Channel : Data Center Management
At SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, SAP AG unveiled SAP HANA service pack 6 (SP6). In a key new capability, HANA now enables real-time insights across heterogeneous systems - including Hadoop. In addition, there are new geospatial capabilities, as well as a new open hardware architecture deployment model for tailored integration with customers' existing data centers. The added capabilities are part of a continued expansion of HANA as platform, and will be available by the end of this quarter, David Jonker, senior director of Big Data Marketing, SAP, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
IBM unveiled new business process and integration software and services that will help organizations accelerate adoption of big data, cloud, mobile and social business technologies. At the cornerstone of this strategy is IBM MessageSight, a new appliance designed to help organizations manage and communicate with the billions of mobile devices and sensors found in systems such as automobiles, traffic management systems, smart buildings and household appliances.
IBM announced new enhancements to its PureSystems family of expert integrated systems. New capabilities enable organizations that are simplifying and accelerating cloud deployments using IBM PureApplication System to get disaster recovery services up and running in four clicks. Additional enhancements include increased security capabilities with advanced encryption options, greater system scalability and significantly reduced application response times during unplanned spikes in demand, and new support for Microsoft Windows applications.
Dell Software has announced the release of Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition (formerly vFoglight Pro). Building on the success of the Quest vFoglight Pro virtualization management solution, Dell has re-branded vFoglight to Foglight for Virtualization to better align the solution as a core component of the Foglight family, and has added performance monitoring support for VMware View to the product.
Array Networks Inc., a provider of application delivery networking, announced it is shipping an enhanced line of application delivery controller appliances. The new appliances, the APV 2600, 5600, 10600 and 10650, support 10-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and multi-core processing and multi-core SSL acceleration.
The latest benchmark testing by Heirloom Computing revealed that the company's "ELPaaS" (Enterprise Legacy Platform-as-a-Service) offering now surpasses most mainframe computing alternatives - with costs that are 90% lower, according to the company.
New offerings from HP are aimed at helping small and midsize businesses and government agencies to maximize storage investments. The products include the next generation of its MSA entry disk array, enhancements to the HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio, and a new program for HP channel partners. "We have seen more and more data center needs start to apply to smaller environments," Brad Parks, a senior manager focused on go-to-market strategies at HP Storage, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
BMC Software has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by a private investor group led by Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital together with GIC Special Investments Pte Ltd and Insight Venture Partners.
Database Plugins, a provider of data-centric computing solutions, has announced the addition of a secure transcoding framework to its line of media management software. The solution, "dbTranscoder," addresses the storing, streaming and transcoding of media data in an Oracle database. "This mechanism that allows you to store your multimedia data in the database but still manipulate it through common file-based semantics by programs that are expecting that multimedia data to exist in a file somewhere. Presently, nobody can do anything like that," Steve Guilford, founder and CEO of Database Plugins, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
OpTier, an application performance management (APM) and big data analytics provider, has launched OpTier SaaS, a lightweight, cloud-based version of its on-premise APM and ITOA solution. OpTier SaaS features advanced operations analytics capabilities, leveraging end-to-end transaction tracing capabilities to provide problem resolution that is easy to deploy and use.
IBM's first-quarter 2013 revenues slipped across many categories, but its mainframe sales were healthy. The vendor's net income for the quarter was $3.0 billion, down 1% from the first quarter of 2012. Total revenues for the first quarter totaled $23.4 billion, down 5%. While total systems revenues decreased 13%, revenues from System z mainframe server products increased 7% compared with the year-ago period - and total delivery of System z computing power, as measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), increased 27%.
Serena Software, a provider of orchestrated IT solutions, announced impending new change and release management capabilities for its Orchestrated IT solution set, intended to provide tooling for IT shops that are embracing the devops movement.
Troux, a provider of enterprise architecture software, launched a new set of tools aimed at helping companies "gain clear line of sight" into how current and future business and technology strategy decisions impact an organization before they are implemented.
It is said that half of all IT projects fail, but many of these failures could have been prevented. Janco Associates recently issued a list of the leading reasons for IT project failures, and people issues - not technical issues - top the list. The mistakes that IT leaders tend to make include not including users in the systems planning stage, and lack of effective change management skills.
Cloudmeter has rolled out Cloudmeter Stream and a beta release of Cloudmeter Insight - new solutions that are intended to provide a simple, effective way for companies to transform real-time network data into meaningful, actionable information for business and IT users.
