Data Center Management Articles
Companies are scrambling to learn all the various ways they can slice, dice, and mine big data coming in from across the enterprise and across the web. But with the rise of big data — hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data — comes the challenge of where and how all of this information will be stored. For many organizations, current storage systems — disks, tapes, virtual tapes, clouds, inmemory systems — are not ready for the onslaught, industry experts say. There are new methodologies and technologies coming on the scene that may help address this challenge. But one thing is certain: Whether organizations manage their data in their internal data centers, or in the cloud, a lot more storage is going to be needed. As Jared Rosoff, director of customer engagement with 10gen, puts it: "Big data means we need ‘big storage.'"
Posted June 13, 2012
Oracle has announced the Sun ZFS Backup Appliance, an integrated, high performance backup solution for Oracle engineered systems, including the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. According to Oracle, the Sun ZFS Backup Appliance delivers up to 20TB per hour full backup and up to 9.4TB per hour full restore throughputs, the fastest published recovery rates among general purpose storage systems for Oracle engineered systems data protection. Oracle's Sun ZFS Backup Appliance is available in two configurations, High Performance and High Capacity, and comes pre-racked and cabled, helping to eliminate hardware tuning.
Posted June 13, 2012
To help customers optimize the value of their technology investments, Oracle has announced Oracle Platinum Services. The Oracle Platinum Services are available at no charge as part of a standard support contract to customers with either Oracle Exadata X2-2 and X2-8, Oracle Exalogic X2-2, and SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 Servers with Exadata storage, Sun ZFS Storage or Oracle's Pillar Axiom 600 Storage. To access Oracle Platinum Services, customers install a patented, secure monitoring gateway that will allow Oracle to deploy quarterly updates on their behalf. With the new services, Oracle is delivering what it thinks is the highest level of service in the industry, says Larry Abramson, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services.
Posted June 13, 2012
Ravi Pendekanti heads Systems Product Marketing for Oracle on a global basis. He has been in the Systems industry for more than two decades, working in the areas of servers, storage, software and networking. In this article, Exabriefing talks with Pendekanti about the Oracle engineered systems approach - what's been learned and why it works.
Posted June 13, 2012
Centrify Corporation, a provider of security and compliance solutions, announced availability of its Centrify Suite 2012 security and compliance solution for the latest Linux operating systems running on IBM z Series. "Today, Centrify supports more than 375 versions of UNIX and Linux operating systems," Tom Kemp, CEO and co-founder and CEO of Centrify, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 11, 2012
CiRBA announced Version 7.1 of the CiRBA Control Console, enabling IT organizations to optimize capacity decisions, VM placements and resource allocations for AIX-based IBM PowerVM environments. The PowerVM platform has very strong capabilities but it also some complexity over other environments, Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of CiRBA, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "This is exactly the kind of platform that you don't want to take chances with," he notes.
Posted June 11, 2012
HP rolled out enhanced new offerings to increase collaboration between development, testing, infrastructure and operations teams, helping organizations break down IT silos so they can quickly deliver high-quality, applications for hybrid and cloud environments. The updated versions of HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HP Performance Center (PC) enable organizations to improve delivery of applications with new Lab Management Automation and Continuous Application Performance Delivery features.
Posted June 11, 2012
Vision Solutions, a provider of information availability software and services, announced the release of Double-Take 6.0, a solution for application and data protection in virtual, cloud and physical computing environments. Double-Take 6.0 provides affordable real-time asynchronous data replication, enabling rapid recovery from system outages. "Among the driving forces in today's marketplace beyond the need for business continuity and disaster recovery is operational excellence," Doug Piper, vice president of product strategy for Vision, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 11, 2012
Quest Software unveiled NetVault Extended Architecture (XA), a platform unifying its data protection technologies, and enabling organizations to align backup and recovery directly to their service continuity needs. "The changing requirements of the modern business are forcing IT to shift from an infrastructure-centric view of backup and recovery to a services-centric view," says Walter Angerer, senior vice president and general manager of data protection for Quest Software.
Posted June 11, 2012
IBM stepped up its smarter computing initiative with a broad range of performance and efficiency enhancements to its storage and technical computing systems - the engines of big data. As part of its ongoing smarter computing effort, IBM has announced a new strategic approach to designing and managing storage infrastructures with greater automation and intelligence, as well as performance enhancements to several key storage systems and the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center suite. IBM also announced its first offerings that incorporate software from IBM's acquisition of Platform Computing earlier this year. "Enterprises are dealing with data that is increasing exponentially in both size and complexity," said Rod Adkins, senior vice president of IBM Systems & Technology Group. The enhanced systems and storage solutions have the performance, efficiency, and intelligence to handle this big data, he added.
