Data Center Management Articles
IBM announced workload-optimized systems to help companies manage a range of more demanding data center workloads. The new systems include a new offering for the zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX); IBM Storwize Rapid Application Storage (RAS) solution; and System x products. The offerings span IBM's systems portfolio.
Posted February 22, 2011
CorreLog, Inc., a provider of log management and security solutions, says it has begun shipping a z/OS agent that helps organizations correlate mainframe security events with security events from Windows, Linux, UNIX, routers, firewalls, and and instantly notify the appropriate personnel in the event of a security threat or breach. The new product, CorreLog Agent for z/OS, works with the CorreLog Security Correlation Server, to enable organizations to monitor enterprise IT security, including mainframes, from a central viewpoint, says George Faucher, president of CorreLog. "For many customers, an IBM mainframe is their most strategic box. However, until now, they had no way of viewing it as part of their enterprise security picture."
Posted February 22, 2011
A new toolset designed to streamline common and complex tasks associated with developing, administering and optimizing Oracle databases, has been announced by Embarcadero. The new toolset, called DB PowerStudio for Oracle, combines several of Embarcadero's most popular database tools into a suite that is intended to make it easier for Oracle developers and DBAs to shorten database development and administration times, and to improve the performance and availability of their databases. The toolset is available in a Developer Edition and a DBA Edition. The new release follows the introduction of a similar toolset by Embarcadero for SQL Server DBAs and developers.
Posted February 22, 2011
Talend, an open source integration tools vendor, has announced the release of Talend Integration Factory, a production-ready distribution of the popular open source enterprise service bus (ESB) from the Apache Camel project. This announcement follows the December 2010 introduction of Talend Service Factory, a repackaged distribution of Apache CXF, optimized for the enterprise. The product initiatives leverage tools from SOPERA, which Talend acquired in November.
Posted February 22, 2011
Idera, a provider of Microsoft SQL Server management and administration tools, has announced the latest version of its SQL Server backup and recovery solution, SQL safe 6.5. According to Idera, SQL safe reduces database backup time by up to 50% over native SQL backups, reduces backup disk space requirements by up to 95%, and enables complete "hands-free" automated backup of an organization's SQL Server infrastructure while ensuring compliance with backup and recovery policies.
Posted February 22, 2011
SHARE convenes on February 27th in Anaheim, with an agenda packed with industry initiatives and knowledge-sharing on the latest best practices and technology trends. In this exclusive Q&A, SHARE president Janet Sun provides her vision for SHARE in the coming years.
Posted February 22, 2011
IBM representatives will be at the High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets event to highlight the benefits of IBM systems and Linux in High Performance Computing. The show and conference will be take place April 4 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, NY, and IBM is a gold sponsor of the event.
Posted February 09, 2011
Did you miss a webcast covering important information about technologies you need to learn more about? IBM offers replays on-demand of webcasts presented by IBM experts and partners.
Posted February 09, 2011
Dr. David Ferrucci, the scientist leading the IBM Research team that has created the Watson supercomputer, will host a keynote session on IBM's Jeopardy! project at The Linux Foundation's annual End User Summit in March. "Watson" will compete on Jeopardy! against the television game show's two most successful contestants. The man vs. machine Jeopardy! competition will air on February 14, 15 and 16, 2011, with two matches being played over three consecutive days.
Posted February 09, 2011
Red Hat recently announced the general availability of the sixth update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform to all active subscribers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 provides a broad set of bug and security fixes, new hardware enablement and back-ports of enhancements in areas such as networking, virtualization, web services, security authentication and file systems. According to Red Hat, the changes introduced in 5.6 include a total of approximately 2,000 individual fixes, as well as approximately 340 individual enhancements and hardware enablement changes.
Posted February 09, 2011
EnterpriseDB, which provides products, services, support and training based on the PostgreSQL open source database project, has announced the availability of three components that add security and replication technology for community PostgreSQL Server users - SQL/Protect, PL/Secure and xDB Replication Server EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Standard Server 9.0 delivers the latest features in PostgreSQL 9.0, plus value-added tools and services providing organizations with a complete enterprise-ready database installation.
