Data Center Management Articles
The clouds are rolling in. And, as more organizations move to evaluate and deploy cloud technologies, there are considerations to keep in mind to help avoid being buffeted in the future by winds of change across the IT landscape. Virtualization is a step on the road to the cloud - whether it is a public or private cloud. In order to build a cloud you need to have virtualization underpinning it.
Posted January 01, 2012
Watch this Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) webcast to learn more about KVM as an enterprise-grade solution from industry leaders IBM, Red Hat and thought leader, Gary Chen, IDC analyst. This webcast, originally presented in December 2011, showcases KVM's key capabilities, including record-breaking performance, superior scalability, advanced security, as well as lower cost - companies that have deployed KVM-based solutions saved up to 80% over deploying similar configurations based on proprietary solutions.
Posted January 01, 2012
2011 was another impressive year for Linux, writes Sean Michael Kerner in an article, "Linux in 2011: What a Great Year," at LinuxPlanet.com. Kerner looks back at some of the year's highlights including the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the operating system's founding, as well as new kernels and distributions that advanced the state of Linux, new releases from Red Hat and Ubuntu, and the return of SUSE Linux as its own business unit, separate from Novell.
Posted January 01, 2012
Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0, the first release providing extended high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities for Oracle Solaris 11, is now available. Oracle Solaris Cluster extends Oracle Solaris to provide the HA and DR infrastructure required for deploying mission-critical workloads in private, public and hybrid clouds as well as enterprise data centers.
Posted December 21, 2011
Oracle has introduced a new release of Oracle Tuxedo 11g, an application server for C/C++, COBOL, and dynamic languages. Optimized to run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2, the new release of Oracle Tuxedo 11g provides a dynamic, scale-out solution for low-latency mission-critical applications that require the highest qualities of service. The new release also includes Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for IMS 11g, a new product within the Oracle Tuxedo family that Oracle says will help customers reduce IT costs and increase business agility by simplifying the migration of IBM mainframe IMS applications to open systems.
Posted December 21, 2011
The first calendar year following SAP's acquisition of Sybase is coming to a close. David Jonker, director, product marketing - Data Management & Analytics, Sybase, discusses key product integrations, IT trends that loom large in Sybase's data management strategies, and the emergence of what Sybase describes as DW 2.0. 2011 has been "a foundational year," with effort focused on making Sybase technologies work with SAP and setting the stage for 2012, says Jonker. "We believe 2012 is going to be a big year for us on the database side."
Posted December 21, 2011
IBM has launched what it calls its new Smarter Computing Workload Simulator, an online tool that is designed to provide chief information officers a way to view areas of potential savings and efficiency. The tool is part of IBM's Smarter Computing strategy, intended as a way to help organizations realize greater efficiencies, improved reliability, and better performance at lower costs. The strategy centers around three fundamental aspects: leveraging analytics to exploit vast amounts of data for business goals; utilizing optimized systems that are designed for specific tasks; and managing as much of the IT as possible with cloud-computing technologies.
Posted December 12, 2011
Clerity Solutions, a provider of mainframe modernization solutions, introduced new software designed to help organizations consume and reuse multiple data sources from multiple platforms without having to write new application code. The software, Clerity Transforming Enterprise Applications (TEA), part of the company's IT modernization suite, supports a mix of server environments, including IBM mainframes, Linux, UNIX, and Microsoft Windows-based systems, by exposing business logic to mobile computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and other IT initiatives.
Posted December 12, 2011
HP Enterprise Services announced the HP Social Intelligence Solution, which it says enables clients to exploit human information - social media and unstructured data - to optimize customer experiences, manage brand reputation, empower resources and drive innovation. "Social media channels and mobile technologies have fundamentally changed consumer behavior. People are sharing their opinions and thoughts all the time through many different public channels. As a result, the customer information traditionally collected now represents only a small proportion of what is available," Val Logan, strategy & global practices leader, Enterprise Information Solutions, HP, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted December 12, 2011
IBM announced that 1,067 schools worldwide have signed on to its System z educational program, teaching courses and offering labs in IBM's mainframe technology. The IBM System z Academic Initiative, which now spans 66 countries, enables schools either to use their own mainframe resources or access them at no cost from IBM using innovative cloud computing technologies. Using the System z mainframe, professors in the program are exposing students to the enterprise computing environments that are solving some of the world's most complex and demanding computing challenges.
