Data Center Management Articles
HP announced a new offering that enables its partners to provide a branded solution to customers for application performance testing in the cloud. HP's LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud offering is intended to provide an on-demand service model of the cloud to help partner vendors deliver consumption-based performance testing of Web 2.0, AJAX, mobile and other applications to customers. The new offering complements HP's own solutions for performance validation, which span on-premise, software as a service and managed services.
Posted February 21, 2012
CA Technologies is offering new CA ERwin products and releases to help a wider range of users visualize data assets across the enterprise - from on-premise platforms to the cloud. The new solutions include CA ERwin Data Modeler for SQL Azure, ERwin Web Portal, and CA ERwin Data Modeler r8.2. CA ERwin data modeling tools are intended to provide a centralized, common view of business data in context to business and technical users.
Posted February 21, 2012
Compuware Corporation, a technology performance tools provider, is shipping an application performance management (APM) solution for IBM WebSphere Message Broker. The solution, Compuware dynaTrace 4.1, incorporates enhanced user experience management capabilities, and enhances visualization and integrates with Compuware Gomez Real-User Monitoring-Data Center.
Posted February 21, 2012
IBM has made several key enhancements to its XIV Storage System Gen3, including a new solid state drive (SSD) caching option that can increase system performance by up to three times, and a new Apple iPhone app that lets people monitor their XIV storage environment from virtually anywhere.
Posted February 21, 2012
UC4, a provider of IT process automation solutions, announced it is acquiring Ventum Solutions, a software provider specializing in enterprise release management. Application release automation is a key capability for organizations struggling with DevOps, IT as a Service, cloud and big data initiatives.
Posted February 21, 2012
Composite Software has introduced version 6.1 of its Composite Data Virtualization Platform. The new release offers improved caching performance, expanded caching targets, data ship join for Teradata, and Hadoop MapReduce connectivity. Composite 6.1 also provides improvements to the data services development environment with an enhanced data services editor and new publishing options for Representational State Transfer (REST) and Open Data Protocol (OData) data services.
Posted February 17, 2012
Compuware Corporation is making available the 2012 issue of its Application Performance Almanac, which provides 400 pages of in-depth guidance and actionable information on how to leverage application performance management (APM) solutions to help organizations optimize performance across production, test and development environments. The guide should be of interest to anyone concerned about performance in production, test or development, according to Alois Reitbauer, dynaTrace Technology Strategist.
Posted February 17, 2012
Oracle has introduced MySQL Cluster 7.2, which is designed to cost-effectively deliver high availability, high write scalability and low latency for demanding web-based and communications products and services. "The performance and flexibility enhancements in MySQL Cluster 7.2 provide users with a solid foundation for their mission-critical web workloads, blending the best of SQL and NoSQL technologies to reduce risk, cost and complexity," says Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering, Oracle.
Posted February 15, 2012
This year Data Security, Cloud Computing, Big Data and Data Integration and Unstructured Data are key areas that are defining competitiveness and investments in IT. Unisphere Research President, Thomas J. Wilson will outline concerns and new solutions for each of the four data trends, as well as help you assess your organization's priorities for the coming year in SHARE's upcoming webcast.
Posted February 06, 2012
Compuware Corporation has introduced enhanced mainframe products designed to help customers increase developer productivity and improve application performance management. Compuware Workbench, an open framework development environment, now includes easy access to MVS data, an enhanced Xpediter debugging capability, and new performance capabilities. In addition, the vendor's Strobe toolset, a mainframe application performance management solution, now includes greater visibility into application performance data.