Posted February 09, 2011
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has announced its 2011 event schedule and the latest expansion of its Linux conference, LinuxCon, to Europe. LinuxCon Europe will take place October 26-28, 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic. The Linux Foundation has also released the Call for Presentations for its full 2011 event lineup, which includes LinuxCon conferences in North America, Japan, Brazil and Europe, as well as other events focusing on embedded Linux in both North America and Europe.
Posted February 09, 2011
IBM representatives will be at the High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets event to highlight the benefits of IBM systems and Linux in High Performance Computing. The show and conference will be take place April 4 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, NY, and IBM is a gold sponsor of the event.
Posted February 09, 2011
Did you miss a webcast covering important information about technologies you need to learn more about? IBM offers replays on-demand of webcasts presented by IBM experts and partners.
Posted February 09, 2011
Dr. David Ferrucci, the scientist leading the IBM Research team that has created the Watson supercomputer, will host a keynote session on IBM's Jeopardy! project at The Linux Foundation's annual End User Summit in March. "Watson" will compete on Jeopardy! against the television game show's two most successful contestants. The man vs. machine Jeopardy! competition will air on February 14, 15 and 16, 2011, with two matches being played over three consecutive days.
Posted February 09, 2011
Red Hat recently announced the general availability of the sixth update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform to all active subscribers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 provides a broad set of bug and security fixes, new hardware enablement and back-ports of enhancements in areas such as networking, virtualization, web services, security authentication and file systems. According to Red Hat, the changes introduced in 5.6 include a total of approximately 2,000 individual fixes, as well as approximately 340 individual enhancements and hardware enablement changes.
Posted February 09, 2011
EnterpriseDB, which provides products, services, support and training based on the PostgreSQL open source database project, has announced the availability of three components that add security and replication technology for community PostgreSQL Server users - SQL/Protect, PL/Secure and xDB Replication ServerEnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Standard Server 9.0 delivers the latest features in PostgreSQL 9.0, plus value-added tools and services providing organizations with a complete enterprise-ready database installation.
Posted February 09, 2011
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has announced its 2011 event schedule and the latest expansion of its Linux conference, LinuxCon, to Europe. LinuxCon Europe will take place October 26-28, 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic. The Linux Foundation has also released the Call for Presentations for its full 2011 event lineup, which includes LinuxCon conferences in North America, Japan, Brazil and Europe, as well as other events focusing on embedded Linux in both North America and Europe.
Posted February 09, 2011
Sepaton, Inc., a provider of enterprise-class disk-based data protection platforms, unveiled its next-generation platform, consisting of version 6.0 software, which drives its new S2100-ES2 Series 1910/2910 system. The new platform delivers grid scalability of both performance and capacity; high performance; multi-protocol support; high-reliability; and deduplication. The new product is both an enabler of private-cloud computing as well as a platform for the data protection capabilities required in enormous scale-out storage environments.
Posted February 07, 2011
Oracle has announced a new enterprise tape storage product, which, the company says, provides high performance and low total cost of ownership at one-third to one-fifth the floor space of any tiered storage, archive or backup solution. The StorageTek T10000C tape drive "has the highest capacity and the highest throughput of anything out there by far," Tom Wultich, director of product management for Tape Storage at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The StorageTek T10000C provides 5TB native capacity and 240MB/second native throughput, representing capacity and throughput increases over competitive products that help customers reduce the cost of enterprise storage while providing fast backup and archive solutions.
Posted February 07, 2011
Serena Software, a provider application development and management tools, announced that its mainframe application development technology supports Java, HFS, and Eclipse. The ChangeMan ZMF Client Pack is designed to help mainframe customers take advantage of application deployment capabilities that reduce downtime, costs and risks typically associated with release management.
Posted February 07, 2011
Speedware, a provider of legacy modernization solutions, announced that it has signed an agreement with COBOL-IT to distribute COBOL-IT's open source COBOL in the North American market and to provide North American based support to COBOL-IT users. According to the terms of the agreement, Speedware will be the latest North American sales and support center, providing 24/7 technical support, re-hosting/system integration services, and training.
