Data Center Management Articles
HP has announced a new financing offer to help organizations accelerate decision making with SAP In-Memory Appliance software (SAP HANA) running on HP Converged Infrastructure. The financing program from HP includes HP infrastructure and services as well as SAP HANA software licenses.
Posted May 25, 2011
The service management world of today is all about linking business services to the underlying IT infrastructure, creating an effective bridge between the business and technology. In theory, this provides a clear window into the IT environment to increase accountability, productivity and efficiency. Effective service management also provides business context, so IT can take action to avert service-impacting events by understanding business priority. However, current business service management (BSM) does not provide enough guidance about how to manage services proactively and effectively. This issue is now more important than ever, because on the horizon lurks an exciting new arena for service management-virtualization and cloud computing.
Posted May 25, 2011
The Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and X2-8 with the Solaris option began shipping just this month. Now in its third generation, the Database Machine combines all the components to create what the company describes as the best platform for running the Oracle Database. Here, Tim Shetler, vice president of Product Management, Oracle, talks about the performance innovations that differentiate Oracle's offering, how customers are using the system today for business advantage, and also — what's ahead.
Posted May 25, 2011
Informatica Corporation has announced Informatica Cloud Summer 2011, a major new release of its cloud integration service. The Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 release enables universal cloud integration and unified hybrid deployment for both on-premise and cloud deployments. The new release provides ease of use cloud features to enhance the simplicity of learning, deploying, administering, managing and configuring cloud integration, as well as enterprise-class functionality, including fine-grained access controls and delegated administration.
Posted May 25, 2011
LogLogic, an IT data management company supporting log and security management, says it is working with VMware to help ensure that IT data is collected from virtualized infrastructures, to meet the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). To help VMware customers achieve regulatory compliance faster, LogLogic also announced it is awarding its MX-Virtual virtual appliance product to the first 100 VMware vShield and VMware vCenter Server customers who sign up at www.loglogic.com/vmware-offer.
Posted May 16, 2011
Red Hat, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source solutions, announced the launch of JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6, a cloud-ready, highly scalable distributed data cache, which can help ease the load on database servers, reduce response times in applications, and provide additional failure resilience. JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6 is based on the popular JBoss Community project, Infinispan, and will initially be available through an Early Access Program.
Posted May 16, 2011
H&W Computer Systems, Inc., a mainframe software vendor, announced it is shipping a new update to its SYSB-II software, which enables customers to keep mainframe CICS applications online while batch updates VSAM files. Version 6.4 of SYSB-II includes performance enhancements gained from features designed to avoid unnecessary update locking, optimize use of read-ahead buffer space, and take advantage of syncpoint optimization.
Posted May 16, 2011
DataKinetics, a provider of mainframe transaction and performance solutions, announced a solution designed to increase mainframe data capacity and throughput while decreasing data access request time for DB2. The Java to DB2 Optimizer, initially developed by DataKinetics to solve Java to DB2 access issues in the mainframe of a large U.S. bank, helps minimize DB2 processing loads, first by reducing the number of I/Os to DB2 for read-only data, and replacing dynamic SQL queries with stored procedures.
Posted May 16, 2011
IBM announced seven new tape storage and enhanced archiving, deduplication offerings designed to help clients efficiently store and extract intelligence from massive amounts of data. The announcements include a tape library system that provides more than 2.7 exabytes of automated storage.
Posted May 16, 2011
Compuware Corporation, a provider of technology performance solutions, announced that American Express won the $1 million grand prize in its "Mainframe Cost Savings Program." Participants in the program were offered a free cost-savings assessment, which identified current opportunities and provided a roadmap for future operational cost-savings for the mainframe.
Posted May 16, 2011
Gluster, a provider of open source cloud storage solutions, announced the availability of the Gluster Storage Software Appliance, intended to extend the range of commercially supported configurations for Gluster in the private cloud and on-premise data center environments. This new product combines Red Hat CentOS and GlusterFS and can be deployed on any Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) certified host server and its certified storage.
