Data Center Management Articles
Revenues from System z mainframe server products increased 6% for the third quarter of 2013, compared with the year-ago period. Total delivery of System z computing power, as measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), increased 56%. Overall, however, total systems revenues decreased 19%.
Posted October 28, 2013
Red Hat is shipping a new version of its portal technology, JBoss Portal 6.1, with features and capabilities to help enterprises build innovative customer experiences, including integration with Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and enable users to log in using their third-party credentials.
Posted October 28, 2013
MuleSoft, a provider of integration platforms, is offering developer tooling for RAML (RESTful API Modeling Language) as a free service to enable any developer to build REST APIs that foster a standard, design-first approach. The new MuleSoft tooling includes API Designer: a modern, web-based, intuitive development tool that guides users through the API design process with RAML and builds a live, visual representation of an API on the fly.
Posted October 28, 2013
With expanded cloud management solutions that enable IT as a service, VMware is sending a message that it supports not only vSphere but also heterogeneous environments.
Posted October 28, 2013
Modern data centers contain a mix of physical and virtual systems and must be able to provide access to highly distributed collaborative applications as well as support systems that leverage cloud computing. Here are 8 best practices for achieving data center security and an in-depth analysis of the new security concerns presented by next-generation data centers.
Posted October 24, 2013
Software Diversified Services (SDS) is partnering with McAfee to provide support, maintenance, new enhancements, and compliance upgrades for McAfee's E-Business Server, a comprehensive suite of products using industry-standard encryption to automatically protect corporate data within applications, email, file transfers, and transaction processing. As part of the agreement to take over support and development of E-Business Server, SDS says it will assume full and ongoing responsibility for all current and future customer support functions and also deliver a series of customer-requested upgrades and enhancements.
Posted October 14, 2013
Software AG announced cloud-based IT and process management technologies at its recent user conference in San Francisco. Portfolios Live is a cloud-based service that provides CIOs the ability to manage and transform IT landscapes based on budget, regulatory, legal and technical information. A sister product, Process Live, is a cloud-based service integrating social collaboration with process improvement. "We've changed our architecture from client/server to an event-driven architecture," Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost said at the keynote kicking off the conference.
Posted October 14, 2013
CA is offering a free version of its CA Nimsoft Monitor solution to help customers quickly achieve visibility into the health of their IT resources. With this, CA's first "freemium" offering, the company seeks to meet the requirements of emerging, high-growth enterprises, as well as reaching out to the system and admin people rather than the economic buyer, Bill Talbot, director of product marketing for CA's infrastructure management solutions and business unit at CA, said in an interview.
Posted October 14, 2013
IBM announced new systems and solutions intended to help clients and managed service providers build private and hybrid clouds to get the most out of big data, social, and mobile workloads. These include PureSystems, Power Systems, Smarter Storage Systems, System x, and Technical Computing offerings that provide the flexibility clients need to quickly deploy clouds. "IBM is positioned to compete aggressively for public, private and hybrid cloud computing opportunities," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems & Technology Group and Integrated Supply Chain.
Posted October 14, 2013
Veeam Software, a provider of backup, replication and virtualization management solutions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, has introduced Veeam Management Pack (MP) v6.5 for VMware. Veeam MP extends VMware monitoring, management and capacity planning to Microsoft System Center, providing complete visibility of physical and virtual infrastructures and applications, all from one console. The Veeam Management Pack connects the VMware virtual infrastructure and puts that data into Systems Center Operations Manager, and then the presentation is done through what is called the Management Pack, Doug Hazelman, Veeam vice president of product strategy, explained in an interview.
Posted October 14, 2013
Syncsort, a provider of data protection solutions, is shipping a new data management solution that provides a centralized way to catalog and search the NetApp ONTAP and VMware landscape, delivering information that helps IT to increase storage efficiency, accelerate the use of snapshot technology for efficient data protection and ensure compliance. The solution, ECX Enterprise Catalog, provides visibility into file and virtual machine environment across all tiers, helping them achieve a new level of operational efficiency to control costs, identify unprotected data or indicate where protection may have failed due to an errant configuration, change or other issues.