Posted December 12, 2011
SOA Software, a provider of SOA governance and management products, has rolled out a new version of its repository solution that is designed to automatically discover dependencies across processes, services and schema. Repository Manager Version 6.4 combines these advanced capabilities with support for service and operation-level consumption governance.
Posted December 12, 2011
Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernization solutions, released a cross-platform migration solution intended to enable mainframe PL/I applications to be moved, with minimal changes, from an IBM mainframe to Linux, UNIX or Windows Server platforms. The solution, Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition for PL/I, is intended to help manage the soaring costs companies incur running PL/I applications on IBM mainframes.
Posted December 12, 2011
Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source platform solutions, has introduced an integrated product that provides scale-out storage for unstructured data. The product, Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, is based on technology from Red Hat's recent acquisition of Gluster, a provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions that extends the Red Hat solution portfolio with capability for managing the storage of unstructured data.
Posted December 12, 2011
Platform Computing, a provider of cluster, grid and cloud management software, launched new software for building private and hybrid clouds. The solution, Platform ISF 3.0, includes a feature called Platform Cloud Application Designer, designed for the creation of reusable templates for deploying business applications in the cloud. The product also includes a completely redesigned user interface, automated capabilities for application and service-level management, Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) support and a self-service portal aimed at easing cloud administration for IT and line of business managers.
Posted December 12, 2011
At HP Discover 2011 in Vienna, HP announced new cloud solutions that advance deployment of private, public and hybrid clouds, enabling enterprises, service providers and governments to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. Fundamentally, the solutions are aimed at helping IT organizations move from a technology-centric view to a service-centric view, and how they can deliver the right services to the right customers with the right parameters, costs, flexibility, and service levels at the right time, Frances Guida, manager of HP Cloud Solutions and Infrastructure, Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted December 12, 2011
Aternity Inc., a provider of end user experience management solutions, has announced that Aternity and Unisys Corporation have taken a further step in the collaboration that enables Unisys to integrate Aternity's Frontline Performance Intelligence (FPI) Platform into its managed end-user services solutions. The expanded agreement will enable Unisys to provide tailored options for managed-service solutions based on Aternity's FPI Platform. Through these solutions Unisys can manage performance of applications used by clients' employees.
Posted December 11, 2011
Unisys Corporation has announced Version 2 of its Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution, its flagship cloud solution for clients' and cloud service providers' data centers. The solution incorporates improvements to the core software stack, as well as expanded management, security and infrastructure automation capabilities.
Posted December 11, 2011
Veryant has introduced a new version of vCOBOL Enterprise, which provides an environment for developing and deploying business-critical COBOL applications across Linux, UNIX, and Microsoft Windows systems. With vCOBOL Enterprise 2011 Release 3, organizations that migrate COBOL applications and relational databases, such as IBM DB2, from the mainframe to open systems can now take advantage of a new application migration utility to simplify the transition. In addition, post-migration, vCOBOL now offers companies the choice of accessing relational databases, such as IBM DB2 or Oracle, through JDBC or through the SQLJ convention, which the company says is popular at shops that are heavy Java application users.
Posted December 07, 2011
A new blog on the SHARE website places the focus on the mainframe as a big data workhorse and the reigning alternative to internal (or external) cloud provision. Pedro Pereira, authoring the blog in SHARE's "President's Corner," makes several astute observations including identifying security and availability as unknowns in a cloud environment.
Posted December 06, 2011
Join Oracle and Unisphere for a live webcast to learn more about common practices that are most vulnerable to fraud and error, and the best practices and technologies used by leading vs. laggard organizations to drive the hidden costs out of operations and enforce process controls. Speakers will include Thomas J. Wilson, president, Unisphere Research; Joseph McKendrick, analyst, Unisphere Research; and Stephanie Maziol, director GRC Applications, Oracle.
Posted December 06, 2011
Three columns ago, I started a series of articles pointing out that tough times are a-comin' for the DBA profession due to major disruptive changes in the wider IT world (see "2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It"). In previous columns, I have told you about how our lives will change due to major technological changes caused by things such as Solid State Disks (SSD) and massively multicore CPUs.