Posted June 11, 2012
Ericom Software, a provider of application access and virtualization solutions, is offering a beta version of AccessNow for Citrix, now part of Ericom's HTML5 RDP client product family. The solution is intended to enable Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop to deliver Windows applications and desktops to any HTML5-compatible browser on any smartphone device, as well as Windows PCs, Linux, and Mac. "This solution fills several gaps in the Citrix environment," Eran Heyman, CEO of Ericom, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 29, 2012
EMC has released the new EMC VMAX Family of enterprise storage arrays, a lineup that offers a range of solutions for organizations of all sizes. The EMC VMAX Family consists of the VMAX 10K, VMAX 20K and the newest member of the family, the VMAX 40K. The VMAX enterprise storage arrays are built upon EMC's Virtual Matrix Architecture, first introduced in April 2009.
Posted May 29, 2012
CA Technologies announced a new version of its IT automation solution that orchestrates IT operational processes across physical, virtual and cloud environments. CA Process Automation 4 is designed with a new user interface, improved integration capabilities, and support for dynamic forms. By making process flows more robust, easier to author and quicker to deploy, CA claims its updated IT automation toolset has enabled customers to improve service delivery, improve the speed for provisioning infrastructure, and reduce the time to spent on application release tasks. "At the end of the day it boils down to one thing: IT can't keep throwing more and more staff at its challenges," Steve DuBravac, senior product marketing manager for CA, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 29, 2012
AccelOps, Inc., a provider of integrated security information and event management (SIEM), and performance and availability monitoring for on-premise and cloud-based data centers, announced that it has added 150 customers and raised $15 million in new funding with USVP, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, leading the round.
Posted May 29, 2012
Compuware Corporation has rolled out a major new release of its integrated application performance management (APM) solution. The Compuware APM Spring 2012 Platform Release includes innovations in four key areas across its dynaTrace and Gomez product brands that help customers optimize the performance and value of their business-critical applications. Compuware's Spring 2012 Release addresses the increasing complexity at the edge; the need for converged network and application performance insight; enterprise APM for cloud and big data applications; and faster time to value.
Posted May 29, 2012
Virtualization is relatively new - but not for the IBM mainframe. In a new blog post, Gregory Lotko, vice president & business line executive, System z IBM Systems & Technology Group, reflects on the heritage and features of the IBM mainframe, including a refrigerator-size, energy-efficient footprint and ability to consolidate large numbers of servers into one: Here at IBM, we often smile when we hear some new buzzword around virtualization. The IBM mainframe has a long history of virtualization. We were doing it before there was a name for it.
Posted May 24, 2012
Red Hat, Inc. and IBM jointly announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with the KVM hypervisor on IBM Systems has been awarded Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+). The Common Criteria is an internationally recognized set of standards used by the federal government and other organizations to assess the security and assurance of technology products. This security certification is the first of its kind for an open source virtualization solution.
Posted May 24, 2012
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) has published a new white paper on the attributes of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that make it a compelling and cost-effective alternative to proprietary virtualization technologies for enterprise-class deployments.
Posted May 24, 2012
What is PowerLinux? In his latest blog post, Scott Handy, vice president, PowerLinux Strategy and Business Development, IBM, writes about the benefits of combining Linux and Power - including strong support for virtualization, performance, scalability, flexibility, support for clouds, efficiency, reliability, security and availability: When we talk about PowerLinux, what we mean is industry-standard Linux available on IBM Power Systems servers.
Posted May 24, 2012
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), which marked its first anniversary on May 17, sponsored a panel discussion at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2012 in San Francisco. The discussion was titled "Virtualization for the 99%: Is KVM Set to Occupy the Data Center?"
Posted May 24, 2012
IBM is the premier sponsor at Red Hat Summit this year. A leading open source technology event, the Red Hat Summit will be held June 26-29 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Robert LeBlanc, IBM senior vice president, will be a keynote speaker, immediately following Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, on opening night of the conference. In addition, IBM executives will present seven sessions at the event focused on Cloud Computing, KVM, IBM PureSystems, System x, PowerLinux, System z and Information Management
Posted May 24, 2012
Join SUSE and IBM for a North American road show, Linux Days, in which SUSE technical experts will present and demonstrate the latest open source technologies from SUSE that benefit a data center. IBM, a premier sponsor of this event, will also participate in the events, showcasing System z, System x and Power solutions. The road show starts this week and continues through the end of June.
Posted May 24, 2012
More than 50% of all software purchased within 5 years will be open source, writes Libby Clark in a blog featured on The Linux Foundation website highlighting the results of a new survey. According to Clark, this year's Linux Foundation survey, "Future of Open Source Survey," which included responses from 740 companies, signals a tipping point in terms of open source technology adoption in the enterprise and non-technical industries, including automotive, healthcare, and finance. In the auto industry, Clark points out, 59% of respondents to The Linux Foundation survey use open source software now, and 35% say they are evaluating it.
