Data Center Management Articles
IBM Enterprise Linux Server (ELS) can help save software licensing costs, while consolidating different kinds of workloads onto a single server, supporting CIOs in their today's budget challenges. ELS also helps to overcome server sprawl, by requiring less physical servers, less floor space, less energy, with increased flexibility due to IBM z/VM virtualization and simplified management based on IBM Wave for z/VM.
Posted September 24, 2014
IBM designed the Enterprise Linux Server from the ground up to add real business value without increasing IT costs. The Enterprise Linux Server's integrated combination of industry leading server and virtualization technologies provide a simple, efficient and trusted infrastructure foundation for businesses with growing Linux workloads.
Posted September 24, 2014
IBM Research and SCA are partnering to create a shared service cloud for the municipalities of New York that is predicted to eliminate 25% of government's IT budget by streamlining applications and connecting siloed municipalities. The IBM mainframe is the platform that New York trusts to host that cloud. In addition to its time-tested scalability, reliability and security, it offers the lowest total cost of ownership — supporting the state as it strives for reduced spending and a smarter, future-ready IT infrastructure.
Posted September 24, 2014
Challenged to do more with less, Dundee City Council identified IT as an area in which it could cut costs. The council consolidated its Oracle Database environment supporting critical services from distributed servers to an IBM zEnterprise BC12 platform, dramatically improving efficiency.
Posted September 24, 2014
IBM Business Partner L3C LLP focuses on three ways to help businesses across the UK increase profitability and reduce costs: consultancy, managed services and complementary IT resources. L3C deployed IBM System z servers running Linux to provide companies of any size — including small, midsized and very large enterprises — with scalable, cost-effective, high-performance cloud services.
Posted September 24, 2014
EVERTEC, Inc., based in Puerto Rico, offers a comprehensive suite of services for core bank processing, cash processing and technology outsourcing. EVERTEC relies on IBM zEnterprise EC12 system running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z to support key financial systems and Oracle databases.
Posted September 24, 2014
A new IBM blog by Adam Jollans, Program Director, Cross-IBM Linux Strategy, IBM explains how new workload demands and greater hardware heterogeneity are placing Linux at the heart of IT innovation. Linux used to be the commodity play, doing the same for less to help improve the bottom line, Jollans notes. But today, more than ever, Linux not only offers a price advantage but is a major force fueling innovation. That is why IBM continues to vigorously support Linux.
Posted September 24, 2014
Mayo Clinic and IBM are planning to use a specially designed version of Watson, the IBM's Linux-powered cognitive computer, to match patients more quickly with appropriate clinical trials. A proof-of-concept phase is currently underway, with the intent to introduce it into clinical use in early 2015.
Posted September 24, 2014
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11, the final minor release of the mature Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Platform, is now available. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11 reiterates Red Hat's commitment to a 10-year product lifecycle for all major Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases and offers a secure, stable, and reliable platform for critical enterprise applications.
Posted September 24, 2014
A new IBM research report provides a performance comparison of virtual machines, specifically KVM, and Linux containers, specifically Docker. As expected, Linux containers offer less overhead than full virtualization with KVM, but the difference is surprisingly small in many cases especially for CPU and memory-intensive workloads.
Posted September 24, 2014
The Linux Foundation is launching a new conference to bring together the world's leading developers in filesystems and storage in the Linux kernel with related projects to collaborate on continued innovation and education in this important space. "Vault" will take place March 11-12, 2015, at the Revere Hotel in Boston, MA
Posted September 24, 2014
Bradmark Technologies has announced a new Readiness Assessment services program to support new and existing SAP database operations looking to grow or scale their IT infrastructure.
Posted September 24, 2014
In what is being heralded as an epic change at Oracle, Larry Ellison, the charismatic CEO of Oracle, is stepping down and will be succeeded by Safra Catz and Mark Hurd who will share the CEO position. Despite the widespread pronouncements that this is the end of an era and that Ellison is relinquishing his membership in the exclusive club of rock-star tech leaders that has included Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates, some industry insiders believe that is simply not the case. Ellison, they say, will remain a force to be reckoned with at Oracle.