Posted May 16, 2011
Big data provides new opportunities to improve customer care, unearth business insights, control operational costs, and in some cases, enable entirely new business models. By having access to larger and broader data sets, you can improve forecasts and projections for the business. A healthcare organization can conduct longitudinal analysis against years of data for patients treated with coronary attacks in order to improve care and speed time to recovery. A retailer can conduct deeper analysis on buying behavior during recessionary times if they have access to large data sets collected during the last economic downturn. Additionally, organizations across many sectors, such as communications, financial services and utilities, face significant regulatory and legal requirements for retaining and providing fast access to historical data for inquiries, audits and reporting.
Posted May 12, 2011
North American businesses are collectively losing $26.5 billion in revenue each year as a result of slow recovery from IT system downtime, according to a recent study. To protect against unexpected outages, IT organizations attempt to prepare by creating redundant backup systems, duplicating every layer in their existing infrastructure and preparing elaborate disaster recovery processes. This approach is expensive and only partly effective, as demonstrated by the string of notable outages, and can be seen, at best, as a way to minimize downtime. Major social networking companies, such as Google and Facebook, have figured out how to scale ut application stacks rather than scale up vertically.
Posted May 12, 2011
Oracle has announced Sun Ray Software 5.2. The latest release of Oracle's server-hosted desktop software is intended to be simpler to install and configure, and features improved video, audio, smart card, Virtual Private Network (VPN), and network resiliency. Sun Ray Software is part of Oracle's desktop-to-data center virtualization portfolio, enabling customers to virtualize and manage their full software and hardware stack, from applications to disk.
Posted May 12, 2011
Unisys CEO Ed Coleman is planning to attend the upcoming UNITE 2011 Technology Conference and Exhibition. Coleman is scheduled to give a short address at the opening general session prior to the keynote, which will be presented by Ann Thureen, Unisys vice president of engineering and supply chain technology and infrastructure services, and Wayne Carpenter, Unisys vice president of sales, application modernization, and North American technology on Monday, May 23. And, after that session, Coleman will be available in the foyers and on the exhibit floor for attendees to meet with and have informal ad hoc discussions. This year's conference will take place May 22-25 at the Hyatt Regency Orange County in Garden Grove, California.
Posted May 09, 2011
Unisys has announced that the ES7000 Model 7600R G3 Enterprise Server, the new high-end model in ES family of open servers based on the Intel x86 processor architecture, are scheduled to start shipping in June 2011.
Posted May 09, 2011
The Unisys Stealth Solution for Networks has achieved EAL-4+ certification from the National Security Agency (NSA) as a secure solution for protection of data-in-motion across any network, whether private or public, qualifying Stealth to protect U.S. Defense Department data classified up to the "secret" level. The patent-pending Unisys Stealth Solution uses advanced data encryption to secure data on shared networks. Using the Unisys Stealth Solution, organizations can create defined communities of interest within a shared network and segregate data access so that one group of users cannot see or access another's data.
Posted May 09, 2011
The Unisys Data Center Transformation Technology Talk webinar series continues this month, featuring an update on Unisys' latest Data Center Transformation and Cloud services and solution offerings to better assist customers in aligning their IT infrastructure more successfully with their business goals. Unisys is highlighting a different storage service and solution topic each month in addition to regular updates on DCT services and ES server technology solutions.
Posted May 09, 2011
BMC Software has acquired Coradiant Inc., an end-user experience and web application performance monitoring technology vendor. According to BMC, the acquisition enhances its ability to offer businesses a complete view of service performance - from end-user experience and behavior to infrastructure. The new BMC End User Experience Management solution based on Coradiant's technology enables business and IT service managers to see and understand how application performance affects end-user behavior and ultimately the business by providing complete visibility into real-time, end-to-end performance of enterprise, cloud and SaaS-based applications. By monitoring the end user's experience, organizations can protect revenue, enhance productivity and ensure operational stability for their business-critical applications.
