Data Center Management Articles
The Independent Oracle Users Groups (IOUG) has been serving Oracle technologists and professionals for more than 20 years, and we are very pleased with how much the community has grown as well as how much IOUG has accomplished. Having said this, we will not rest on our laurels. There are many great opportunities that lie ahead of us. While we set the bar pretty high in 2014 with the establishment of the content-rich blog #IOUGenius, an increased number of Master Classes offered across the nation and a truly inspirational COLLABORATE 14, you'll be very pleased with what IOUG has in store for 2015.
Posted March 17, 2015
COLLABORATE 15 - Technology and Applications Forum for the Oracle Community (hashtag #C15LV) is back in Las Vegas April 12-16, 2015 at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, offering a wide variety of education and valuable opportunities for collaboration among peers. The more than 1250 planned education sessions in 17 tracks were sourced through the user communities of IOUG, OAUG and Quest and selected through a competitive process. The result is an agenda packed with relevant insights for functional as well as technical users, beginner to advanced.
Posted March 17, 2015
The 55,000+ member Quest International Users Group supports JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Fusion, and many other Oracle edge application customers and offers tons of resources to make your job easier. Here are just a few reasons you should go Quest green at COLLABORATE 15.
Posted March 17, 2015
Violin Memory, Inc., which offers flash storage platform solutions for primary storage and active workloads, is launching a Global Partner Program and a new simplified online portal. The expanded Violin Global Partner Program will establish incentives and business models that will help organizations to achieve success through simplified partner programs, more predictable performance rewards, and tools to deliver consistency in partner engagement.
Posted March 17, 2015
In a recent blog from SHARE, Pam Taylor, senior product manager at IBM, shared her thoughts about the importance of establishing a framework for addressing governance, risk and compliance.
Posted March 16, 2015
BMC has begun shipping new capabilities in its mainframe management suite, aimed at helping IT executives reduce IBM Monthly License Charge (MLC) software costs. BMC Cost Analyzer is designed to help users better manage their mainframe budget and reduce MLC costs by up to 20% through workload placement, the vendor claims.
Posted March 16, 2015
SOA Software, a provider of API Management, service-oriented architecture governance and cloud integration solutions, is changing its name to Akana. "Enterprises today need a ‘digital glue' to securely extend their data to their ecosystem, build efficient partner networks and digital value-chains, and extract intelligent insights into their business through analytics," said Paul Gigg, CEO of Akana. "Akana remains committed to providing innovative and flexible solutions to address the continuously evolving needs of both our customers and the market as a whole."
Posted March 16, 2015
SUSE has introduced the latest version of its OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. Formerly called SUSE Cloud, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 is based on the latest OpenStack release (Juno) and provides increased networking flexibility and improved operational efficiency to simplify private cloud infrastructure management.
Posted March 16, 2015
TeamQuest, a provider of IT capacity planning and management solutions, announced new updates to its flagship software suite, aimed at providing analytics across multi-vendor environments.
Posted March 16, 2015
VMware is offering a new release of VMware Horizon 6, a comprehensive desktop and application virtualization solution for delivering and managing physical desktops and laptops, virtual desktops and applications, and employee-owned PCs. VMware also announced an early access program for its VMware Horizon for Linux virtual desktop solution, with support for Red Hat and Ubuntu-based Linux desktops.
Posted March 13, 2015
It looks like 2015 will be an important year for big data and many other technologies such as HTAP and in-memory computing. Many businesses have gone from investigation to experimentation to actual implementation. With installations coming online, and more to come in 2015 and beyond, big data will become more efficient and more customer-focused. Essentially, what many saw as hype will now turn into real implementations.
Posted March 12, 2015
In information services, providing a solution that removes a user's pain can be a great boost to one's psyche. Being the hero, wins trust, and may even enhance job security. However, organizationally, too many sideline heroics create chaos. The day after the crisis has passed, things are left in a less than wonderful state.
Posted March 12, 2015
One of the trickiest aspects of relational database management can be dealing with missing information. The standard method of representing missing information is to set the "value" to null.
Posted March 12, 2015
Dell has announced a new endpoint security suite to help businesses protect employee devices from malware attacks, secure data and meet compliance requirements. The Dell Data Protection | Endpoint Security Suite (DDP | ESS) provides threat protection, authentication and data encryption with a single management console in an integrated, easy-to-deploy solution. It is available as a stand-alone software offering for both Dell and non-Dell hardware, and as an integrated offering with Dell commercial laptops, desktops and tablets, and is targeted at the mid-market, which Brett Hansen, executive director of end user computing software and mobility at Dell, defined as companies with 100 to 5,000 employees.
Posted March 10, 2015
Ryft has unveiled the Ryft ONE, a commercial 1U platform designed to enable faster business insights by simultaneously analyzing up to 48 terabytes of historical and streaming data at 10 gigabytes/second or faster. The Ryft ONE will be available in early Q2 2015, as a hosted or on-premises solution, and the Ryft Early Access Program is now accepting applications.
