Winter in Canada can be a very long affair and as we know its been a very hard and cold winter this year. This has kept us locked in the office for a lot longer allowing us to do a lot of work on the products with lots of new features and improvements plus a number of new Products.
As we have posted previously we spent the later part of last year developing a new product call LVLT4i, this is a solution aimed at the Managed Service Providers who want to act as a target system for a number of remote clients. The biggest benefits come from the use of iASP technology on the target system while still allowing the clients systems to run their normal non iASP environments. We think the solution has a lot of potential and will be something that will be sought after as we see the move towards cloud based solutions and more people looking to offload their IT to the MSP model. We did a lot more testing on the product and added a few new features into the based product at the start of the year so it is now ready for the big time!
The next project we undertook was the migration of the existing HA4i product to a new program standard, we have introduced the *SRVPGM model instead of the previous static binding model. This has given us a lot of benefits both in our code management and support plus some increase in performance at a reduced CPU overhead. The product is also ready for us to develop the interfaces in different languages as we separated the UI from the program code allowing us to create language dependent objects that will install based on the language of choice. The older *IBM apply method has been removed as we fell our own in-house apply method is far superior to anything we could develop using the APYJRNCHG method due the lack of IBM support for improvements and limitations of the technology. This also allowed us to remove a lot of functions and features that are related to the APYJRNCHG process while adding a number of new ones that will allow a far better recovery position to be identified in the event of a system failure when you have JQG4i installed. We are very pleased with the new product due to the simplified interfaces and the new recovery features which make it one of the best High Availability solutions on the market.
This will be a new version of HA4i (7.2) and will only be available for V6R1 onwards due to the additional technology we have used to improve some of the features.
The latest project involved taking the Auditing features we have in our HA4i products and creating a special Audit Suite that will allow us install the suite at a clients site and verify that the existing replication process is keeping the source and target objects in synch. Obviously if you are already running HA4i there is not much point in installing the new audit suite as you already have most of the functionality in the product, but if you have one of our competitors solutions and would like verification that you have the source and target in sync as they should be. We have created a new PHP based interface to the product which install automatically when the suite is installed, this provides a very elegant view of the audits that have been carried out. The audits that are available allow you to check User Profiles, Library Objects, Database files, IFS directories and System values between the systems. Once the audits have been run we tag each object audited with the date and time of the audit so we can run a new audit and only pick up objects which have not been audited in the last ‘X’ days. We think this is something that will allow us to show just how well a client is able to actually switch systems when required, even if you have existing audits in your High Availability solution it might be something to just verify that all is as it should be!
So as you see we have been very busy improving the products and developing solutions that are useful for a number of requirements, we want to make sure the solution we provide meets your needs and is not a simple one shoe fits all option. I have listed below the products we provide and the segment we think the product fits, if you would like to have your existing HA environment checked gives us a call and lets discuss what you need and where we can help.
Products and their target segment.
We hope to continue with our node.js work once we get through the next few weeks so keep checking back and we should have some new sample code to show how we are using node.js to provide new interfaces over existing IBM i data.
Chris