Data Center Management Articles
In this paper, ITIC examines IBM's PowerLinux strategy and delivers a verdict. It concludes that PowerLinux offers current and prospective IBM customers high performance and reliability for physical and virtualized environments at an extremely aggressive price point, and that it's the right solution at the right time to disrupt the market's inertia towards "good enough" computing.
Posted August 24, 2012
Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) member company Abyres has successfully transitioned several Malaysian government agencies to open virtualization environments running Microsoft Windows applications powered by KVM. As a result, the agencies have a cost-effective, user-friendly platform that is easy to manage and maximizes utilization, reliability and availability of the high-performance virtual machines Abyres delivers.
Posted August 24, 2012
The Red Hat EMEA Partner Road Tour 2012 will take place between September and November 2012 in various cities across Europe. IBM is a platinum sponsor of the event which is designed for business partners, distributors, resellers, solution providers, global and local system integrators, as well as for independent software vendors, who have an interest in solutions around virtualization, infrastructure, cloud, middleware, and storage. In addition, the Red Hat Asia Pacific Partner Conference is an annual event at which partners across Asia Pacific gather to learn about the latest and greatest from Red Hat and its alliance partners, as well as gain insight about the direction and strategy moving forward.
Posted August 24, 2012
SUSECon is the first annual global conference for SUSE customers, partners and community enthusiasts, enabling SUSE users to learn about the latest developments in enterprise-class Linux. SUSECon will be held from September 18-21, 2012 in the Grand Caribe Convention Center at the Caribe Royale Hotel in Orlando, Florida.
Posted August 24, 2012
This year's OpenSUSE conference will take place at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The campus is located in the district Dejvice and is next to an underground station that gets you directly to the historic city center. The conference will run from October 20 through October 23. More information is available from the openSUSE Conference website.
Posted August 24, 2012
Shelter Mutual Insurance Co., an insurance company with a presence in 14 states, was facing out of control server sprawl and difficulties with air flow and rack space, writes Jim Utsler in the August issue of IBM Systems Magazine. To deal with the problem, Shelter opted to move many of its applications to IFL processors running on its mainframe, slowing the growth rate of the existing Intel technology-based boxes. As an added bonus, the company's applications are now running faster on its zEnterprise 114 (z114) platform than they had in the past, notes Utsler.
Posted August 24, 2012
IBM is seeing growing momentum of IBM PureSystems among global clients and business partners, as organizations increasingly look for ways to reduce IT complexity and overcome the worldwide skills shortage. According to industry experts, approximately three-quarters of global employers cite a lack of experience, skills or knowledge as the primary reason for the difficulty filling IT positions. As a result, organizations are searching for new computing models that don't require a significant commitment of resources or employee training to set up and maintain. IBM PureSystems is addressing this issue by providing patterns of expertise - a new technology model that builds on the experience of thousands of IBM clients and streamlines the set-up and management of hardware and software resources.
Posted August 24, 2012
As we enter into the next chapter of x86 virtualization, KVM is poised to redefine the market with superior performance and an impressive ROI via commercial implementations such as Red Hat's RHEV3. The key to the success of RHEV3 lies within its manageability, which includes proper instrumentation and monitoring of the entire infrastructure within dynamic and converged infrastructures. Zenoss and the Open Virtualization Alliance invite you to explore this topic further during a live webinar on Wednesday, August 29, at 2 pm ET.
Posted August 24, 2012
In a new blog, Ian Robinson, virtualization product line manager, IBM Systems Software, STG, writes about the complexity that comes with the managing physical and virtualized servers, and the increasing need to manage more than one hypervisor. That's where IBM Systems Director with VMControl comes in, he says. "Generally, when we think about new technology we tend to focus on all the advantages it adds. And, in the case of server virtualization - a technology that has been strongly embraced over the past decade as it expanded beyond the mainframe into the realm of x86 servers - the advantages are many. Virtualization is being widely embraced in the enterprise because it enables greater utilization of an existing infrastructure, flexibility in terms of reallocating resources when they are needed and where, and not incidentally, significant cost savings due to a smaller physical footprint, energy efficiency and the ability to avoid or postpone new hardware purchases."
Posted August 24, 2012
LinuxCon is the leading annual technical conference in North America. Launched in 2009, LinuxCon has become known for offering top speaking talent, a cross-section of the leading players in the Linux community, innovative and timely content, a wide variety of opportunities for attendee collaboration and a place for smaller groups to co-locate for topic-specific mini-summits and workgroups. Co-located with CloudOpen, the Linux Kernel Summit and the Linux Plumbers Conference, LinuxCon North America 2012 will take place August 29-31 at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego.