Posted May 03, 2011
IBM announced it had a stellar first quarter for this year, and that mainframe systems sales were through the roof. Overall, IBM's first-quarter net income was up 10% over the year before, up from $2.6 million to $2.9 billion. Total revenue for the first quarter of 2011 of $24.6 billion increased 8% from the first quarter of 2010. The company also reported that revenue from its systems and technology segment totaled $4 billion for the quarter, up 19% from the same quarter a year ago. Leading the way was revenue from System z mainframe server products, which increased 41% compared with the year-ago period.
Posted May 02, 2011
CA Technologies has announced a month-long virtual tradeshow designed to help IT professionals discover new ways to leverage mainframes to meet key business challenges. Called May Mainframe Madness (MMM) 2011 the event leverages cloud technology to deliver educational presentations, and offers networking on a wide range of topics with subject matter experts, including CA Technologies staff, analysts and customers.
Posted May 02, 2011
Cleversafe Inc. has announced that it has been issued five patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, helping the company build its portfolio around information dispersal. In addition, the company has two allowed patent applications, and, as of April 11, 2011, 65 published pending U.S. patent applications. The company also has more than one dozen foreign pending patent applications, and continues to file more U.S. and foreign patent applications. The capabilities that these patents represent are the foundation techniques that are required to build and deploy large scale storage systems, Chris Gladwin, president and CEO of Cleversafe, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 02, 2011
Data center vendors NetApp and MeriTalk have released a new report which provides a status update on federal data center consolidation progress to comply with the Office of Management and Budget's deadline for federal agencies to eliminate 800 data centers by 2015. Based on a survey of 152 Federal IT decision makers, the report states that about half (47%) of federal agencies have consolidated some of their data centers. However, they lack a consistent definition of what a data center compromises, Mark Weber, NetApp president of U.S. public sector, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Clearly, there is action happening and people are reducing data center counts, he says. "That is pretty big news. The big key message is being received and people are starting to monitor, measure and capture results on their efforts."
Posted May 02, 2011
Novell announced the expansion of its Long Term Service Pack Support (LTSS) program for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, lengthening customers' access to the company's Linux support for each service pack release. For the first time, long term support is also provided globally for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z. Novell further announced the immediate availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 4 (SP4), bundling all previously released patches, fixes and updates for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, while supporting the newest hardware, storage systems and networking devices, including Intel's latest Xeon E7 processor family and AMD's latest Opteron processors.
Posted May 02, 2011
A recent study conducted among members of SHARE and readers of Database Trends and Applications finds that plans for hiring of new IT professionals are strong, reflecting a bounce-back from the recent recession. A majority of the 376 IT employers surveyed, however, express concerned about the caliber and capabilities of today's IT college graduates. This not only relates to new types of skill sets such as business intelligence and analytics, but also to longstanding foundational skills such as mainframe administration and programming. In addition, many employers find the technical graduates they recruit are severely lacking in core business skills.
Posted May 02, 2011
Sepaton, Inc., a provider of disk-based data protection platforms, announced that it will extend its V6 data protection platform by enhancing its OpenStorage solutions for the latest version of NetBackup 7 by now supporting auto image replication. The Symantec OpenStorage technology allows Sepaton to deliver a tightly integrated solution with NetBackup. This integration enables enterprise IT organizations to eliminate administrative and operational complexity as data protection is consolidated into a single, integrated process across the entire infrastructure.
Posted May 02, 2011
Representing a continuation of a long-running partnership between the two companies, IBM and Sybase have introduced a new workload-optimized server appliance aimed at financial institutions, mobile operators and enterprises called the IBM mCommerce Appliance Solution. The hardware and software appliance features IBM POWER7-based Power 750 servers running IBM DB2 information management software and IBM WebSphere software application server, IBM System Storage DS5300 and the Sybase mCommerce 365 solution. Specifically, the appliance is targeted at financial institutions and mobile operators but it is not limited to those customers or verticals, Charlie Chen, vice president of platform alliances, Sybase, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 29, 2011
Sybase has announced that the Call for Papers is now open. TechWave 2011 will be co-located with SAP TechEd, September 12-16 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. TechWave will continue to deliver training on Sybase products, as well as keynote sessions, exhibits, special event and other networking functions.