Posted March 10, 2015
Percona, which provides MySQL consulting, support, managed services, and training as well as software, will be hosting its MySQL Conference and Expo 2015 in Santa Clara, Calif., April 13-16. Percona will also concurrently be hosting Open Stack Conference and Expo 2015 as well. The MySQL conference is set up differently than many other conferences because it focuses around MySQL as a product, but first and foremost is about the MySQL community, said Peter Zaitsev, co-founder and CEO of Percona.
Posted March 10, 2015
Hadoop distribution provider MapR Technologies has announced the results of testing based on the recently released benchmark for big data technologies from TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council). The recently released TPCx-HS benchmark for big data technologies is a series of tests that compare Hadoop architectures across several dimensions. Cisco is also now reselling the MapR Distribution with Cisco UCS, as part of an agreement that includes marketing, sales and training worldwide.
Posted March 05, 2015
"This acquisition is strategic, synergistic, and will strengthen our leadership in the big data and Hadoop market," said Shimon Alon, Attunity's chairman and CEO, during a conference call this morning discussing his company's purchase of Appfluent, a provider of data usage analytics for big data environments, including data warehousing and Hadoop. "We also expect it to accelerate our revenue growth and to be accretive to earnings." The total purchase price is approximately $18 million, payable in cash and stock, with additional earn-out consideration based on performance milestones.
Posted March 05, 2015
IBM has acquired AlchemyAPI, a Denver-based provider of cognitive computing application program interface (API) services and deep learning technology. The goal IBM says is to improve the development of next generation cognitive computing applications. IBM says the acquisition also expands the Watson ecosystem, with the addition of 40,000 developers to the IBM Watson developer community. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed
Posted March 04, 2015
Oracle says it is addressing two major networking requirements for cloud-enabled data centers with new high performance, low cost 10Gb/40Gb Ethernet switches and the addition of virtual network services to Oracle SDN. The new networking technologies are aimed at providing the flexibility and scalability for both enterprise data centers and network function virtualization infrastructure.
Posted March 04, 2015
To address the growing requirements posed by the proliferation of digital devices and platforms, and the resulting need for online transaction processing to be as efficient as possible, Oracle announced the general availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4. Cluster has had "huge success" in the telco and mobile industry, as well as the mobile gaming industry which similarly finds benefit in its capabilities. As a result, many of the requirements driving the product forward are geared to those workload demands, explained Tomas Ulin, vice president, MySQL engineering, Oracle.
Posted March 04, 2015
Software-defined technologies and software-defined data centers (SDDCs) are generating significant traction in the IT community, and many organizations recognize the potential operational benefits to be had by software-defining their own IT infrastructure. What most do not realize, however, is that SDDC is not achieved by simply bolting together virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), and software-defined storage (SDS).
Posted March 04, 2015
Informatica, a data management company, is collaborating with two major big data players - Capgemini and Pivotal - on a data lake solution. As part of the Business Data Lake ecosystem developed by Capgemini and Pivotal, Informatica will deliver certified technologies for data integration, data quality and master data management (MDM).
Posted March 03, 2015
The call for presentations for SHARE® in Orlando is now open! For its 60th anniversary educational event, SHARE is seeking content in a range of topics, with emphasis on the new z13 IBM mainframe.
Posted March 02, 2015
CA Technologies announced "Day One" support for IBM's z13, allowing customers to take advantage of the z13's advanced mobile, cloud and analytic capabilities. According to CA, the new mainframe delivers a high level of insight through secure management of exponentially growing data volume and an integrated transaction and analytics system.
Posted March 02, 2015
Compuware Corporation and BMC Software, Inc. are partnering to improve the economics of IBM z Systems ownership. By doing so, the two companies hope to help empower customers to reduce mainframe operating expenses, even as they more aggressively leverage their high-value mainframe applications, data and processing capacity.
Posted March 02, 2015
SUSE announced the general availability of a self-managing, self-healing, distributed software-based storage solution for enterprise customers. It is powered by Ceph, a popular open-source distributed storage solution. SUSE Enterprise Storage is designed to help organizations to build storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.
Posted March 02, 2015
Syncsort, a provider of big data and mainframe software, has completed the acquisition of UK-based William Data Systems, a provider of advanced network monitoring and security software products for the IBM z Systems z/OS mainframe platform. According to Syncsort, because the mainframe is a high-volume transactional supercomputer, the networking and security data collected by the William Data product suite is particularly valuable to fast-growing big data and analytical platforms.
Posted March 02, 2015
The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), has announced the members of its 2015 executive committee, which is responsible for the organization's strategic planning process and direction.
Posted March 02, 2015
SAP and the National Hockey League (NHL) have announced a multi-year partnership. To start, SAP and the NHL are focusing on increasing fan engagement and deepening fan loyalty with the newly released statistics platform on NHL.com powered by the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service.
