In a new IT Jungle article, Timothy Prickett Morgan discusses IBM’s Q4 sales strategy for System i. He offers some compelling arguments and analysis of IBM’s moves during 2007 as well as what the company’s short-term roadmap might mean for System i users. Here are some of the highlights I found interesting:

• “IBM is expected to roll out the Power6 processor across the System i and System p lines in 2008, with the System i perhaps getting a revamp with a 615, 625, and 655 box in the late January to late February timeframe.”
• “IBM is going to stop selling OS/400 V5R3 on January 4, 2008. No matter what, customers with AS/400 and iSeries 270s and 7XX machinery have to at the very least buy V5R3 before then because V5R3 is the final release to be supported on these machines.”
• “Upgrades from iSeries Model 810 and 825 servers to user-priced System i 515 and 525 servers or a 550 Enterprise Edition are being withdrawn on December 1.”
• “Upgrades to System i 5XX machines from iSeries 870 and 890 servers are still going to be available until April 8, 2008, and that is presumably because customers with these classes of machines need more planning time to figure out their upgrade path into the 9406-MMA 570 server that is a natural upgrade path for them.”

System i high-availability company Vision Solutions Inc. announced today that Robert J. Herbold — a former Microsoft executive and a member of the board of overseers member at the Hoover Institution, a conservative organization — has joined the Irvine, Calif.-based company’s board of directors. Herbold’s résumé includes nearly 30 years at the Proctor & Gamble Co., serving on the board of directors for organizations like Agilent Technologies and intelligent design proponents Discovery Institute. Still high on the news of recent sales gains, Vision hopes that Herbold’s successful track record will follow him as he steps up to the board-of-directors plate.

Automated operations and business intelligence software company Help/Systems announced last week the addition of Linux support to its server operations event management software Robot/CLIENT. Here is what Robot/CLIENT does:

Robot/CLIENT acts as agent software running on non-System i servers, including Windows and UNIX. It checks server operational status, receives job status information, launches processes, monitors server applications and services, and transfers data. With Linux support, users can integrate their Linux servers into their System i procedures.

By using Robot/CLIENT agent software with Robot/SCHEDULE (the job scheduler and batch management software) as their master scheduler, users can schedule jobs on the server and receive a completion status; monitor server status; transfer files between the System i and the server; and much more. Linux servers managed by Robot/CLIENT run efficiently and reliably, expanding the scope of a System i-based enterprise.

Robot/CLIENT for Linux integrates with the other Robot Automated Operations Solution products, including Robot/ALERT for system event notification; Robot/CONSOLE for message, resource, and log management; Robot/SPACE for disk space management; and Robot/NETWORK for complete network management. Now, the System i automated operations team can control Linux systems, too.

Pretty cool stuff for shops running a variety of platforms that need to have their systems work together. Do you use this or other operations management software? Want to share your product reviews or offer tips to the rest of the 400 community about using Robot/CLIENT or like systems management software? You can always send me an email or leave your comments here.

High availability and disaster recovery software provider Vision Solutions Inc. recently announced a significant increase in sales volume following the acquisition of Lakeview Technology.

According to the Irvine, Calif.-based company, Vision Solutions “closed more than 1,000 new sales of high availability, disaster recovery, and data management software,” more than 40% of which are to new customers. That’s good news for investors, but what about the people who actually use Vision’s products?

In an IM conversation with iStudio400.com’s John Brandt, sales is all Vision seems to be talking about. “My impression is that they are simply pushing for more sales,” Brandt said. He also added that the media has not said “a word about better functionality or better service” concerning Vision post-acquisition.

Does anybody else share this opinion? Send me your rants or raves or leave us a comment here.

Do you use open source software on your System i? Here is an opportunity to give back to the open source community.

Tech book publisher No Starch Press is auctioning a copy of its new pub, Absolutely FreeBSD by Michael W. Lucas, to raise money for the FreeBSD Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the Unix-like FreeBSD platform. The winner of the auction receives a signed copy of “Absolute FreeBSD” and a certificate of authenticity.

The ongoing auction runs through Nov. 2, 2007. The FreeBSD Foundation is using eBay’s charitable MissionFish service to provide this auction at a reduced rate.

In a recent conversation with software provider GridApp about the release of the latest version of GridApp’s flagship database automation software, Clarity 4.0, CEO Rob Gardos and Chief Scientist Matthew Zito described their product as “out-of-the-box.” But does anyone really believe that there is such thing as a true out of the box tool? As the briefing went on, it became clear that GridApp is getting closer to such a deployment with their online model-based best practices configuration.

Essentially, admins must create profiles (models) of their existing configuration and when Clarity runs, it lets you know what isn’t set up correctly according to their online best practices support, which you can then correct. And that’s it. Your database management is automated. Of course, I’m simplifying, but the point remains that although System i admins do not need to create and maintain any new scripts (thus, the out-of-the-box tagline), they still need to do some system modification.

Gardos and Zito said that Clarity is for organization that need to manage a minimum of 50 databases and that the product is intended for a enterprise-level organizations. But they point out that it’s not uncommon and it doesn’t take long for businesses to reach the 1000 database threshold.Clarity is cross-platform software, meaning that it can be used on Windows, Linux, Solaris, System i, pretty much anything. There are a few systems that aren’t yet fully functional, though. Support for zLinux isnt’ ready . . . yet.

If you use Clarity or any other database automation software, we’d like to know about it. You can always post comments to this blog or send me an email. We’d be interested to know your experience with automation or any other systems management tools and strategies.

System i security vendor Raz-Lee Security Inc. announced Monday support for SSL enforcement in iSecurity Firewall, a move Raz-Lee says constitutes a major improvement in Firewall. Although many sites allow Telnet access without SSL, they often insist that ODBC access use SSL capabilities. Often times though, different types of equipment in company’s branch offices include differing levels of SSL support, giving rise to the need for security tools.

Shmuel Zailer, CEO of Raz-Lee Security said that previously “the only way to implement user to port rules was to use the OS/400 Port Restriction capabilities [which often] resulted in unacceptable performance degradation.”

Additionally, Zailer said that ” OS/400 Port Restriction does not have simulation capabilities and its logging file is not part of the standard log files provided by OS/400.” The activity log file produced is part of iSecurity Firewall’s standard log file and simulation mode is available prior to “live” implementation, preventing what may be serious networking errors.

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).

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.

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.