Posted October 14, 2013
Macro 4, a software and services company, introduced an Eclipse interface for its mainframe application performance management software, FreezeFrame. The new interface gives developers and support staff extra features to enhance productivity and collaboration and makes it easier for new or less experienced mainframe support staff to work with z/OS systems. "Our products are designed for the various stages of mainframe application deployment, whether in test or production environments, and they work in an integrated way in Eclipse," noted Michelle Harris, Group Product Release Manager at Macro 4.
Posted October 14, 2013
The mainframe continues to thrive even as new computing trends such as Big Data and cloud take hold. Mainframe experts ponder the perception and future of the mainframe.
Posted October 14, 2013
EMC's CEO and chairman Joe Tucci gave a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 on the transition occurring in IT and the data center of the future. There are four key macro trends driving the transformation in IT, said Tucci. These tremendously disruptive and opportunistic trends include mobility, cloud computing, big data, and social networking. Jeremy Burton, EVP at EMC, cited a recent IOUG-Unisphere Research survey report which showed that the daily DBA activities most on the rise are systems monitoring, performance diagnosis, and managing backup and recovery. Oracle and EMC are integrating their technologies to allow customers to spend less time in the back office so they can devote more time to the front office dealing with more impactful business issues, said Burton.
Posted October 02, 2013
IBM says it will be shipping z/OS Version 2 Release 1 (z/OS V2.1) today, which includes enhanced support for cloud and mobile computing. The new version of z/OS is engineered to help enterprises pursue the innovation to drive highly scalable workloads -- including private clouds and support for mobile and social applications, IBM said. The new operating system also is designed for big data workloads, with a new security infrastructure and an optimized data availability that supports data analytics solutions.
Posted September 30, 2013
Red Hat, a provider of enterprise open source solutions, announced new enhancements and a roadmap for its OpenShift platform, which facilitates the creation, integration and management of applications and business processes in the cloud. The new line of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings include Red Hat JBoss xPaaS services for OpenShift provide enterprise application, integration and business process automation capabilities and services in an extensible open PaaS platform, and is designed to enable development and deployment of enterprise applications and business processes in the cloud.
Posted September 30, 2013
The OpenDaylight Project, a community-led and industry-supported open source framework to advance software-defined networking (SDN), recently provided a first glimpse at the OpenDaylight SDN architecture for the first release called "Hydrogen." "The OpenDaylight community is developing an SDN architecture that supports a wide range of protocols and can rapidly evolve in the direction SDN goes, not based on any one vendor's purposes," explained David Meyer, Technical Steering Committee chair, OpenDaylight Project.
Posted September 30, 2013
ManageEngine, a provider of real-time IT management solutions, is shipping a Large Enterprise Edition of OpManager, its network and data center infrastructure management software. With this release, the vendor hopes to offer an alternative for companies seeking to replace their legacy network management tools from HP, IBM, CA and Microsoft.
Posted September 30, 2013
At LinuxCon 2013, IBM announced plans to invest $1 billion in new Linux and open source technologies for IBM's Power Systems servers. The new pledge recalled the company's announcement in 2000 that it would embrace Linux as strategic to its systems strategy, followed a year later with the promise of $1 billion dedicated to backing the Linux movement. The new investment will fuel two immediate initiatives - a new client center in Europe and a Linux on Power development cloud.
Posted September 30, 2013
Syncsort, a software company specializing in high speed sorting products, data integration and backup software and services, has formed a technology partnership with Cloudera. The joint effort is aimed a providing an approach that customers can leverage to exploit critical mainframe data in Hadoop for big data analytics. "We view Cloudera as enabling a lot of the enterprise-level services that Hadoop needs," said Jorge Lopez, director of product marketing, Syncsort, in an interview. "Together, we can really bridge the gap between the mainframe and Hadoop."
Posted September 30, 2013
We all know that one of cloud computing's most attractive attributes is flexibility, which some people may not associate with the mainframe. But those people are not mainframers. The mainframe actually does provide all the benefits of cloud computing - and the virtualization that provides the cloud's underpinnings. Pedro Pereira explores why the mainframe is a good investment for environments that demand flexibility in the most recent blog post on the SHARE President's Corner.
Posted September 30, 2013
There is no limit to the potential, business- building applications for big data, springing from the capability to provide new, expansive insights never before available to business leaders. However, the new forms of data, along with the speed in which it needs to be processed, requires significant work on the back end, which many organizations may not yet be ready to tackle. IT leaders agree that to make the most of big data, they will need to redouble efforts to consolidate data environments, bring in new solutions, and revisit data retention policies. These are the conclusions of a new survey of 322 data managers and professionals who are members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). The survey was underwritten by Oracle Corp. and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc.