Posted September 24, 2014
Whether your business provides big data and analytics to others, or you use big data and analytics to enhance your own products, research and marketing, it is necessary to have a fast, efficient and reliable infrastructure and architecture.
Posted September 24, 2014
Registration is open for the OpenStack Summit, which will be held in Paris, November 3-7.
Posted September 24, 2014
Red Hat Summit brings together thought leaders and executives from across the technology industry to participate in keynotes and sessions on community, innovation, collaboration and customer success. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet with Red Hat product teams, hear from expert users at leading customer and partner companies, get hands-on training and learn best practices and strategies for innovation and success.
Posted September 24, 2014
With sessions that are consistently rated as excellent in the annual attendee survey, and recognized as the highlight of the conference, SUSECon presents content from SUSE employees, customers, partners and other contributors.
Posted September 24, 2014
KVM is an industry leading open source hypervisor that provides an ideal platform for data center virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure, and cloud computing.
Posted September 24, 2014
Although big data promises to dramatically alter the business environment, technology is only a decision enabler.
Posted September 24, 2014
In 2013, Bon Ton Stores invested in upgrading IT, continuing to update and expand its eCommerce sites, and launching a new mobile site supporting delivery of promotions and online purchasing.
Posted September 24, 2014
MapR Technologies has introduced the 4.0.1 version of the MapR Distribution including Hadoop. The latest MapR release expands real-time capabilities for use cases including operational applications, interactive queries and stream processing with new versions of Apache Drill, Apache Spark, and Apache HBase, while leveraging Hadoop 2.4, including YARN.
Posted September 23, 2014
In simpler times, businesses kept their data in one place. That made the data easy to access and control. Today, many large enterprises have a global component to daily business transactions, with customers, partners and employees located around the world. Given the distributed nature of an organization's users and increasing data location regulations, the traditional method of storing data on a central server to support worldwide stakeholders no longer meets business needs.
Posted September 16, 2014
If cars evolved at the rate of IT, they'd get 1 billion miles per gallon by 2020. That's the power of the innovation the mainframe delivers, said IBM's Chief Innovation Officer Bernie Meyerson during his keynote address at SHARE in Pittsburgh.
Posted September 15, 2014
The Attachmate Group has entered into a definitive agreement to merge with Micro Focus. The transaction is expected to close on November 3, 2014.
Posted September 15, 2014
A new solution from BMC Software is designed to help reduce the need for multiple mainframe subsystems. The new software, BMC Subsystem Optimizer for zEnterprise, removes the traditional requirement that DB2, IMS and CICS subsystems must reside on the same logical partition (LPAR) to communicate and process workloads, the vendor said. Overcoming this requirement translates to "significant" mainframe monthly license costs (MLC) savings of up to 20% or more, according to BMC.
Posted September 15, 2014
Trident Services, Inc., a z/OS service provider and software developer, has begun shipping the latest release of its z/OS management product, zOSEM, which adds greater analytic capabilities.
Posted September 15, 2014
On the heels of the announcement of Compuware's planned acquisition by Thoma Bravo LLC, a private-equity company, Compuware says it plans to divide into two separate operating units - one for its mainframe business, and the other for its application performance management business.
Posted September 15, 2014
IBM has developed new M5 servers that are designed to support a wide range of enterprise workloads and computing environments, from infrastructure basics to cloud computing to big data and analytics. The M5 portfolio includes highly configurable models of rack and tower servers, dense systems, blades and integrated systems.
Posted September 15, 2014
IBM's SoftLayer cloud line will offer customers bare metal servers powered by Intel cloud technology, designed to provide monitoring and security down to the microchip level.
Posted September 15, 2014
A new line of PowerEdge servers from Dell, equipped with advancements in storage, processing and memory technology. The Dell PowerEdge 13th generation server portfolio is based on five form-factors across blades, racks and towers.
Posted September 15, 2014
Just as the title states, this presentation shares a case study of a successful implementation of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c.Speaker Kashif Manzoor explains the methods that were used in the implementation to maximize the value of the EM 12c and will share their lessons learned.