CA Technologies announced a strategic direction intended to help mainframe customers embrace the next-generation data center. At its recent partner conference, the company says it made "significant" new investments in mainframe solutions to provide customers with the tools to manage data centers with reliability, security and speed.
Neebula Systems' ServiceWatch has integrated with CA Nimsoft Service Desk, providing a combined solution that enables IT administrators to quickly understand the impact of incident and change management activities on business, which minimizes disruptions and optimizes uptime. The combined Neebula ServiceWatch and CA Nimsoft Service Desk offering is being delivered as software-as-a-service.
Hemoco, a networking solutions provider, announced a new tool for software and network inventory audits, intended to provide agent-free scanning of network clients for changes in hardware inventory and compliance of software with license policies, retrieving event logs and managing product license keys.
IBM announced it has enhanced the Tivoli System Automation family with a product focused on helping smaller zEnterprise customers. The IBM Automation Control for z/OS (IACz) product is targeted at single System z customers looking to move from manual scripting to policy-based automation.
Memory-based storage system provider Violin Memory Inc. and SAP AG have announced that Violin 6000 Series Flash Memory Arrays are now certified for interoperability with SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP Sybase ASE), providing reliability and increased performance across a range of enterprise applications. Together, these solutions will provide enhanced and simplified solutions that leverage the power of Violin Flash Memory Arrays and business-critical SAP applications to accelerate transaction-driven environments.
A new version of SAP Sybase Replication Server is planned to provide high-performance, secure and reliable delivery of data across the enterprise. SAP Sybase Replication Server satisfies a range of mission-critical needs, including gathering real-time business intelligence and recovering from disaster. The latest release will replicate data in real time from multiple sources into multiple instances of SAP HANA — without disrupting or slowing the production applications at the source — while transactional consistency is preserved.
SAP rolled out three new enterprise resource planning (ERP) rapid-deployment solutions to speed and simplify adoption of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. Rapid-deployment solutions include preconfigured software, implementation services, best-practices content and end-user enablement. The new SAP ERP for Finance and Controlling, SAP ERP for Manufacturing and SAP ERP for Trading SAP Rapid Deployment solutions come with a fixed price.
Veeam Software, a provider of backup, replication and virtualization management solutions, has introduced Virtual Lab for Windows Server Hyper-V, one of the new features to be included in the upcoming release of Veeam Backup & Replication v7. Virtual Lab helps ensure the protection, performance and availability of Hyper-V environments. Virtual Lab works in conjunction with vPower, Veeam's technology for running a virtual machine directly from a compressed, deduplicated backup file on regular backup storage.
IBM announced it has enhanced the Tivoli System Automation family with a product focused on helping smaller zEnterprise customers. The IBM Automation Control for z/OS (IACz) product is targeted at single System z customers looking to move from manual scripting to policy-based automation.
Vision Solutions, Inc., a provider of protection and recovery solutions, has announced the release of an automated tool that enables real-time data sharing between disparate databases. Double-Take Share version 5.1 provides enhanced support for Microsoft SQL Server, including support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012, increased performance when running in IBM i and Teradata environments, and support for additional versions of z/OS.
Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernization, released a solution designed to accelerate IBM mainframe application delivery. Enterprise Developer for IBM zEnterprise is intended to help customers modernizing applications for deployment on the mainframe or any of the IBM zEnterprise environments. The product uses either the Microsoft Visual Studio or Eclipse-based Integrated Developer Environment with mainframe integration, and also includes tools to support development and unit testing on Linux for System z, AIX and x86 environments.
Arney Computer Systems says it has begun shipping a new software diagnostic product that employs IBM System z hardware facilities and z/OS operating system services to dynamically monitor the execution of applications being debugged.
Avaya, a provider of business communications solutions, announced a bundled toolset designed to help deploy real-time virtualized communication and collaboration applications for public and private clouds. The Avaya Collaboration Pod for Avaya Aura Virtualized Environments is intended to provide enterprises and cloud service providers with a full stack, plug-and-play communications and collaboration solution that can be rapidly deployed.
IBM is investing $1 billion in research and development to design, create and integrate new Flash solutions into its expanding portfolio of servers, storage systems and middleware. Flash, a highly efficient re-writable memory, can speed the response times of information gathering in servers and storage systems from milliseconds to microseconds, the company says. Because it contains no moving parts, the technology is also more reliable, durable and more energy efficient than spinning hard drives.