement, Vision stated that their EchoCluster and EchoStream products will now be available on AIX. The two products are an outgrowth of their acquisition of Lakeview Technology and formerly known under the Mimix brand.

EchoCluster for AIX keeps your applications up and running through continuous server monitoring and immediate, automated failover to a local or remotely located alternate server. The solution continuously seeks out potential problems at the hardware, software, and network levels to decrease downtime as much as possible.

EchoStream for AIX is a continuous data-protection and disaster-recovery solution that replicates data to a remote location or local server. The new AIX release can simplify customers migration of data between dedicated I or P power servers to IBMs new blade offerings so that organizations can run more applications on a single server.

The solution’s “snapshot” capability means that users can roll back data to different points in time for various department needs. For example, roll back to the end of the day for shipping information and to the month-end for payroll processing.

Combining these two products with the company’s classic favorite, Replicate1 (a data mining ETL solution), which recently experienced a nice facelift after Vision’s purchase of Lakeview, the product line now boasts a wealth of opportunity for companies looking to move from to blade servers and Power systems.

When I recently talked with Henry Martinez, Senior Vice President of Engineering, he was really excited about what this move to AIX means for Power users, saying that Vision is happy to have these HA options for heterogeneous environments running an I or p as a backend and other servers as the front-end: “now, our customers can have high availability and business resiliency on both sides of the house.” One of our European customers can actually role swap their entire Windows, Linux, and i servers at the same time.”

To read about some companies using the new AIX-compatible products, check out
http://www.visionsolutions.com/Downloads/Case-Studies/CS_ESAIX_JacksonClinic_E.pdf
http://www.visionsolutions.com/Downloads/Case-Studies/CS_ESAIX_FirstFuture_E.pdf
http://www.visionsolutions.com/Downloads/Case-Studies/CS_MIMIX_ESAIX_TonysFineFoods_E.pdf http://www.visionsolutions.com/Downloads/Case-Studies/CS_ESAIX_DKSH_IE.pdf
http://www.visionsolutions.com/Products/Disaster-Recovery-EchoStream.aspx

Most exciting, though, is what these new, lower-priced options mean for possible Power converts. Martinez explained that, as Power box prices have gone down, a new breed of customer (who couldn’t afford the servers before) can now have access to the latest and greatest. But that doesn’t mean they have a bigger budget, so by making EchoStream and EchoCluster easier to install and maintain, fewer professional services are required to get it up and running and keep it running consistently. While Vision still offers 24X7 support to customers, the hope is that, with the new easier-to-operate options, users can rely lesson CustomerCare for nominal business operations.

And importantly, the Echostream solution is storage-agnostic, so it can work with any existing storage solution, no matter the maker, which also makes the switch to Power much easier for management to stomach.

So, not only can new users now move to the box for less, but now they can also keep them running and available for less. Now that’s a vision to believe in…

--Erin Bradford, systems management & availability editor

Posted by ebradford on September 2, 2008 at 8:17 AM | Comments (0)