Posted September 10, 2014
It's not unusual to have different parts of your data system solving different problems. From utilizing partitioning in a relational database to user-facing in-memory caches to a Lambda architecture, it is important that pieces of the system are the "right tool for the job"; appropriate for the task at hand, and not duplicating the functionality of another piece of the system. While there are technical challenges, the root and the solutions to these challenges is largely non-technical.
Posted September 10, 2014
When should you scale your database? The short answer often is: Don't scale until you have to. It is important to understand—and exhaust—all of your options for improving database performance first. Here is a look at the common options available.
Posted September 10, 2014
When it comes to data analysis, companies often have a long project list with each project having it's own set of specific needs - the net result is a lengthy and growing project backlog. Since the late 1980s, business intelligence (BI) vendors have been attempting to address this backlog through various "ease of use" enhancements. We've seen big improvements with the latest generation of cloud-based BI solutions. But how can companies evaluate which analysis projects will work well with a cloud-based solution?
Posted September 10, 2014
In this month's column, Guy Harrison writes about Docker, an open source project based on Linux containers that is showing rapid adoption. "Unlike virtual machines, Docker containers do not have to include a copy of the guest OS - each Docker container essentially shares the same copy of the underlying OS," explains Harrison. "This allows Docker containers to be much smaller, which, in turn, allows them to be more easily deployed, provides for greater density (more containers per host) and permits faster initialization."
Posted September 10, 2014
Vormetric, Intel, and MongoDB have worked together to integrate and test a combined configuration which they say overcomes the longstanding concern that adoption of encryption technologies might reduce throughput and capacity of a database implementation. With the combined solution set, they say, not only is there no degradation in performance, but performance with encryption greatly exceeds that without encryption. "With Vormetric, MongoDB customers not only gain critical safeguards required for use of sensitive data, but incur no performance penalties due to the additional performance boost available from the optimized Intel hardware encryption, and Vormetric's kernel driver optimization," said Vijay Vijayasankar, VP of Global Channels and Business Development at MongoDB Inc.
Posted September 09, 2014
Continuing its push to help developers create new connected apps for the Internet of Things, Embarcadero has made the latest release of Appmethod available to active subscribers and new Appmethod developers. The release is aimed at helping developers streamline the creation of apps for IoT using a single app development platform and shared C++ codebase. According to Embarcadero, Appmethod September 2014 Release provides a complete software development solution for building natively compiled C++ apps that connect mobile and desktop devices, sensors, gadgets, wearables, cloud services, and data.
Posted September 08, 2014
Moore's Law is coming to an end and silicon alone will not be able to continue to deliver 2x performance gains to address the expanding demands of applications hungry for data, hungry for performance, and hungry for analytics insight. What's needed is a new way to innovate, a new way to continue to drive performance increases.
Posted September 03, 2014
IBM is adding Power Systems Linux services to its Innovation and Client Centers to help accelerate software development to meet the growing global demand for new kinds of applications that take advantage of IBM's POWER8 architecture. The expansion - a more than 10x increase in global reach - provides in-person and online access to Linux on Power Systems application development resources to potentially thousands of additional IBM Business Partners, developers, and clients worldwide in key regions including Brazil, Russia, India, Vietnam, Australia, United Kingdom and Germany.
Posted September 03, 2014
In a new blog post, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin officially welcomed the OpenPOWER Foundation to the Linux community and said The Linux Foundation looks forward to working with the OpenPOWER Foundation to drive open innovation in new ways and in new places.
Posted September 03, 2014
Open source practices have become driving forces within the software industry, but they are still relatively new to hardware, noted The Linux Foundation's Libby Clark in a Linux.com blog.
Posted September 03, 2014
Hitachi and NEC are the newest members of the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), joining Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Rackspace, salesforce.com and VMware. The CII is a project hosted by The Linux Foundation that enables technology companies, industry stakeholders and respected developers to identify and fund critical infrastructure projects that are in need of assistance.
Posted September 03, 2014
At the US Open Tennis Championships going on through Sept. 9 - the United States Tennis Association has all of its technology powered in an IBM cloud, meaning that if demand for services suddenly expands or contracts, the cloud computing system can respond quickly - sometimes in microseconds, writes Jeff Borek, Worldwide Program Director for Cloud Computing at IBM, in a new Forbes.com blog.
Posted September 03, 2014