Posted April 29, 2011
Oracle has announced the latest release of Oracle Real User Experience Insight, an update to Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g's Application Performance Management capabilities. The release provides integration between Oracle Real User Experience Insight and the Business Transaction Management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, enabling customers to achieve better insight into end-user satisfaction and transaction fulfillment.
Posted April 21, 2011
Clerity Solutions, a provider of mainframe migration, modernization and optimization solutions, announced that it has certified its UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software to work with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud engineered systems. Explaining Clerity's motivation for certifying with Oracle Exalogic and Exadata, Wendy Williams, director of marketing, Clerity, tells 5 Minute Briefing, "We are starting to see a greater interest in cloud-based initiatives from our customers. They are looking for ways not only to move their file-sharing and basic applications to the cloud but they are also starting to talk about how they can move some of their critical business-imperative applications to the cloud as well."
Posted April 21, 2011
Oracle has announced that the latest release of its distributed in-memory data grid product, Oracle Coherence 3.7, is now available. The new release simplifies the configuration and management of large scale deployments and offers customers more storage capabilities and dynamic load balancing of client connections. In total, the 3.7 release includes almost 500 improvements over the 3.6 release which came out last July, Cameron Purdy, vice president of development, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 21, 2011
Quest Software has unveiled Quest Backup Reporter for Oracle, a new desktop solution that offers DBAs a dashboard view of all of the Oracle backups across the enterprise that they are managing and also provides drill-down views into a single database for more detailed reporting. In addition to simplifying and cutting the time needed to report on the status of Oracle backups, the new solution is also aimed at reducing the risk associated with failed or poorly performing backups.
Posted April 21, 2011
Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) met with Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) president Mark C. Clark during last week's COLLABORATE 11 conference in Orlando, Florida. Now, more than 2 years following the financial meltdown of late 2008, it is clear that more users are again out attending COLLABORATE. "We have gone through a period of very tight IT budgets, a 2-to-4 year phase of maintenance. Everybody I am talking to is looking at opportunities to do projects this year. And if they aren't doing it this year, they are planning for it next year," said Clark, commenting on the renewed enthusiasm for attending the conference.
Posted April 19, 2011
BMC Software has announced database management solutions to help customers exploit the cost savings advantages enabled by DB2 10 for z/OS. Customers are moving more aggressively to DB2 10 than BMC has seen in the past when new versions of DB2 have been released, Robin Reddick, director, MSM Solutions Marketing at BMC Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The primary motivation that BMC is hearing from its customers is that they can achieve cost savings with the new release. According to Reddick, about 50% of BMC's customers say they will have moved to DB2 10 within 18 months of the release of the latest version, and about 25% say that they are going to skip version 9 and go right from version 8 to version 10.
Posted April 18, 2011
CA Technologies announced a new version of its service catalog that integrates with CA Virtual Automation and CA Oblicore Guarantee, designed to enable the automatic provisioning of physical, virtual and cloud services based on the cost and performance criteria of the service request. With these new additions, companies can now employ use CA Service Catalog 12.6 to enable private and hybrid cloud provisioning, service automation, user self-service, IT costing/financial management, and provisioning role-based security. This single point of contact, says CA, is intended to support a customer's journey to an increasingly virtualized service environment. CA Service Catalog also bridges the gap between current IT operations and the challenge of moving existing services to private clouds.
Posted April 18, 2011
HP says it is adding seven new offerings intended to expand its Application Transformation solution portfolio, targeted at enterprises seeking to better assess, modernize and manage their applications. The purpose of these products is to enable enterprises to understand their application portfolios and decide what to keep, change or retire.
Posted April 18, 2011
IBM announced two new services for companies moving enterprise business processes into production cloud environments. They are IBM SmartCloud, an enterprise cloud technologies and services offering for private, public and hybrid clouds, and IBM Workload Deployer, a single platform designed to enable companies to provision middleware and application components to run web workloads in the cloud.
