Data Center Management Articles
Oracle has announced the latest release of Oracle Real User Experience Insight, an update to Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g's Application Performance Management capabilities. The release provides integration between Oracle Real User Experience Insight and the Business Transaction Management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, enabling customers to achieve better insight into end-user satisfaction and transaction fulfillment.
Posted April 21, 2011
Clerity Solutions, a provider of mainframe migration, modernization and optimization solutions, announced that it has certified its UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software to work with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud engineered systems. Explaining Clerity's motivation for certifying with Oracle Exalogic and Exadata, Wendy Williams, director of marketing, Clerity, tells 5 Minute Briefing, "We are starting to see a greater interest in cloud-based initiatives from our customers. They are looking for ways not only to move their file-sharing and basic applications to the cloud but they are also starting to talk about how they can move some of their critical business-imperative applications to the cloud as well."
Posted April 21, 2011
Oracle has announced that the latest release of its distributed in-memory data grid product, Oracle Coherence 3.7, is now available. The new release simplifies the configuration and management of large scale deployments and offers customers more storage capabilities and dynamic load balancing of client connections. In total, the 3.7 release includes almost 500 improvements over the 3.6 release which came out last July, Cameron Purdy, vice president of development, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 21, 2011
Quest Software has unveiled Quest Backup Reporter for Oracle, a new desktop solution that offers DBAs a dashboard view of all of the Oracle backups across the enterprise that they are managing and also provides drill-down views into a single database for more detailed reporting. In addition to simplifying and cutting the time needed to report on the status of Oracle backups, the new solution is also aimed at reducing the risk associated with failed or poorly performing backups.
Posted April 21, 2011
Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) met with Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) president Mark C. Clark during last week's COLLABORATE 11 conference in Orlando, Florida. Now, more than 2 years following the financial meltdown of late 2008, it is clear that more users are again out attending COLLABORATE. "We have gone through a period of very tight IT budgets, a 2-to-4 year phase of maintenance. Everybody I am talking to is looking at opportunities to do projects this year. And if they aren't doing it this year, they are planning for it next year," said Clark, commenting on the renewed enthusiasm for attending the conference.
Posted April 19, 2011
BMC Software has announced database management solutions to help customers exploit the cost savings advantages enabled by DB2 10 for z/OS. Customers are moving more aggressively to DB2 10 than BMC has seen in the past when new versions of DB2 have been released, Robin Reddick, director, MSM Solutions Marketing at BMC Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The primary motivation that BMC is hearing from its customers is that they can achieve cost savings with the new release. According to Reddick, about 50% of BMC's customers say they will have moved to DB2 10 within 18 months of the release of the latest version, and about 25% say that they are going to skip version 9 and go right from version 8 to version 10.
Posted April 18, 2011
CA Technologies announced a new version of its service catalog that integrates with CA Virtual Automation and CA Oblicore Guarantee, designed to enable the automatic provisioning of physical, virtual and cloud services based on the cost and performance criteria of the service request. With these new additions, companies can now employ use CA Service Catalog 12.6 to enable private and hybrid cloud provisioning, service automation, user self-service, IT costing/financial management, and provisioning role-based security. This single point of contact, says CA, is intended to support a customer's journey to an increasingly virtualized service environment. CA Service Catalog also bridges the gap between current IT operations and the challenge of moving existing services to private clouds.
Posted April 18, 2011
HP says it is adding seven new offerings intended to expand its Application Transformation solution portfolio, targeted at enterprises seeking to better assess, modernize and manage their applications. The purpose of these products is to enable enterprises to understand their application portfolios and decide what to keep, change or retire.
Posted April 18, 2011
IBM announced two new services for companies moving enterprise business processes into production cloud environments. They are IBM SmartCloud, an enterprise cloud technologies and services offering for private, public and hybrid clouds, and IBM Workload Deployer, a single platform designed to enable companies to provision middleware and application components to run web workloads in the cloud.
Posted April 18, 2011
IBM announced a suite of new software and services aimed at helping organizations transform their business processes. IBM's new unified Business Process Management (BPM) platform, IBM Business Process Manager, is intended to provide companies greater visibility into business operations so they can model, automate, monitor and adjust plans instantly. IBM also announced it is launching a global consulting and services delivery organization for business process improvement. The new services will be delivered via a new methodology, called the IBM Method for Business Process Optimization.
Posted April 18, 2011
HP has updated its Information Management portfolio to enable organizations to reduce risk, increase efficiency and simplify the way they manage their business information. By bringing a holistic approach to information management, HP says the solutions and services will help executives harness the power of their information to make better decisions, manage for cost and compliance, and deliver the right information to the right users at the right time.
Posted April 12, 2011
HiT Software, Inc., a BackOffice Associates, LLC company and provider of data management products, has released HiT ODBC/DB2 v6.2 and HiT OLE DB/DB2 v4.2, the newest versions of its high-performance connectivity products specifically for application access to IBM DB2 for z/OS and IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, Windows (LUW) databases.
Posted April 12, 2011
Unisys has announced its Unisys Hybrid Enterprise framework, a comprehensive methodology and set of services for helping organizations manage multiple IT delivery models - both traditional and cloud-based - within a consistent computing environment managed as a single entity.
