LANSA has upgraded LANSA Composer, its "code-free" business process integration solution for the i. Vision Solutions has launched RecoverNow, a data recovery and continuous data protection solution for companies seeking to reduce the recovery point objectives offered by tape. And Gillingham-based CCSS has announced that its QSystem Monitor performance monitoring and reporting solution now includes disk capabilities to identify sudden increases in disk usage as well as other new features.

LANSA says that that Version 2 of LANSA Composer adds more than one hundred new and enhanced features. Support for executing business processes on Windows as well as IBM i servers has also been introduced.

LANSA Composer is a tool for integrating business activities that involve the transportation and transformation of data and custom business processing. LANSA says that the design environment was made "code-free" by combining a graphical data mapping tool with a visual process sequence editor. A business analyst can therefore design an end-to-end process without the need for any programming expertise. Typical business scenarios include routing transactions and alerts between trading partners, automating workflow procedures between departments and providing straight-through processing between front and back-office systems.

New features include improved exception handling, enhanced auditing with one-click documentation of process sequences, and version control for compliance and change management purposes. There is an improved user interface and Excel 2007 (OOXML) has been added to the tool's library of data types and transport protocols such as XML, EDI and Text/CSV. The tool can also now be deployed on Windows Server 2003 and 2008.

Vision Solutions has launched RecoverNow, a data recovery and continuous data protection solution for companies seeking to reduce the recovery point objectives offered by tape.

Vision says that RecoverNow fits into numerous existing infrastructures because it can use the storage available on virtually any platform as a target including Windows, Linux, IBM i, AIX or other Unix versions. It can also support SAN or NAS environments as a target. This means users can benefit from RecoverNow’s recovery and continuous data protection (CDP) without buying another Power i.

RecoverNow works in conjunction with the IBM i Save While Active process to eliminate downtime when doing backups on the production system. For existing Vision HA customers, RecoverNow can be implemented in their environments to provide CDP capabilities on top of the data protection delivered with the HA software.

Gillingham-based CCSS has announced that its QSystem Monitor performance monitoring and reporting solution now includes new disk capabilities to identify sudden increases in disk usage, two new real-time monitors that identify the largest library and largest object on the system, and a new real-time disk collection feature.

CCSS says that the new real-time disk collection capability brings new value to both the solution's online monitor and the MONDSKINQ command. The disk monitor can be told to perform a delta scan of the system at intervals during the day and will utilise real-time collection results for object-based elements such as record count and object size. Analysis of disk issues using real-time information, rather than data from the last full collection, gives immediate insight as to the cause and location of sudden disk use surges.

The new real-time largest library monitor uses the results obtained through the disk collection capability. The online monitor, the central viewing and control module of QSystem Monitor, gives a visual representation of the largest library and its real-time size, in the form of a dedicated bar (or bars, depending on how many largest libraries the user wants to see). Size thresholds can be attributed to a chosen colour code, so libraries within the uppermost size threshold would be shown as red, those within the next size threshold shown as amber, the next range yellow and those with no threshold may be green.