Posted December 06, 2011
At the recent CA World conference, CA Technologies announced what it calls its Next-Generation Mainframe Management strategy, intended to leverage mainframe computing power to help businesses compete in a more competitive economy. The new strategy expands on CA's Mainframe 2.0 initiative launched a few years ago, Mark Combs, distinguished senior vice president for CA Technologies Mainframe business, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Enterprise IT environments are changing, and the new Next-Generation Mainframe Management theme is oriented more toward CIOs' current core pain points - the business demand for agility at lower risk and lower cost.
Posted November 28, 2011
nlyte Software, a data center infrastructure management solution (DCIM) provider, today launched what it calls the first DCIM solution to provide large-scale data center project lifecycle management. The new release, nlyte 6.2, is a DCIM project lifecycle management designed to help customers auto-allocate assets, create what-if models for data center projects, automatically convert those models into actionable project plans with associated work orders, and predict the impact those projects have on the availability of power, space, cooling and connectivity. "DCIM needs to become simpler to adopt and use," says Jon Temple, president and CEO of nlyte.
Posted November 28, 2011
F5 Networks, Inc., a systems management tools provider, has announced improved live virtual machine migration capabilities for customers using NetApp unified storage and VMware virtualization solutions. The new solution combines the companies' technologies to help customers migrate live virtual machines between data centers without perceivable disruption to users or applications. Combining F5, NetApp, and VMware technologies, customers can improve the effectiveness of live migrations of virtual machines as well as applications that were not originally designed for distributed deployment.
Posted November 28, 2011
Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernization solutions, has begun shipping a new suite of application testing software intended to help organizations achieve higher levels of quality, flexibility and scalability throughout the software development lifecycle. SilkTest 2011 is designed to run on any terminal-based host system through its integration with Micro Focus Rumba, and supports browser and Rich Internet Applications such as Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flex and Firefox.
Posted November 28, 2011
BMC Software is beefing up its Application Performance Management solution with enhancements designed to accelerate problem detection, isolation and resolution. These new capabilities are intended to enable organizations to improve their ability to proactively detect and quickly isolate root causes of problems. "With this announcement, BMC is advancing application root cause analysis - extending operations teams' ability to perform root cause analysis across all monitored assets," according to Ali Hedayati, vice president of End User Management Application Performance Management for BMC Software.
Posted November 28, 2011
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), a cloud requirements consortium, and The Green Grid (TGG), which promotes resource efficiency in data centers, announced a strategic collaboration in which the two organizations will utilize TGG's IT efficiency metrics, including Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), to align with ODCA's cloud usage model requirements to deliver resource efficient computing for industry solutions. Initial delivery of collaboration work is expected in the first half of 2012.
Posted November 28, 2011
UC4, an IT automation software vendor, announced a partnership with Basis Technologies International (BTI), a provider of add-on solutions that optimize SAP, intended to deliver targeted automation solutions for SAP customers. The joint offering, dubbed "UC4 MDR powered by BTI," will integrate BTI's Mass Data Runtime - an SAP NetWeaver-based solution that delivers data processing improvements - with UC4's ONE Automation platform. The combination of these two products is designed to help accelerate and orchestrate business processes, applications and infrastructure with SAP environments.
Posted November 16, 2011
SAP AG has announced the availability of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) 7.3 running on the SAP HANA platform. SAP HANA can enhance the query performance and provide faster data loads in SAP NetWeaver BW, and help customers significantly reduce the total cost of ownership for customers by simplifying the administration with reduced data layers, according to SAP. The announcement was made at the SAPPHIRE NOW and SAP TechEd co-located event in Madrid.
Posted November 16, 2011
Cleversafe, Inc. has been granted and issued four new patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) related to the vendor's IP portfolio around dispersed storage technology. The technology uses algorithms to divide data into "slices" and disperses them, via secure network connections, to one or more multiple storage nodes on a dsNet system.
Posted November 14, 2011
IBM announced that technology enabling IBM zEnterprise System users to integrate Microsoft Windows applications into the mainframe environment - an industry first - will become available on December 16th. With this new capability, end users with multi-tier applications - for example, Windows applications connected to mainframe data - can be integrated and consolidated on the same system.