Posted February 07, 2011
Verizon Communications Inc., a global telecom provider, announced it intends to acquire Terremark Worldwide Inc., a provider of managed IT infrastructure and cloud services, at a total equity value of $1.4 billion. Verizon expects to close the tender offer late in the first quarter of 2011. This transaction will accelerate Verizon's "everything-as-a-service" cloud strategy by delivering a portfolio of scalable on-demand solutions to business and government customers globally, through a unified enterprise IT platform and unique business cloud offerings that leverage the companies' collective strengths.
Posted February 07, 2011
SOA Software, an SOA and cloud services governance provider, announced the availability of an upgraded closed-loop service governance automation solution, designed to help ensure that fine-grained development-time policy decisions are automatically applied to the enterprise's operating environment and enabling users to enforce development policies at runtime. Repository Manager Version 6.3 also integrates with SOA Software's Policy Manager.
Posted February 07, 2011
Trend Micro Incorporated, an internet security vendor, announced its security software for 64-bit IBM Lotus Domino platforms now extends to the IBM System z platform. The ScanMail Suite delivers anti-spam, anti-malware, web threat protection and content filtering to prevent data theft and loss.
Posted February 07, 2011
Investing in cloud computing - primarily private clouds - is a top priority for IT organizations for 2011, according to polls conducted by Unisys. A recent Unisys poll which was completed on January 24 found that 44% felt that 44% of the people responding expect to make cloud computing their top IT investment priority in 2011. By contrast, 24% named support for mobile/end user devices as their primary IT investment focus.
Posted February 06, 2011
UNITE has published the registration fees for the upcoming conference May 22-25, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency Orange County Hotel in Anaheim, California.
Posted February 06, 2011
Oracle has announced a new enterprise storage product, the StorageTek T10000C tape drive, which, the company says, provides high performance and low total cost of ownership at one-third to one-fifth the floor space of any tiered storage, archive or backup solution. "The new tape drive has the highest capacity and the highest throughput of anything out there by far," Tom Wultich, director of product management for Tape Storage at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted February 02, 2011
Over the past 3 years, the IOUG ResearchWire studies conducted by Unisphere Research have focused on Oracle technology as well as trends affecting data professionals, allowing IT professionals to benchmark where their organizations stand within their own technology environment. Executive Summaries of all IOUG ResearchWire reports are publicly available for free download and full study reports are also available to IOUG members at no charge when they sign in with their user name and password.
Posted February 02, 2011
Oracle has made enhancements to Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g enables organizations to develop and deploy internal and external portals and websites, composite applications, mashups, and social and collaboration services all tightly integrated with enterprise applications. The updates combine best-of-breed capabilities from Oracle's portfolio of portal products and provide customers with a unified user experience platform for the enterprise and the web, Andy MacMillan, vice president, Product Management, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted February 02, 2011
Data growth is driving the use of virtualization within data centers. The virtualization evolution from server to storage to desktop is catching on at many small-to-medium size businesses, as well as at large enterprises. Aimed at providing a better end-user and administrator experience than their physical counterparts, virtualized desktops promise lower cost of acquisition and management with a highly scalable, easy-to-deploy and fully protected environment. However, with virtualization desktop infrastructure (VDI) comes a set of new challenges. Chief among these are storage and server resource allocation and data protection and recovery.
Posted February 02, 2011
IBM announced the latest release of the Informix database server, version 11.7, in October 2010, thus marking the fourth major release since Informix joined the company. One of the most exciting features in Informix 11.7 is the "Flexible Grid." Wouldn't you like to administer multiple servers as easily as a single server? Wouldn't you like to mix different hardware, operating systems, and versions of software? The Informix Flexible Grid provides this capability.
