High availability and disaster recovery for IBM System i provider, Vision Solutions, announced a new online HA and DR blog today. Leading Vision’s blogging effort, which has been christened UPTIMES, is Alan Arnold,the company’s CTO. His first post is an example of how HA is important to the online banking industry.

A brief search for other System i HA blogs yielded few results, though there are definitely many resources available for general System i information (see The iSeries Blog blogroll).

We’ve talked a lot on this blog about the iSociety, that MySpace-like page for System i fan(atic)s. Every once in a while, the iSociety hosts a “fireside chat,” which is basically the same as an online chat except….well, there are no differences except that iSociety calls it a “fireside chat.”

Still, they’re very cool. Mark Shearer did one when he used to be part of the System i division, when there used to be a definitive System i division. Other ones have focused on VoIP, MySQL and PHP.

Well, the most recent one last week focused on i5/OS V6R1, the newest iteration of the System i5/OS operating system. The chat focused on converting to V6R1 rather than the feature list of the operating system version. If you missed it, no worries. The iSociety chat’s transcript is online.

IBM continues to make partnerships that strengthen the System i platform, Lee Kroon writes in an article about IBM, Infor and Siemens.

Kroon references two recent conferences, Inforum and VoiceCon. At Inforum, Infor and IBM announced a partnership to target smaller businesses with Infor’s ERP software on IBM’s hardware, including Linux on System i.

Meanwhile, at VoiceCon, IBM and Siemens announced an agreement to work on IP telephony products, also called Voice over IP or VoIP, together. This has been a big push from IBM this year — trying to get companies to move their telecommunications business over to the i.

Common, the System i users group, will be holding its second conference this year. Called Common Focus, it is part of the group’s refocusing of its efforts to have one main show in the spring and then a more developer-focused show in the fall.

This year, the fall conference is in Columbus, Ohio and runs Oct. 14-17. Even though we’ve been told that reporters aren’t allowed at this one (sour grapes!), we still recommend you check it out. Common conferences are a good way for System i people to connect and learn.

Programmers will have new model-based development options when Websydian Web Developer+, the web client for CA Plex, becomes available in December, says co-developer ADC Austin.

According to ADC Austin, this “new development tool enables CA Plex development shops to make direct HTML deployment of existing applications without development, as well as deployment of new applications in a standard J2EE Web server environment.”

Websydian Web Developer+ is currently in a limited beta phase, but will become generally available in December through Websydian, ADC Austin and a network of Websydian and CA partners.

Timothy Prickett Morgan at IT Jungle has a great column reviewing Hewlett-Packard’s release of the BladeSystem c3000, nicknamed “Shorty.” The new HP chassis can hold eight blades, sits 10.5 inches high and draws from a regular 120-volt wall outlet.

Morgan said this is exactly what IBM should be doing with its blades, and it should have done that — and offered i5/OS in the blade format — a long time ago. Morgan argues that HP is making a better pitch than IBM to the small and medium businesses (SMBs) that are looking to fill their small data centers or server closets with compact hardware that doesn’t throw off a lot of heat.

Check out this quote from a local story in the Dodge City Daily Globe, which serves southwest Kansas. The quote refers to some purchases the local government recently made (bold type is my emphasis):

Approved the purchase of a 2000 Bluebird LTC40 motor coach bus for $140,000, as well as an iSeries mainframe computer for $69,658.

Now on its face, it doesn’t seem like much, right? Just a typo from the reporter, maybe. But the thing is that the reporter probably got that language from the town, which probably got it from one of its IT workers, who obviously seems to feel that the iSeries is a mainframe, or at the very least, is like a smaller mainframe.

Maybe I’m making too much out of this, but I think a lot of people out there probably think of the System i as a mini-mainframe. It’s reliable, it’s secure, etc. On the downside, if you want to call it that, is people may be thinking of the System i as a legacy architecture, just like the mainframe. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing; I’m just throwing it out there.

IBM and Sun recently announced that IBM System x and BladeCenter will be able to run Solaris, and the two are also working to get Solaris to run on the mainframe.

So is Solaris on Power that far behind? Obviously Sun is committed to its open-source vision for Solaris, and getting Solaris to run on as many systems as is humanly possible. Will IBM allow Solaris to run side-by-side alongside AIX and i5/OS? I think Solaris and i5/OS could happen quicker than Solaris and AIX just because Solaris and AIX are the two major competing Unix operating systems right now.

System i application developer LANSA announced Wednesday a partnership with IBM distributor Avnet Partner Solutions in order to bring LANSA’s so-called “Lease of Life” legacy modernization hardware, software and consulting bundle to System i users.

The press release describes the result of this partnership as a consortium that sells packaged System i server lines with software and an “ROI calculator” (i.e. Excel spreadsheet), which is designed to help users determine a legacy modernization approach via LANSA’s Rapid Application Modernisation Process (RAMP).

LANSA offers the option to take their “RAMP Challenge,” which is essentially a survey with check boxes which will presumably determine what system to see you. Perhaps System i users save money money through the Lease of Life consortium because LANSA (and Avnet) have developed this self-consult survey, thereby saving on their consulting overhead.

More investigation is needed to determine how useful the Lease of Life consortium really is. If someone has tried it, let me know. My initial impression is to label this effort a repackaged sales pitch.

After four months of beta testing, System i application tool developer Business Computer Design Int’l Inc. (BCD) released WebSmart PHP for general availability today. WebSmart helps System i developers create PHP-based applications that can run on Linux, Unix and Windows servers. The tool also supports DB2 UDB and MySQL.

BCD is offering WebSmart PHP free for a 30-day trial. The normal licensing fee for the complete application is $4,250 for up to two developer seats and $1,950 for additional seats. BCD also offers an unlimited license for $13,500, according to their press release. Discounts are available.