Posted February 06, 2012
CiRBA Inc., a provider of data center intelligence software, announced support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 in its latest release of CiRBA Version 7.0. CiRBA's new Control Console is designed to provide IT organizations with greater control within virtual and cloud infrastructures. "CiRBA 7.0 gives unprecedented control over efficiency and risk to organizations deploying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. In a single glance at the console, users can see where attention is required at the VM, host, and cluster level, and CiRBA's new action system provides explicit instructions on what allocations need to change, which workloads need to move and to where, and where new capacity is required," Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted February 06, 2012
Cleversafe, Inc., a storage management vendor, has unveiled a 10-exabyte storage system to meet the growing need to store massive amounts of data being collected in companies. In order to capitalize on the intelligence gained through big data analytics, companies must first find effective options for storing immense volumes of unstructured data. "Internet traffic volumes are increasing at a rate of 32% globally each year. It's not unrealistic to think companies looking to mine that data would need to effectively analyze 80 exabytes of data per month by 2015," says Russ Kennedy, vice president of product strategy, marketing and customer solutions for Cleversafe.
Posted February 06, 2012
Advanced Systems Concepts, a provider of workload automation and job scheduling software, announced a new series of upgrades to its business intelligence and data warehousing automation software. Service Pack 3 for ActiveBatch, now in Version 8.0, offers ActiveBatch support for a range of platforms, including IBM Cognos 8 BI, IBM InfoSphere DataStage, Teradata Integrated Data Warehouse and Data Appliances, and Oracle's PeopleSoft suite of business performance software. The new product support in Service Pack 3 adds to existing ActiveBatch support for BI and data warehousing solutions including Informatica PowerCenter, Netezza, SAP Business Objects and SAP Crystal Reports.
Posted February 06, 2012
CA Technologies is offering a new solution intended to enable IT to provide rapid, predictable and secure provisioning and delivery of cloud infrastructure and critical IT and business services. The product, CA Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock Platforms, is the company's fifth solution certified for use with VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, all of which are based on CA Technologies Unified Automation solutions. Many organizations are evaluating and testing converged private cloud architectures, such as Vblock Platforms, that enable IT resources to be dynamically pooled and shared across multiple physical and virtual computing environments.
Posted February 06, 2012
Attivio, creator of the Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), a unified information access platform, has introduced IT Knowledge Expert. The new solution aims to improve management of IT incidents by providing an aggregated and connected view into all relevant support information. By presenting unstructured content and structured data in one dashboard, IT Knowledge Expert helps to resolve IT incidents faster, reduces cost-per-ticket, number of tickets and service level agreement (SLA) penalties, and also eases the burdens of high employee turnover in the IT support industry.
Posted February 03, 2012
EMC Corporation today announced EMC Isilon scale-out NAS with HDFS, combined with EMC Greenplum HD. The company is also offering services, training and certification, and customer support to provide a seamless user experience and eliminate CIOs' need to integrate products from multiple vendors. "Enterprise IT managers want to take advantage of Hadoop, but they want it delivered at the same level of service that they get from the rest of their IT infrastructure," Brian Cox, senior director of product marketing, EMC Isilon, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted January 31, 2012
Big data and the cloud, two important IT trends, are fueling new deployments of Linux, according to The Linux Foundation. The non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux has just released its latest report on Linux adoption trends, which includes new data about Linux's role in supporting cloud computing, big data and new, greenfield deployments.
Posted January 25, 2012
Red Hat has announced the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, with expanded capabilities for both its server and desktop virtualization management tools and its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, Red Hat provides an open virtualization alternative to customers that offers performance, scalability, security, manageability and cost benefits.
Posted January 25, 2012
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) is organizing its next educational webinar: "Open Virtualization for Open Clouds." The webinar is free and open to any one interested in learning more about KVM.
Posted January 25, 2012
The oVirt project has announced that Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat and SUSE have joined together to help create a new open source community for the development of open virtualization platforms, including virtual management tools to manage the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.
Posted January 25, 2012
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 25, 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 25, 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 25, 2012
IBM had another strong year in 2011, announcing that both revenues and net income for the year were up by 7%. Revenues for 2011 totaled $106.9 billion, compared with $99.9 billion in 2010. Net income rose to $15.9 billion from $14.8 billion the year before.