Posted February 02, 2011
The market for data warehouse appliances - solutions consisting of integrated software and hardware - is heating up, with new twists emerging from both established and new appliance vendors. Netezza, an early proponent of the appliance approach, was acquired in November 2010 by IBM. Here, Phil Francisco, vice president, product management and marketing for IBM Netezza, shares his views on what's changing and what's ahead. Going forward, Francisco sees very specific, vertically-oriented solutions that are built on appliances, whether it be for Telco, retailers, or financial services. "These appliances will take into account the kinds of data models that are required, but also the kind of functionality that is required for those industries and relieve even more of the day-to-day administration requirements," he notes.
Posted February 01, 2011
HP and Microsoft have announced four new converged application appliances that combine applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single system. In addition, there is the previously-announced HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, an enterprise-level mission-critical system. Now available with a starting price of $2 million, the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance is said to deliver up to 200 times faster queries and 10 times the scalability of traditional SQL Server deployments."Our appliances have been engineered from the beginning with time to solution in mind," Fausto Ibarra, senior director of Business Intelligence at Microsoft, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We are really offering a unique value proposition."
Posted January 25, 2011
BMC Software announced a workload automation solution that enables business users to manage their own workloads without requiring the intervention of IT departments. The new tool, BMC Control-M Self Service, enables users check the status of their work, make workload processing changes for their business transactions and access a service catalog of predefined workloads. "BMC Control-M Self Service is arming business users with more control over their IT environment," says Bill Miller, president of mainframe service management for BMC Software. "The lines between IT and business users are being blurred and BMC is seeking to provide a clear vision with easy-to-use tools that empower them to play a leading role in delivering their end product."
Posted January 24, 2011
Application Security, Inc., a provider of database security, risk and compliance solutions, and NEON Enterprise Software, a provider of mainframe solutions, have announced a strategic alliance to deliver enterprise security solutions for monitoring database activity on the mainframe. The "compliance tidal wave" that has been hitting IT is now crashing on the mainframe, Josh Shaul, vice president product management, AppSec, tells 5 Minute Briefing. As open systems have succeeded in becoming "much more locked down," regulators are naturally expanding the breadth of their audits to include mainframes to ensure that proper controls are there as well, he explains. And while it is very hard to hack into mainframe systems, Shaul notes, for authorized users the potential for abuse exists on the mainframe in the same way as it does in distributed systems.
Posted January 24, 2011
Symantec Corp. has introduced two new appliances designed to provide customers with a more flexible delivery model for its data protection, storage management and security solutions. The Symantec FileStore N8300 is a scale-out, clustered network attached storage (NAS) appliance designed to help customers address the business challenges associated with building out cloud storage, managing large volumes of data and controlling the associated storage costs. The NetBackup 5200 appliance series helps customers expand their data protection infrastructure with an all-in-one hardware and software backup solution that integrates deduplication to reduce storage.
Posted January 24, 2011
IBM has announced a new tool feature designed to provide improved data access by simplifying and automating the process of cloning entire IBM IMS subsystems or databases. The IBM IMS Cloning Tool employs storage processor fast-replication facilities to clone IMS systems and refresh databases. IMS Cloning Tool simplifies, automates, and speeds up IMS system cloning and database refresh operations, while at the same time using fewer CPU, I/O, and storage resources than traditional methods by offloading the copy process to the storage processor.
Posted January 24, 2011
Veryant, a COBOL-to-Java vendor, has released vCOBOL Enterprise, a platform to migrate legacy COBOL applications off IBM mainframes. vCOBOL includes an optimized compiler and COBOL-to-Java runtime technology. "vCOBOL software's strong compatibility with legacy COBOL dialects, combined with the ability to natively call COBOL programs directly from Java it enables, makes the technology a natural choice for mainframe modernization initiatives," Dovid Lubin, vice president of technical operations for Veryant, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted January 24, 2011
3X Systems has released version 3.0 of its 500 and Tera Series remote backup appliances, capable of automatically backing up Microsoft Windows-based servers, workstations, and laptops over the internet to a central storage device that delivers data protection and disaster recovery capabilities. The new features in version 3.0 of the appliances provide more flexibility for users, Alan Arman, CEO, 3X, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "You utilize one console to back up your servers, your virtual environment, your laptops in the field, and back up remote offices, all managed under a policy-based back up. That saves administrators quite a bit of time."
