June Industry News

• 06/01/2000

Computer Network Technology (CNT), a company specializing in storage networking, is now offering the first component in its strategy to provide storage networking applications over IP-based networks.

Traditionally, these networks have been considered unreliable and expensive for storage applications. Reductions in bandwidth costs and new transport capabilities from CNT eliminate these concerns, making these networks a viable option for continuous business applications, such as remote Web serving, distributed data warehousing, software distribution and data center migration.

For its initial IP-based offering, CNT augmented and refined the storage transport capabilities in its UltraNet Storage Director, a high-speed switching platform, to support IP. These software enhancements, packaged under the name I-Stor, will enable EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) data mirroring software to operate over IP networks. CNT has also developed software to create a communication mechanism that converts SRDF data frames to standard IP packets, to ensure data delivery and performance over an IP network. This enhancement adds transport layer functionality, and features data compression, alternate routing, load balancing and enhanced flow control.

Mark Ward, EMC’s Vice President of Global Marketing notes, "EMC worked closely with CNT to marry SRDF, [an] information protection solution, with CNT’s approach to remote storage networking. The result, SRDF over IP, offers customers the ability to productively employ and protect their increasing volumes of mission-critical data."

This is CNT’s first of several components to support the IP network. In addition, the company has broadened its professional services offerings to include IP-based training and support.

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Cybermation Inc.’s ESP Sysplex 1.0 allows users to exploit throughput and high-availability advantages provided by IBM’s S/390 Parallel Sysplex clustering technology.

ESP Sysplex is an enhanced performance option for its Enterprise Systems Platform (ESP) workload management solution, which maximizes throughput and optimizes availability.

ESP Sysplex integrates with IBM’s S/390 Parallel Sysplex clustering technology for OS/390 environments. In recognition of the extent of this integration, IBM has granted ESP Sysplex its Advanced Cluster Proven mark, the only product of its type to receive this designation.

ESP Sysplex is designed for enterprises with batch processing on OS/390 system environments. It helps users to exploit the continuous availability capabilities of S/390 Parallel Sysplex clustering and optimizes batch throughput and management.

Through exploitation of the cross-system communication facility (XCF) and other S/390 Parallel Sysplex clustering advantages, ESP Sysplex 1.0 provides full command and control through its universal logon/API routing, regardless of which system server a user is logged onto. Fault tolerance is provided through ESP Sysplex’s shadow management, and it raises priority and allocates more system resources to a job, or group of jobs, in order to meet service-level commitments.

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ARC’s Eighth Annual E-Business for Manufacturing Forum brings together executives and decision makers from leading manufacturing companies and e-business solution providers to explore new ideas and strategies for success in the e-business world, and share their perspective on the state of e-commerce and industry direction. This year’s E-Business for Manufacturing and Logistics Forum 2000, being held in Boston on June 26 and 27, will have dedicated sessions on B2B Portals and Marketplaces, E-Procurement Strategies for Plant Systems, E-Manufacturing & E-Fulfillment Strategies, and E-Business Integration Strategies.

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SAP, IBM and HP have entered several co-development agreements, aimed at expanding their respective markets. SAP customers who prefer both the DB2 Universal Database and HP-UX servers will no longer have to choose between the two. Companies installing mySAP.com solutions with UNIX-based application servers will have the flexibility to choose DB2 Universal Database as their database server for HP-9000 Enterprise Servers running HP-UX 11.

The first availability of mySAP.com solutions with SAP R/3 release 4.6C and DB2 Universal Database 7.1 on the HP platforms is planned for the fourth quarter of 2000.

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If you are a "virtual" manager who relies on voicemail and e-mail to stay in touch with employees, your staff may need more face time with you, suggests a recent nationwide survey. More than half of CIOs polled said inadequate communication with IT employees is a company’s most common management mistake.

The survey, developed by RHI Consulting and conducted by an independent research firm, includes responses from 1,400 CIOs with more than 100 employees in their company.

CIOs were asked, "What one mistake do companies make most in managing their IT employees?" Lack of communication between staff and management ranked highest at 52 percent, followed by lack of recognition and praise at 17 percent. Other responses included lack of flexibility in scheduling hours worked, lack of employee authority, and lack of training, development or educational opportunities.

"When communicating with employees, many companies rely on the ‘trickle down effect,’ hoping that key messages will somehow make their way from senior management to the staff level," says Greg Scileppi, Executive Director of RHI Consulting. "Apprising your team of the big picture increases motivation and allows them to develop more targeted solutions. The result is greater job satisfaction and, ultimately, reduced turnover."

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Human resources departments could soon be scrutinizing the length of time certain employment agency temporary workers and independent contractors spend at client job sites. A ruling by a federal appellate court that some Microsoft temporary workers were entitled to benefits they had been denied, could have far-reaching effects on staffing agencies and other providers of long-term temporary workers.

D. Richard Creson, President of Meridian Technology Group Inc., said potential court-ordered benefits, primarily stock options for non-benefited W-2 and 1099 agency temporaries and contract employees, could be a red flag for hundreds of technology companies. Meridian employs 100 full-time information technology consultants, often placing them at client sites for long periods of time.

Creson says that many consulting and staffing firms place people at client sites for months, even years, and call them "temporaries." In the Microsoft case, some of those temporary people received extraordinarily high hourly rates, while others did not. In most cases, however, the people were non-benefited, 1099 contractors or W-2 employees placed by an agency. Consequently, some of the non-benefited temporary employees believe that they should be treated the same as company employees and share in the benefits.

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PentaSafe Security Technologies, a developer of IT auditing and security software, has allied with BEA Systems to provide additional security management features to BEA Tuxedo, WebLogic Enterprise and WebLogic Server.

PentaSafe currently provides security management for Windows NT/2000, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux and the AS/400. With the introduction of security agents for BEA’s middleware products, PentaSafe will further enhance its enterprisewide security management solution.

PentaSafe’s VigilEnt security agents allow users to audit, secure and protect application servers from internal and external threats by performing installation checks, monitoring and assessing configuration changes, operations and application logs, and providing automated archiving and recovery.

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Hall-Mark Global Solution has inked a deal with VERITAS Software to deliver VERITAS’ data protection and application storage management applications to VARs. VERITAS cross-platform storage management software is designed to ensure availability from business-critical applications.

"By partnering with VERITAS Software, Hall-Mark VARs will be able to expand their portfolio of e-commerce solutions to their end users on IBM, Compaq and HP systems," says George Brookler, Vice President and General Manager of Hall-Mark’s Software Business Unit.

VERITAS Software solutions are immediately available via Hall-Mark VARs. VERITASwill also make training and professional services available to its Hall-Mark VARs.

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For the last two years, vital IT issues have been neglected as IT managers addressed Y2K problems. They are now struggling to catch up with these commitments within the constraints of limited budgets. Application downtime resulting from data and file corruption can cause substantial losses in revenues from business operations. To address this problem, Macro 4 is offering a new version of its INSYNC solution, which includes a host of features designed to improve the approach to file and data management on the S/390.

INSYNC 3.1 introduces full support for IMS, including online and batch support, DL/1 and BMP access, static and dynamic PSBs (Program Specification Blocks), as well as physical, logical and secondary index support.