Where do the tablets go?

So, your organization has a mainframe – had one for years – and everything is nicely locked down. You can recover almost up to the minute the system or subsystem crashed (which it hardly ever does), and you’ve got people who seem to know, almost by instinct these days, when something isn’t performing quite right.

On top of that, you’ve got another layer of IT. People who use laptops with Windows and/or people who use Linux, and possibly bits or Solaris dotted around. These people have more interesting lives. They have to fight to get the best performance. Their back-up strategy is good if they can recover to last night! They probably still insist on people using XP as their Windows operating system because Vista was no good and it’s a bit of a jump to Windows 7. Plus they’re probably coming to the end of a virtualization project to reduce the number of server boxes they’ve got lying around. Parhaps they’re installing Citrix to virtualize desktops, or SharePoint to produce an intranet and join up all the separate islands of computing.

Plus you’ve got remote users, who are logging in over somebody else’s wifi. Or they might be using the 3G network on their smartphone. It’s your fault, of course, because you spent so long changing your CICS and IMS applications so they could be used in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. But, I guess you have strategies in place to secure the connection, and secure what applications they can run, and what data they can see.
In fact, you’re probably convincing senior managers in your organization that it really was their idea all along to combine the strengths of mainframe computing with the flexibility of distributed systems. What your organization needs is a nice z196 mainframe – perhaps one of the planned-but-not-quite-announced Business Class (BC) machines.

For those of you who’ve spent the past year on Mars, the z196 brings together the latest mainframe technology with POWER7 and x86 IBM blade systems, giving potential users z/OS, AIX, Linux, and (coming soon) Windows, all on the one box. At this stage, I should point out that there are very strong arguments for going to zLinux. It’s been around for 10 years now, and is just becoming an overnight success – as they say.

So, there you are thinking that you can use your mainframe experience and expertise to tidy up all the other computing areas in your organization and get them under your control when HR tells you they have supplied everyone on the board of directors with an iPad. Now, you might think this is a good opportunity to bring some of the board into the 21st century, but it creates yet another rip in the secure blanket you've been throwing over the company’s computing infrastructure. Can you set up a security policy for iPads? Well, yes, if they come into a Microsoft server – in the same way you would for Mac users. Can you allow board members to download apps? Or can they have only pre-approved ones? Where do you start building proper security? It’s back to herding cats!

And don’t think I’ve singled out iPads, Androids have similar issues. You can download firewalls and anti-virus software for them, but it’s not the same as RACF!

And it might not just be board members – you may still have road warriors that want the small form factor of a tablet. The issues of theft or forgetfulness compound your security problems.

My suggestion at this stage is to wait for Windows 8 tablets, and hope that the policies laid down by the non-mainframe ITers will apply to them. And by then, Windows will be running on our z196 box. So everyone’s a winner!

Eye-Fi card – review

We’ve all taken digital photos on our digital cameras and then got to our laptops to upload them and thought there must be a better way than faffing around getting the card out of the camera and sticking it in the card reader slot or even worse connecting a cable to download the pictures. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just put your camera near your laptop and the photos would automatically copy across. Well, that’s exactly what an Eye-Fi card does.

Installation is very straightforward. You open the box and the Eye-Fi card is already in the USB reader. You simply plug this into a USB slot on the laptop and wait while your computer recognizes the card reader. After a little while a dialogue box appears asking what you want to do with the contents of the new drive. There’s one that looks like a coloured pebble with radar waves coming out of it. That unflattering description is the Eye-Fi icon – and it says “Free Your Memories” on the menu next to the icon. It’s usually pre-selected, so all you need do is press the “OK” button. The software then installs.

At the end of the installation, the Eye-Fi Manager set-up wizard launches. You simply press the “Next” button. The instructions that appear onscreen are perfectly straightforward and these need to be followed to complete the Eye-Fi registration process.

After that stage completes, you are asked to remove the Eye-Fi card from the card reader and put it into a camera. And that’s really all there is to set up. Perhaps obviously you need to have wifi set up for it to work, and you’ll need to enter your WPA key during set up.

As long as the camera is powered on, bring in near the computer allows photos and videos to upload to your laptop without any effort. Once they’ve all arrived, turn off your camera – to conserve battery power.

You can associate the card with a different computer, and you can associate the card with multiple access points (although you need to run the Eye-Fi Manager software again and put the card back in the card reader).

One of the great features – if you want to use it – is, in Eye-Fi Manager, to choose the to have your photos automatically uploaded to online sharing sites like Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and many others. I chose not to do this – so there’s no link to my online pictures, you’ll be pleased to know!

The upload was incredibly easy, we just had the camera in the same room as the computer the Eye-Fi Manager software was installed on. In future, we might see what the maximum distance away we could be and still get it to work. It uploaded AVIs, MOVs, and JPGs.

We tried that card in three different cameras that we had around and it worked perfectly in all of them. However, some people have reported problems with some cameras.

The pictures are also geotagged – which means that they’re tagged to show where they were taken. If they’re uploaded to Flickr or iPhoto, they become searchable in Places, or on a map by city or country. There’s even an iPhone app now!

We were using Eye-Fi Pro, which also allows RAW camera files to be uploaded to the computer.

And our verdict? It’s brilliant. Get an Eye-Fi card, you’ll love it.

You can find more details at www.eye.fi/products/sharevideo.