Posted January 24, 2011
IBM announced bullish fourth-quarter and 2010 year-end results for software and solutions sales, marking an acceleration in the resurgence from the recent economic slump. The company said its fourth-quarter net income was $5.3 billion, an increase of 9% over $4.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009. Total revenues for the fourth quarter of 2010 were $29 billion, an increase of 7%. Revenues from System z mainframe server products increased 69% compared with the year-ago period. Total delivery of System z computing power, as measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), increased 58%.
Posted January 24, 2011
Application Security, Inc., a provider of database security, risk and compliance (SRC) solutions for the enterprise, and NEON Enterprise Software, a provider of solutions for mainframe customers, have announced a strategic alliance to deliver enterprise SRC solutions for monitoring database activity on the mainframe. The "compliance tidal wave" that has been hitting IT is now crashing on the mainframe, Josh Shaul, vice president product management, AppSec, tells 5 Minute Briefing. As open systems have succeeded in becoming "much more locked down," regulators are naturally expanding the breadth of their audits to include the mainframes to ensure that proper controls are there as well, he explains. And while it is very hard to hack into mainframe systems, Shaul notes, for authorized users the potential for abuse that exists on the mainframe is the same as in distributed systems.
Posted January 18, 2011
Unisys Corporation has added the Security Event and Log Management solution to its Unisys Managed Security Services (MSS) offering. This new solution gives clients enhanced capabilities to identify and deflect potential cybersecurity breaches as they emerge from anywhere in the enterprise IT infrastructure, as well as to create and maintain the detailed audit trails of threats and responses increasingly required by regulatory and industry bodies.
Posted January 12, 2011
UNITE's series of Best of UNITE Conference webcasts continues. Topics of upcoming webcasts include: Using - Really Using - COBOL-85; How to Secure a ClearPath OS 2200 Server,;and An Agile Business Suite User Case Study.
Posted January 12, 2011
Software Diversified Services (SDS), a mainframe tools vendor, announced it has made PGP Corporation's data encryption platform available for IBM z/OS systems. The offering, PGP Command Line for IBM Mainframes, integrates into existing mainframe processes and provides compression and encryption for data at rest, in transmission, and in archival backups, SDS says.
Posted January 10, 2011
At HP Software Universe in Barcelona, HP introduced a new release of its configuration management tool, incorporating a module for policy-based topology and inventory configuration analysis, as well as greater integration with the vendor's discovery and mapping platform. HP's UCMDB-Configuration Manager (UCMDB-CM) is an instant-on module that is part of the UCMDB product delivered with UCMDB 9.10.
Posted January 10, 2011
GT Software, a provider of mainframe integration solutions, announced that the company's flagship product, Ivory Service Architect, has released version 4.3 that adds the REST architecture as a new interface option.
Posted January 10, 2011
Attachmate Corporation says it is now shipping a solution that helps securely connect local and remote users to legacy applications on a variety of host platforms including IBM, HP, Unisys, UNIX and OpenVMS. The new release, Attachmate Reflection for the Web 2008 R3 is designed to help administrators use LDAP and Active Directory services to centrally install, deploy and control access to legacy applications. The new release also provides support for emerging platforms such as Linux on System z, Google Chrome and the latest versions of Java.
Posted January 10, 2011
Luminex Software Inc., a provider of mainframe virtual tape for data deduplication storage systems, announced Luminex Tape Monitor software (LTMON) for mainframe virtual tape systems, part of its family of Channel Gateway mainframe virtual tape products. Luminex also announced its High Availability Grid (HA-Grid) functionality, which provides highly available and redundant mainframe virtual tape storage.
Posted January 10, 2011
Without a doubt, Cloud Computing is the hottest topic in information technology today. Gartner has identified Cloud Computing as the #1 (of 10) strategic technology for 2011. Gartner specifically states "Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private. The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation."
Posted January 10, 2011