Posted January 23, 2012
BMC Software introduced an enhanced solution intended to help users more efficiently manage complex and geographically dispersed operations from a consolidated and secure point of control, based on I/O Concepts' ioEnterprise line of mainframe console security, automation and consolidation solutions. BMC closed on the acquisition of I/O Concepts on Dec. 15, 2011.
Posted January 23, 2012
CA Technologies announced a new release of its project management software designed to help improve customers' ability to reduce costs through improved productivity and a simplified user experience; to achieve faster time-to-value from their software investment; and to collaboratively innovate across varied functions within the enterprise.
Posted January 23, 2012
Novell announced the availability of Novell ZENworks Application Virtualization 9, a new release that provides an upgraded approach to "application harvesting" intended to enable enterprise IT staff to tap into a library of trusted resources and find the best stored version to build the necessary virtual application dynamically. By harvesting work that has already been done, IT users can scan a target endpoint and quickly build a set of needed virtual applications, saving time and ensuring quality, the vendor says.
Posted January 23, 2012
Software Diversified Services (SDS) announced an update to its VitalSigns for Network Automation and Control (VNAC) solution (version 3.0), adding panel applications to its replacement for legacy mainframe tools. "VitalSigns Network Control and Automation now allows companies to monitor, control and automate SNA networks with ease, taking advantage of the functions they use most often," says Jim Lampi, vice president of SDS. "We designed it to help companies stretch their network visibility and their budgets."
Posted January 23, 2012
Savvis, a provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, has expanded its application performance management (APM) partnership with Compuware. Savvis joined the Compuware Partner Network in 2009 through an agreement to resell the Gomez SaaS Web performance management solution and offer it as part of its hosting platform to its clients. Savvis has now extended this partnership to include the Gomez on-premises APM product suite.
Posted January 23, 2012
Jaspersoft, a BI software provider, has announced the development of what it describes as the first BI architected for platform-as-a-service, with the planned integration of Jaspersoft BI with Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS. "With Jaspersoft's suite of reporting and analysis capabilities now available on OpenShift, organizations can quickly realize the benefits of the cloud while gaining deep insights from the data that powers these applications," says Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat.
Posted January 17, 2012
The argument that "everyone is doing it and you should too" holds no value for strategic decision-making in IT. Yet critical thinking often goes by the wayside when a hot, new trend catches on and it seems like the masses are following along. Cloud computing is certainly in vogue - most industry analysts are bullish on cloud computing adoption and anticipate enterprise spending to increase - but organizations need to steer clear of falling into the trap that moving to the cloud always delivers cost savings.
Posted January 11, 2012
Along with thousands of IT professionals, I was in the San Francisco Moscone Center main hall last October listening to Larry Ellison's 2011 Oracle Open world keynote. Larry can always be relied upon to give an entertaining presentation, a unique blend of both technology insights and amusingly disparaging remarks about competitors.
Posted January 11, 2012
At the outset of each new year, I devote an edition of my column to review the significant data and database-related events of the previous year. Of course, to meet my deadlines, the column is written before the year is over (this column is being written in November 2011), so please excuse any significant news that may have happened late in December.
Posted January 11, 2012
SHARE's webcast series kicks off 2012 with a new installment aimed at helping you determine how to incorporate data encryption in your enterprise to maximize security. Enterprise Encryption 101 will take place Thursday, January 26 at 10:00 a.m. CST. Led by Philip H. Smith III from Voltage Security, Inc., this webcast will look at the issues and opportunities surrounding encryption technologies.
Posted January 09, 2012
BMC Software announced the availability of the latest release of the BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping solution, which adds collaborative application mapping. According to BMC, application discovery and the mapping of dependencies is critical for succeeding with strategic IT initiatives such as IT service management, data center automation and transformation, cloud computing and virtualization management, service impact management and service costing. With this new capability, BMC aims to help reduce the time, effort and cost of mapping multi-tier applications to the IT infrastructure supporting them, enabling IT to better understand how applications and infrastructure work together to deliver the services that enterprises depend on.