Posted September 26, 2013
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has released a new version of its data replication software intended to address requirements for big data analytics, business intelligence, business continuity and disaster recovery initiatives. Addressing expanding use cases for the solution, Attunity Replicate 3.0, is engineered to provide secure data transfer over long distances such as wide area networks (WANs), the cloud and satellite connections, said Lawrence Schwartz, vice president of marketing at Attunity, in an interview.
Posted September 25, 2013
Oracle has rolled out the new StorageTek T10000D tape drive. With 54% more capacity per cartridge over the previous generation, up to 8.5 TB of native capacity per cartridge and native data rates of 252 MB/sec, Oracle says the StorageTek T10000D tape drive can help customers reduce acquisition costs for data center backup by 35%. Deployed in the Oracle StorageTek SL8500 tape library system, the StorageTek T10000D enables customers to scale in excess of 68 exabytes of capacity under a single point of management.
Posted September 18, 2013
Syncsort, a provider of big data integration solutions, has announced the availability of MFX ZPCopy, a new software product that can offload mainframe copy processing to zIIP engines, and can be licensed separately as an add-on to Syncsort MFX. After looking at mainframe processing from several customers, Syncsort realized that copy-related processing accounts for hundreds of hours of CPU processing time annually and contributes to batch window bottlenecks, inflating software costs and making it more difficult to meet SLA, said Jorge Lopez, director of product marketing at Syncsort, in an interview.
Posted September 17, 2013
BMC Software, a provider of system management software, has introduced a new tool intended to help companies decrease their IBM mainframe software expenses. With its new Cost Analyzer for zEnterprise, BMC says it is able to deliver predictive analytics that can help IT departments plan, report and reduce their mainframe licensing charge by identifying system peaks, and recommending preemptive cost-reduction strategies. BMC Cost Analyzer is targeted at the majority of IBM mainframe customers, who are paying for their core IBM software on a usage basis which is determined by the monthly peak usage over a four-hour average, Jay Lipovich, director of Solutions Marketing, BMC Software, told 5 Minute Briefing in an interview.
Posted September 16, 2013
IBM has introduced an array of new software, system and services offerings to help organizations manage big data projects. The technology is aimed at helping customers increase their confidence in their data, their speed in gaining business value out of their data, and sharpen their skill sets to address big data challenges."We have to hold that data to the same standards, manage it, and govern it appropriately for the enterprise. You can't drop those standards because it is unstructured data," said Nancy Kopp-Hensley, a director in product marketing and strategy for Big Data Systems at IBM, in an interview.
Posted September 16, 2013
IBM introduced a flexible computing platform that it claims will provide three times as many cores as current one-unit rack servers. The NeXtScale System is an addition to IBM's x86 portfolio, designed to run applications with the power of a supercomputer in any data center, via an open architecture that will support options for compute, storage, and graphics processing acceleration.
Posted September 16, 2013
Phoenix Software International announced it will soon be shipping the latest version of its mainframe spool management tool. The new software, (E)JES Version 5, Release 3.0, includes features built to take advantage of the latest release of IBM's z/OS operating system (V5R3), including email notifications and a REST-based API.
Posted September 16, 2013
BDNA, a Data as a Service (DaaS) company, announced its Purchase Order Normalization solution, intended to help change how IT spend is calculated and managed. BDNA's PO Normalization solution provides a view from purchasing to deployment with more accurate and precise data than has been previously available through standard accounting and purchasing systems. Such data can provide better spend analysis, improved business value realization, forward planning, demand management and reduced software audit risk, BDNA says.
Posted September 16, 2013
Oracle has introduced its latest ZFS Storage Appliances, the ZS3 Series, aimed at enabling customers to improve operational efficiencies, reduce data center costs, and increase business application performance.
Posted September 11, 2013
IBM has also completed the acquisition of CSL International, a privately held provider of virtualization management technology for IBM's zEnterprise System. The software will become part of the IBM zEnterprise portfolio in early 2014.