Posted August 24, 2012
Mike Day, distinguished engineer and chief virtualization architect, Open Systems Development, IBM, dispels some persistent myths about KVM in his new blog. "KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is gaining traction in the enterprise as a virtualization solution that provides high performance, scalability, and cost efficiency," writes Day. "But misconceptions still abound about this open source hypervisor. Some falsehoods continue to be perpetuated by organizations offering competing products, and others because KVM is maturing quickly and the up-to-date, correct information is not yet widely known. Here, we tackle some of the most persistent myths about KVM - because it's time to set the record straight."
Posted August 24, 2012
The oVirt Project develops and distributes an open source virtualization management platform that combines the KVM hypervisor with advanced capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduling, and more. As part of its community's efforts to provide education about oVirt and to bring more contributors into the fold, oVirt is hosting workshops at LinuxCon North America and LinuxCon Europe. Interested parties are invited to attend these workshops free of charge, and all workshop participants are eligible for a $200 discount on their LinuxCon registration courtesy of The Linux Foundation.
Posted August 24, 2012
TransLattice, a provider of distributed databases and application platforms for enterprise, cloud and hybrid environments, has released TransLattice Elastic Database (TED), which the company describes as the world's first geographically distributed relational database management system (RDBMS). A single database can run on multiple TransLattice nodes around the world, allowing for greater data availability, performance, and scalability at a lower cost than traditional databases. "Since we have the ability to pre-position the data close to end users and have a node that's operating on their behalf in distributed queries, we can offer a much higher level of user experience than conventional systems," Michael Lyle, CTO of TransLattice, explains to DBTA. Additionally, TED makes it easier for global enterprises to comply with data jurisdiction policy requirements.
Posted August 23, 2012
Quest Software has announced that vRanger 6.0, the latest version of its virtual data protection solution which provides backup, replication, and recovery for VMware, now also enables customers to back up and restore physical Windows servers. Providing a single source of protection for both virtual and physical environments, vRanger 6.0 is VMware Ready certified for vSphere 5, provides OS support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and also will support Windows Server 2012 upon its release to market. "We feel that we can reduce the complexity and reduce the number of tools used in a Windows environment that is using VMware," Greg Davoll, senior director, product marketing, data protection business, at Quest, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted August 21, 2012
VMware, Inc., a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure, says it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nicira, Inc., a network virtualization vendor. VMware will acquire Nicira for approximately $1.05 billion in cash plus approximately $210 million of assumed unvested equity awards. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The parties expect the acquisition to close during the second half of 2012, according to VMware. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both VMware and Nicira and the stockholders of Nicira.
Posted August 20, 2012
Symantec has introduced Veritas Operations Manager 5.0 and Veritas Operations Manager Advanced 5.0. Veritas Operations Manager provides a centralized management console that bridges the gap across servers and storage and enables organizations to get end to end visibility not just from the application to the storage spindles themselves but also in a heterogeneous environment, Don Angspatt, vice president of product management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec Corp., tells 5 Minute Briefing. The Advanced version is an add-on offering that provides additional capabilities for reporting, enables an enterprise-wide multi-site view, and also allows users to verify utilization for network attached storage as well.
Posted August 20, 2012
Nastel Technologies, a provider of application performance monitoring solutions for mission-critical applications, announced the release of a free tool for isolating faults in and measuring baseline performance of applications based on IBM's WebSphere MQ (WMQ). Nastel's MQSonar, available as a free download, can generate particularly valuable insight for enterprises using home-grown monitoring and management applications for WebSphere MQ.
Posted August 20, 2012
IBM announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Texas Memory Systems (TMS), a developer of high-performance flash memory solutions. TMS is a privately held company based in Houston, Texas. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Posted August 20, 2012
UC4, a provider of IT process automation software, says private equity firm EQT VI has agreed to purchase the company from global asset manager The Carlyle Group. Carlyle Europe Technology Partners I, L.P. originally acquired UC4 in March 2006.
Posted August 20, 2012
STORServer, a provider of data backup solutions for the mid-market, has announced the availability of version 4.5 of its Archive Backup Client for OpenVMS, which enables users to include their OpenVMS servers in their heterogeneous IBM Tivoli Storage Manager backup solution. The updates to the backup software include a major enhancement to file backup speed and performance when backing up large numbers of files in a single directory. According to the company, it has verified backup performance improvements of nearly 30 times the throughput of the previous implementation.