Posted November 14, 2011
IBM is offering a new service intended to help businesses secure the exploding number of mobile devices with access to corporate data. The IBM Hosted Mobile Device Security Management service is intended to help organizations protect against data loss and other risks caused by device theft, unauthorized access, malware, spyware, and inappropriate applications. The service will be delivered over the cloud
Posted November 14, 2011
The Ethernet Alliance, a global consortium dedicated to Ethernet advancement, revealed the successful completion of its most recent Data Center Bridging (DCB) interoperability "plugfest," held at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory. The event attracted a broad range of cross-discipline, Ethernet Alliance member companies.
Posted November 14, 2011
ADVA Optical Networking announced the successful qualification of the ADVA FSP 3000 for the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension. The IBM zEnterprise platform, which includes zBX, is the new infrastructure for extending System z qualities of service and management capabilities across a set of integrated, fit-for-purpose POWER7 and IBM System x compute elements. This extension enables applications that require low-latency, high-capacity and secure data transmission links between systems, such as business continuity, disaster recovery and cloud computing.
Posted November 14, 2011
Attachmate Corp. has made updates to two of its flagship products for terminal emulation and web-to-host access. The Attachmate Reflection 2011 R2 family of products is updated Windows-based terminal emulation software that includes strengthened desktop and host security. Attachmate Reflection Suite for X 2011 R2 is designed to enable Windows users to access text and graphics-based applications on UNIX and Linux systems, as well as legacy applications on IBM System z mainframes and System i midranges.
Posted November 14, 2011
Software AG unveiled a process improvement accelerator designed to accelerate business optimization and automation projects based on specific industry requirements or cross-industry topics such as compliance, supply chain management or customer relationship management initiatives.
Posted November 14, 2011
Maintec Technologies Inc., an enterprise service provider, has launched a ‘Mainframe on Demand' service that provides "pay-as-you-go" access to mainframe computing. The service is targeted at technology training companies, development firms and production clients with both short-term and long-term mainframe computing requirements.
Posted November 14, 2011
Compuware Corporation, a technology management vendor, and Dataguise, a provider of enterprise security intelligence solutions, have teamed up to provide a privacy solution to protect employee and customer personally identifiable information. As part of this partnership, Compuware will resell technology from Dataguise Compuware Test Data Solution, branded as DgDiscover for Compuware.
Posted November 14, 2011
SOA Software, a service governance and management tools provider, announced Atmosphere Cloud, a cloud-based version of its Enterprise API Management solution. Combined with the on-premises deployment option that was announced in June, Atmosphere customers can now choose how they want to configure and deploy their API Management environment.
Posted November 14, 2011
EnterpriseDB, a commercial software company supporting the PostgreSQL open source database, has announced the Postgres Plus Connector for Hadoop, which enables massive amounts of data from a Postgres Plus Advanced Server (PPAS) or PostgreSQL database to be accessed, processed and analyzed in a Hadoop cluster. The Postgres Plus Connector for Hadoop enables programmers to process large amounts of SQL-based data using their familiar MapReduce constructs. EnterpriseDB has opened a private Postgres Plus Connector for Hadoop beta program.
Posted November 14, 2011
In this webinar, attendees will learn more about KVM as an enterprise-grade solution from industry leaders IBM, Red Hat and thought leader, Gary Chen, IDC analyst.
Posted November 09, 2011
In what it is described as the largest update to its systems portfolio this year, IBM introduced 55 new and updated server and storage technologies that can help clients gain actionable insights from data, increase IT capacity and deliver new services faster to create profitable business opportunities. The new offerings include affordable business analytics systems, automated tools for implementing security and compliance standards, and starter kits for establishing private clouds.
Posted November 09, 2011
IBM's Watson, which bested Jeopardy!'s two most successful contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, continued its winning streak during a recent exhibition game played against teams of students from Harvard Business School (HBS) and the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Posted November 09, 2011
At the first-ever LinuxCon Europe held in Prague, Czech Republic (co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit and GStreamer Conference), the 3.1 Linux kernel was launched.
Posted November 09, 2011
Choosing the right virtualization foundation is critical whether you are virtualizing for the first time or transitioning to a Cloud computing model. This one-hour webinar will focus on the benefits of virtualization, alternatives, and the value of KVM and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on IBM System x.
Posted November 09, 2011