Posted September 03, 2013
SQL Sentry, Inc., the developer of software for Microsoft SQL Server, has introduced v7.5 of SQL Sentry, which provides integrated, visual monitoring and management for the high availability and disaster recovery solution, SQL Server AlwaysOn. The SQL Sentry Monitoring service actively collects data from availability group primaries, secondaries and failover cluster instances as appropriate to present a seamless view of the AlwaysOn environment.
Posted September 03, 2013
Red Hat, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source solutions, announced new initiatives within Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, including the introduction of the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Offering. The move to OpenStack, the open source private cloud infrastructure, represents a new approach to enterprise cloud computing, Andrew Cathrow, senior product manager at Red Hat, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 03, 2013
CiRBA, a provider of automated capacity control software, announced a new administrative console designed to enable organizations to automate new workload routing and capacity reservations processes. The console is designed to integrate with existing job scheduling or workload automation systems, Andrew Hiller, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted September 03, 2013
Software AG announced it is acquiring JackBe Corporation, a provider of real-time visual analytics and intelligence software. Providing rapid deployment and enterprise mashups of different data sources, JackBe will serve as the foundation for Software AG's new webMethods Intelligent Business Operations Platform. The new platform is designed to provide customers with an integrated, real-time awareness of dynamic operations and processes via visualizations.
Posted September 03, 2013
Trend Micro says it is collaborating with VMware to integrate Trend Micro's Deep Security with VMware NSX, the platform for network virtualization. The goal is to provide a security framework for joint customers that increases protection and automates security deployments in virtualized data centers.
Posted September 03, 2013
Building on the momentum of SAP's OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partner base in North America, three OEM partners - AlertEnterprise, Clockwork, and PROS - will offer their customers access to solutions with SAP HANA, a real-time in-memory technology platform. SAP says it has quadrupled the total number of OEM partners licensing SAP HANA in the first 6 months of 2013 compared to the last 6 months of 2012, demonstrating strong partner adoption in North America and globally.
Posted August 31, 2013
IBM announced its new zEnterprise BC12 (zBC12) mainframe, designed for enhanced analytics, cloud, and mobile computing. Priced at $75,000 for the base model, IBM says it is targeting smaller organizations. The computer giant says it is also adding new industry solutions and software and operating systems across its zEnterprise portfolio, designed for financial services and government operations.
Posted August 21, 2013
EMC has announced the next generation of its Disk Library for Mainframe (DLm) systems, designed to deliver twice the scalability of the previous generation, with support for up to 11.4 PB of logical capacity and up to 80% faster performance. EMC's DLm 8100 and DLm 2100 systems are enabled by an enhanced virtual tape engine and eight new Gb/s FICON adapters.
Posted August 19, 2013
GT Software is shipping a new release in its Ivory Suite of products, providing SQL access to CA IDMS, a mainframe database. Ivory Data Hub v5.2.0 is designed to simplify SQL access to mainframe data, simplify problem diagnosis, and extend its integration into IBM's Workload Manager (WLM). SQL access to CA IDMS is important for a number of reasons, Eric Nelson, president of GT Software, told 5 Minute Briefing in an interview.
Posted August 19, 2013
At last week's SHARE conference in Boston, AES announced Clever Mobile for Trace, designed to help administrators diagnose TCP/IP network traffic on mobile devices. Most corporate strategy definitions of a multi-architecture end-to-end environment include mobile phones. Functions available to users of browser interfaces, now must also be available as mobile applications, the company said.
Posted August 19, 2013
Luminex Software, Inc. announced the Luminex Synchronous Tape Matrix (STM) feature for its Mainframe Virtual Tape (MVT) and Channel Gateway X (CGX) solutions. Luminex STM provides multiple data centers in campus or metro regions support for active-active tape operations, with continuous availability and redundancy.
Posted August 19, 2013
Dimension Data, a data center solutions and services provider, is making an optional backup and recovery service available as an add-on to its line of public, private and hosted private cloud offerings. The new service, Cloud Backup, enables organizations to back up files, folders, systems, applications and data to Dimension Data's cloud data centers to ensure business continuity and protection for enterprise workloads.
Posted August 19, 2013
Phoenix Software International plans to soon release an update to the company's mainframe software consumption measurement and analysis tool. The tool, zHISR 2.0, will interface directly with z/OS Hardware Instrumentation Services on IBM System z10 or zEnterprise processors to collect data for hotspot analysis of customer, vendor, or operating system program execution.
Posted August 19, 2013