Posted August 20, 2012
Whether you attended SHARE in Anaheim last week or not, most of us in enterprise IT can relate to Jason Dorsey's keynote "Crossing the Generational Divide: Leveraging the Power of Generations™ for Your Strategic Advantage." Jason is from the Center for Generational Kinetics and kicked off the five day event by sharing strategies and humorous anecdotes on balancing a workforce made up of four generations working side by side. An impromptu poll found that about half of the audience was Baby Boomers, which Jason defines as people born between 1946 and 1964. Gen X - people born between 1965 and 1976 and Gen Y - people born between 1977 and 1995 also had a strong presence. There were also about a dozen Traditionalists - the generation born before 1946 in the audience.
Posted August 20, 2012
Oracle announced a new release of its mainframe rehosting platform, now optimized for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, that it says is capable of delivering up to 8x performance gains for rehosted IBM CICS and IMS applications. The platform is intended to help customers reduce mainframe IT costs by rehosting larger-scale mainframe applications more rapidly and running them more efficiently on traditional Linux or Unix servers, engineered systems, and in enterprise clouds.
Posted August 15, 2012
Oracle has enhanced its Exastack Optimized program with the ability to achieve Oracle Exastack Optimized status for Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. In addition, partners can now test their solutions on the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 through the Oracle Exastack Labs, remotely accessible environments for the purposes of testing and tuning applications on the latest major releases of key Oracle Exastack components. Part of the Oracle Exastack Program, Oracle Exastack Optimized enables independent software vendors (ISVs) and other qualifying members of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) to optimize their applications to run faster and more reliably on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.
Posted August 08, 2012
EMC has introduced a high-end virtual tape library product for large enterprise mainframe environments. The new tape library has two unique enhancements, Jim O'Connor, senior marketing manager for backup and recovery systems at EMC, tells 5 Minute Briefing. It is the first mainframe virtual tape library to provide synchronous replication for the DR site, he says, and in addition, the DLm8000 uses EMC VMAX enterprise storage and supports Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) replication, making it ideal for large, transaction-oriented enterprises such as banks and brokerage houses that have stringent RTOs due to regulatory requirements.
Posted August 06, 2012
Serena Software announced the availability of a new release of its dashboard, designed to provide improved visibility into end-to-end IT process performance and new accessibility on mobile devices. Serena will be exhibiting Serena IT Dashboard at the SHARE Technology Expo at Booth #417.
Posted August 06, 2012
Attachmate Corporation announced the availability of the version 7.1 of Attachmate FileXpress Platform Server for UNIX, part of the Attachmate FileXpress family of products for the managed file transfer (MFT) software market. FileXpress Platform Server is the engine that powers the file transfer infrastructure and enables secure delivery of files of any size across all major platforms, including servers running Unix and Linux operating systems.
Posted August 06, 2012
To help IT organizations deliver better user experiences, BMC Software has created a "chart and compass" to quickly map and navigate the end user experience. BMC End User Experience Management is a solution intended to help IT organizations rapidly diagnose and improve customer satisfaction rates. In the latest release, BMC has extended this solution to include applications running in the cloud, with visibility from the end user all the way back to the code.
Posted August 06, 2012
SHARE in Anaheim kicked off yesterday and will continue through Friday. If you were not able to travel to the event, you can still be a part of the audience with SHARE Live!, the virtual event option. SHARE Live! provides the latest enterprise IT best practices as well as on-demand access to recorded proceedings for six months post-event. SHARE Live! features sessions on a variety of topical areas including the keynote addresses.
Posted August 06, 2012
The winner of the Apple iPad 3 drawn from the pool of 358 data managers and professionals who responded to the 2012 IOUG High Availability Survey has been announced. The winner is Debbie Gollnick, president of Gollnick, Inc. The executive summary of the survey report, "Enterprise Data and the Cost of Downtime: 2012 IOUG Database Availability Survey," is publicly available, and the full survey report is available exclusively to IOUG members.
Posted August 01, 2012
SUSE has announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 2 (SP2) for SAP Applications. Built using the recently updated SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications increases the performance of compute and memory-intensive workloads, including those involving the SAP HANA platform. The operating platform optimized for running SAP solutions also supports the latest hypervisors, helping customers move physical workloads to virtual and cloud environments more quickly and easily.
Posted July 30, 2012