Posted April 18, 2011
IBM announced a suite of new software and services aimed at helping organizations transform their business processes. IBM's new unified Business Process Management (BPM) platform, IBM Business Process Manager, is intended to provide companies greater visibility into business operations so they can model, automate, monitor and adjust plans instantly. IBM also announced it is launching a global consulting and services delivery organization for business process improvement. The new services will be delivered via a new methodology, called the IBM Method for Business Process Optimization.
Posted April 18, 2011
HP has updated its Information Management portfolio to enable organizations to reduce risk, increase efficiency and simplify the way they manage their business information. By bringing a holistic approach to information management, HP says the solutions and services will help executives harness the power of their information to make better decisions, manage for cost and compliance, and deliver the right information to the right users at the right time.
Posted April 12, 2011
HiT Software, Inc., a BackOffice Associates, LLC company and provider of data management products, has released HiT ODBC/DB2 v6.2 and HiT OLE DB/DB2 v4.2, the newest versions of its high-performance connectivity products specifically for application access to IBM DB2 for z/OS and IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, Windows (LUW) databases.
Posted April 12, 2011
Unisys has announced its Unisys Hybrid Enterprise framework, a comprehensive methodology and set of services for helping organizations manage multiple IT delivery models - both traditional and cloud-based - within a consistent computing environment managed as a single entity.
Posted April 11, 2011
Dynamic Solutions International (DSI) and B&L Associates have partnered to offer a fully integrated solution including the DSI9000 Virtual Tape Library family of solutions with B&L's data center operations automation and management products, enabling a single point control of the automated VTL environment. This partnership provides current B&L users with a solution for virtual tape which improves reliability, performance and functionality over physical tape libraries. According to the vendors, the combined software and VTL results in a best-of-breed package for the MCP market space.
Posted April 11, 2011
With the annual Oracle users conference COLLABORATE about to begin, Andy Flower, president of the IOUG, spoke with 5 Minute Briefing about the IOUG's strong areas of focus in terms of overall conference content, and how the addition of the MySQL user base into the Oracle community is evolving. Citing a MySQL keynote, 75 sessions at COLLABORATE focused on MySQL, and a new MySQL Council headed by Sarah Novotny, Flower says the IOUG is making strides in giving voice to the MySQL community within the IOUG and setting a stage for positive interaction with Oracle.
Posted April 06, 2011
Three new Oracle Validated Configurations are now available to speed the deployment of solutions based on Oracle Linux with Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. The three new configurations consist of Oracle Linux 5 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage 7420 appliance. The configurations also include one of the following: Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 server, an 8-socket rackmount x86 system, with QLogic FC HBAs; Oracle's Sun Fire X4470 server, a 4-socket rackmount system; or Oracle's Sun Fire X4270 M2 server, a 2-socket rackmount system.
Posted April 06, 2011
On the surface, the idea of using a single source integrator to implement SAP's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software seems ideal. The appeal lies in the potential to make an incredibly complex project appear simple. The single source model promises the ease of having only one vendor to pay, only one team to work with and a single source of accountability should things go wrong. Yet what works in theory doesn't always bear out in real world applications.
Posted April 05, 2011
Submit your intent to present at SHARE in Orlando, August 7 - 12, 2011 in Orlando, Florida, the premier event for the enterprise IT community.
Posted April 04, 2011
OpenTech Systems, Inc., a provider of z/OS tape data migration software and services, tape-based data center relocation/consolidation software and services, and tape-based disaster recovery software, has added several advanced data set recovery features to its DASD Backup Supervisor (DBS) product. The newly released version of DBS now fully supports the recovery of one or more individual data sets from DFDSS (logical or physical) or FDR full volume backups including VSAM data sets.
Posted April 04, 2011
Phoenix Software International has released zHISR, a new product that uses data created by z/OS Hardware Instrumentation Services (HIS) on IBM System z10 or zEnterprise mainframe processors to produce hotspot analysis reports, which can be used to help tune applications by locating the specific sections of code that are the biggest CPU consumers. zHISR helps users pinpoint problem spots and make targeted improvements, Amy Gilbert, marketing manager at Phoenix, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Phoenix plans to market the new product to software developers, performance analysts, and system programmers.
Posted April 04, 2011