Posted January 09, 2012
Veryant, a COBOL modernization vendor, is shipping three integrated new products, including a package designed to help companies improve productivity and reduce costs as they modernize COBOL legacy applications. The new offerings, Veryant ODBC, isCOBOL File Server, and isCOBOL Graphical Terminal, are new additions to Veryant isCOBOL Evolve (2011 Release 3), a platform for COBOL application development, deployment, maintenance, and modernization.
Posted January 09, 2012
CiRBA Inc., a provider of data center analytics software, has begun shipping CiRBA version 7, which provides a console for visualizing and controlling virtual and cloud infrastructures.
Posted January 09, 2012
IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Green Hat, a software quality and testing solutions vendor for the cloud and other environments. Financial terms were not disclosed. Green Hat, which is jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware, delivers automated testing solutions for complex systems relying on cloud, web services, messaging, service oriented architecture, enterprise service bus, business process management, complex event processing, and SAP
Posted January 09, 2012
IBM has completed the acquisition of Platform Computing, a provider of cluster, grid and cloud management software for distributed computing environments. Financial terms of the acquisition of the Toronto, Ontario-based company were not disclosed. The acquisition was first announced in October 2011.
Posted January 09, 2012
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. 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 January 09, 2012
The European Commission says it has reached a settlement with IBM on its antitrust actions in the mainframe maintenance market. IBM commits to make spare parts and technical information swiftly available, under commercially reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, to independent mainframe maintainers, according to a statement released by the commission.
Posted January 09, 2012
Brocade, a network backbone vendor, says that its latest storage area network (SAN) controllers are now qualified for mainframe environments, enabling enterprises to fully exploit the capabilities of their IBM zEnterprise FICON infrastructures. Brocade's DCX 8510 directors, based on 16 Gbps Fibre Channel SAN technology, are part of its line of FICON-capable directors and switches. Brocade DCX 8510 FICON directors are intended to help organizations leverage the capabilities of System z, particularly IBM zEnterprise 196 (z196) mainframe solutions.
Posted January 09, 2012
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a provider of high-performance solid-state drives for computing devices and systems, and Marvell, an integrated silicon solutions vendor, have unveiled what they call the industry's fastest and most versatile PCI Express (PCIe) storage system. The jointly developed Z-Drive R5 is designed to offer an intelligent, hardware-meets-software managed solution designed to help accelerate database, enterprise, and virtualization applications, the vendors add.
Posted January 09, 2012
IBM has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Green Hat, a provider of software quality and testing solutions for the cloud and other environments. Financial terms were not disclosed. Founded in 1996, Green Hat is jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware. Upon the acquisition close, Green Hat will join IBM's Rational Software business.
Posted January 04, 2012
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3, a C, C++, and Fortran development platform for building fast, scalable enterprise applications for Oracle Solaris systems. According to Oracle, the new release accelerates performance of SPARC T4 and x86-based applications up to 300% by leveraging Oracle's advanced compiler technology.
Posted January 04, 2012
Big data and the cloud, two important IT trends, are fueling new deployments of Linux, according to The Linux Foundation. The non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux has just released its latest report on Linux adoption trends, which includes new data about Linux's role in supporting cloud computing, big data and new, greenfield deployments.
Posted January 01, 2012
Red Hat has announced the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, with expanded capabilities for both its server and desktop virtualization management tools and its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, Red Hat provides an open virtualization alternative to customers that offers performance, scalability, security, manageability and cost benefits.
Posted January 01, 2012
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) is organizing its next educational webinar: "Open Virtualization for Open Clouds." The webinar is free and open to any one interested in learning more about KVM.
Posted January 01, 2012
The oVirt project has announced that Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat and SUSE have joined together to help create a new open source community for the development of open virtualization platforms, including virtual management tools to manage the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.
Posted January 01, 2012
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) has made significant gains in participation since its launch last spring - the group now has more than 240 members and has been further bolstered by the creation of the oVirt Project, writes Alan Radding in a BottomlineIT blog post, "OVA and oVIRT Drive KVM Success."
Posted January 01, 2012