Posted February 25, 2015
SAP has announced the general availability of the SAP Cloud for Planning solution, which simplifies planning processes with a consumer app-like user experience. Built natively on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP Cloud for Planning embeds social collaboration and analytics directly within the context of the planning process so people can plan, analyze and discuss in context rather than having to jump to another application.
Posted February 25, 2015
SAP has announced SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA). The new product is built on the in-memory platform SAP HANA and is designed leveraging the SAP Fiori user experience (UX) for mobile devices. The announcement was made at a launch event at the New York Stock Exchange.
Posted February 25, 2015
The "Internet of Things" (IoT) is opening up a new world of data interchange between devices, sensors, and applications, enabling businesses to monitor, in real time, the health and performance of products long after they leave the production premises. At the same time, enterprises now have access to valuable data—again, in real time if desired—on how customers are adopting products and services.
Posted February 25, 2015
Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) System Release 11.1.2.4, now available from Oracle, incorporates key updates to the entire portfolio of EPM applications that enable organizations to engineer predictable performance, connect the enterprise, and further improve decision-making.
Posted February 18, 2015
Oracle Linux images are now available on the Docker Hub Registry, a repository for Docker-based components, including applications and operating systems. Oracle Linux joins MySQL, which is already on Docker Hub and has been downloaded millions of times. "With Oracle Linux and MySQL images available on the Docker Hub Registry, users will be able to quickly create and publish custom Docker containers that layer applications on top of Oracle Linux and MySQL, which is a great time-saver for both independent software vendors and IT departments," said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle.
Posted February 18, 2015
HP has introduced a new offering called HP Haven Predictive Analytics to accelerate and operationalize large-scale machine learning and statistical analysis.
Posted February 18, 2015
GridGain Systems, provider of open source and commercial in-memory data fabric solutions, is introducing a new release of the GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric Enterprise Edition built on Apache Ignite. Available for download in early in Q2, the new release includes ease-of-use and automation features to help simplify the deployment of the software as well as the migration from legacy in-memory data grids.
Posted February 18, 2015
BMC Software announced plans to acquire assets of CDB Software, Inc., a mainframe data management company that has developed utilities for managing IBM DB2 databases with a minimum of outages. CDB's technology includes software utilities for DB2 administration, maintenance, application tuning, and backup/recovery.
Posted February 17, 2015
StackIQ Inc., a provider of server automation solutions, has released a new version of software offering key new data center automation capabilities. "Boss 5 extends our full stack server automation capabilities to Docker containers as well as enhancing all of our Hadoop and OpenStack solutions," says Tim McIntire, CEO and co-founder of StackIQ Inc.
Posted February 17, 2015
Asset Vue, a provider of RFID-based asset management and data center management solutions, introduced two new solutions into its portfolio of data center IT asset management tools, designed to provide real-time views into enterprise cloud and mobile environments. "These new cloud and mobility options for our data center IT Asset Management solutions offer greater flexibility with a lower cap-ex model for data center managers and IT professionals," said John Consoli, executive vice president for Asset Vue.
Posted February 17, 2015
The OpenDaylight Project, a community-led and industry-supported open source platform to advance Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), announced that CA Technologies, IIX, Megaport, and Spirent have joined the project to support the development of one common and open SDN and NFV platform that can be leveraged by all.
Posted February 17, 2015
Cisco intends to bring more networking solutions under the umbrella of its open Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) approach. The vendor's Nexus 9000 Series switches will support the IETF standard BGP EVPN protocol (Border Gateway Protocol - Ethernet Virtual Private Network) for overlay networks. Overlay networks provide the foundation for scalable multi-tenant cloud networks.
Posted February 17, 2015
Software AG and Wipro Ltd. announced a joint solution platform for streaming analytics that provides real-time actionable intelligence for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) market. The solution, branded as Wipro Looking Glass, is engineered to respond to events in real-time with unlimited scalability.
Posted February 17, 2015
Hadoop heavyweight Pivotal is open sourcing components of its Big Data Suite, including Pivotal HD, HAWQ, Greenplum Database, and GemFire; forming the Open Data Platform (ODP), a new industry foundation along with founding members GE, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosys, SAS, and other big data leaders; and forging a new business and technology partnership with Hortonworks.
Posted February 17, 2015
Someone new to big data and Hadoop might be forgiven for feeling a bit confused after reading some of the recent press coverage on Hadoop. On one hand, Hadoop has achieved very bullish coverage in mainstream media. However, counter to this positive coverage, there have been a number of claims that Hadoop is overhyped. What's a person to make of all these mixed messages?
Posted February 11, 2015
When the data requirements of an organization change, the databases used to store the data must also change. Unfortunately, today's database systems do not make managing database change particularly easy.
Posted February 11, 2015