Posted May 24, 2012
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), a Linux organization, has announced revisions to its LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 certification exam objectives and subsequent exam question updates. The LPI provides a global framework, industry leadership and other services to enhance, develop and further lifelong professional careers in Linux and open source technologies.
Posted May 24, 2012
Google has announced that Google BigQuery, a web service that lets users do interactive analysis of massive data sets, is now available to the public. Billed as enabling customers to "analyze terabytes of data with just a click of a button," the company says the data is secured, replicated across data centers, and can be easily exported.
Posted May 23, 2012
Oracle has introduced new desktop virtualization software, including new releases of three products. The new product versions are Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.4, Sun Ray Software 5.3 and Oracle Virtual Desktop Client 3.1.The desktop virtualization solutions enable organizations to provision access for employees to personal desktop computing environments, enterprise applications, and data without being tied to a particular physical client device. The benefits of this approach include user mobility, data security, and enhanced centralized administration - key issues for organizations involved in the public sector, healthcare field, financial sector, and call center operations, where centralized control is important for compliance and security reasons, Monika Kumar, senior director, product marketing at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 23, 2012
Unstructured data is on the rise, and ready to engulf current data management systems, a new survey shows. In addition, many corporate managers do not understand the challenge that is looming, and are failing to recognize the significance of unstructured data assets to the business. These are the findings of a newly released survey of 264 data managers and professionals who are subscribers to Database Trends and Applications. The survey was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with MarkLogic earlier this year.
Posted May 23, 2012
Embarcadero Technologies has introduced a new version of its database management and development platform, DB Power Studio XE3, which offers enhancements to further improve the performance and availability of databases. The new release offers increased coverage across database platforms by delivering multiple feature enhancements for each product in the suite, including DB Artisan, Rapid SQL, and DB Optimizer, as well as direct access to Embarcadero's support team. In addition, DBArtisan and Rapid SQL also introduce support for Sybase IQ, which is initially available as a technical preview, Scott Walz, senior director of product management at Embarcardero, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 22, 2012
SAP AG has announced a range of innovations. The announcements put heavy emphasis on SAP HANA, and focus on three main areas, David Jonker, director of product marketing - Data Management & Analytics, SAP, tells 5 Minute Briefing. One is working with customers to accelerate their existing investment in the SAP landscape, a second emphasis is big data and analytics, and the third is around sparking new innovation by working with customers, partners and startups to leverage real-time analytics to rethink how business gets done.
Posted May 22, 2012
Today, at Informatica World in Las Vegas, Informatica, a provider of data integration software, unveiled Informatica 9.5. This new release addresses the big data challenges customers are facing as a result of the explosion of data volumes in the enterprise, fueled by social media, cloud computing, and mobile computing data, Ivan Chong, executive vice president and general manager of Data Quality product division at Informatica, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Describing it as a major release of the Informatica Platform, Chong says Informatica 9.5 includes a wide range of new features to help customers extract more value from their big data assets.
Posted May 15, 2012
Software AG has launched Data Masking for Adabas, a solution created to enable Adabas customers to design and test applications using actual production data that has been altered to ensure the privacy and security of the data itself. "By being able to mask this data they will be able to comply with data protection regulations such as HIPAA and the EU Data Protection Directive and others that basically say you can't put sensitive data out there for people to work with, even in non-production environments," Bruce Beaman, senior director, product marketing, at Software AG, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 14, 2012
At IBM's recent Impact conference in Las Vegas, the company announced new business integration software capabilities designed to help organizations incorporate the collaborative and intelligent capabilities of social media, mobile computing and cloud computing into enterprise applications. The cornerstone of enabling enterprises to embrace these critical technologies is the new version of IBM WebSphere Application Server (v8.5). The latest release now provides companies with support for embedded deployments and, is ready for cloud with built-in virtualization. IBM released two editions - a new developer friendly light-weight web app server for mobile and embedded environments called WAS v8.5-Liberty Profile, and WAS Network Deployment (ND) for traditional enterprise settings.
Posted May 14, 2012
BMC Software, a provider of business service management solutions, announced that its cloud-based offerings have seen record sales. More than 300 enterprises have adopted its cloud-based IT service management solutions. This includes the BMC Remedyforce Service Desk solution, which has doubled its customer base in less than 6 months.
Posted May 14, 2012
IBM and Red Hat, Inc. announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with the KVM hypervisor on IBM Systems has been awarded Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+). The Common Criteria is an internationally recognized set of standards used by the federal government and other organizations to assess the security and assurance of technology products. This security certification is the first of its kind for an open source virtualization solution.
Posted May 14, 2012
Cisco announced its intent to acquire privately held Truviso, Inc. Based in Foster City, Calif., Truviso provides scalable, real-time network data analysis and reporting software. The companies' combined solutions will provide more rapid access and visibility into network use and services, Cisco says.
Posted May 14, 2012