Posted April 11, 2011
Dynamic Solutions International (DSI) and B&L Associates have partnered to offer a fully integrated solution including the DSI9000 Virtual Tape Library family of solutions with B&L's data center operations automation and management products, enabling a single point control of the automated VTL environment. This partnership provides current B&L users with a solution for virtual tape which improves reliability, performance and functionality over physical tape libraries. According to the vendors, the combined software and VTL results in a best-of-breed package for the MCP market space.
Posted April 11, 2011
With the annual Oracle users conference COLLABORATE about to begin, Andy Flower, president of the IOUG, spoke with 5 Minute Briefing about the IOUG's strong areas of focus in terms of overall conference content, and how the addition of the MySQL user base into the Oracle community is evolving. Citing a MySQL keynote, 75 sessions at COLLABORATE focused on MySQL, and a new MySQL Council headed by Sarah Novotny, Flower says the IOUG is making strides in giving voice to the MySQL community within the IOUG and setting a stage for positive interaction with Oracle.
Posted April 06, 2011
Three new Oracle Validated Configurations are now available to speed the deployment of solutions based on Oracle Linux with Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. The three new configurations consist of Oracle Linux 5 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage 7420 appliance. The configurations also include one of the following: Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 server, an 8-socket rackmount x86 system, with QLogic FC HBAs; Oracle's Sun Fire X4470 server, a 4-socket rackmount system; or Oracle's Sun Fire X4270 M2 server, a 2-socket rackmount system.
Posted April 06, 2011
On the surface, the idea of using a single source integrator to implement SAP's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software seems ideal. The appeal lies in the potential to make an incredibly complex project appear simple. The single source model promises the ease of having only one vendor to pay, only one team to work with and a single source of accountability should things go wrong. Yet what works in theory doesn't always bear out in real world applications.
Posted April 05, 2011
Submit your intent to present at SHARE in Orlando, August 7 - 12, 2011 in Orlando, Florida, the premier event for the enterprise IT community.
Posted April 04, 2011
OpenTech Systems, Inc., a provider of z/OS tape data migration software and services, tape-based data center relocation/consolidation software and services, and tape-based disaster recovery software, has added several advanced data set recovery features to its DASD Backup Supervisor (DBS) product. The newly released version of DBS now fully supports the recovery of one or more individual data sets from DFDSS (logical or physical) or FDR full volume backups including VSAM data sets.
Posted April 04, 2011
Phoenix Software International has released zHISR, a new product that uses data created by z/OS Hardware Instrumentation Services (HIS) on IBM System z10 or zEnterprise mainframe processors to produce hotspot analysis reports, which can be used to help tune applications by locating the specific sections of code that are the biggest CPU consumers. zHISR helps users pinpoint problem spots and make targeted improvements, Amy Gilbert, marketing manager at Phoenix, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Phoenix plans to market the new product to software developers, performance analysts, and system programmers.
Posted April 04, 2011
HiT Software, Inc., a BackOffice Associates, LLC Company and provider of data management products, announced the release of HiT ODBC/DB2 v6.2 and HiT OLE DB/DB2 v4.2, the newest versions of its high-performance connectivity products specifically for application access to IBM DB2 for z/OS and IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, Windows (LUW) databases.
Posted April 04, 2011
Clerity Solutions, a provider of mainframe migration, modernization and optimization solutions, announced the 8th generation of its mainframe rehosting reference architecture, designed to reduce the costs and complexities of mainframe migration and modernization initiatives. This updated framework supports the newest third-party infrastructure products and utilities required for smooth transitions from legacy mainframe systems to flexible open systems environments.
Posted April 04, 2011
Networking giant Cisco announced it is now offering end-to-end data center convergence from server to storage by delivering new director-class, multi-hop Fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE) capability for the Nexus 7000 and MDS 9500 platforms, joining the FCoE capability available on the Nexus 5000.
Posted April 04, 2011
UC4, an IT automation provider, announced a new line of IT automation tools that supports a range of environments across enterprises. The company simultaneously announced it is shipping ONE Automation, a new solution for cross-platform automation, along with UC4 Automation Platform version 9, designed to provide end-to-end enterprise automation.
Posted April 04, 2011
DBAs and IT operational teams, pressured by the unabated flow of data streaming in from an ever wider range of sources, require proactive self-managing and automated systems to supplement or replace manual techniques and processes which are no longer scalable given the rate of data growth, according to the results of a new Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) study on database manageability. With input from 445 member respondents from within the IOUG community, the survey finds that forward-looking companies, led by Oracle technologists and DBAs, are meeting their growing data management challenges by employing more advanced database management policies. This survey was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with Oracle Corporation. Among the key findings are that more than one-third of respondents indicate their companies' data stores are increasing at a rate greater than 20% a year, and, the survey finds, this growth is a main contributor to many of the difficulties DBAs currently face.
Posted March 31, 2011
Tokutek has announced TokuDB v5.0, which adds hot indexing and hot column addition/deletion as well as full MVCC (multiversion concurrency control) support. TokuDB, the company's flagship product, is a scalable MySQL Storage Engine. According to the company, with the new release, customers can now speed the time to build targeted queries or revise their data model, in order to perform near real-time analysis on live production data and take advantage of dynamic business opportunities.
Posted March 31, 2011
UC4, an IT automation provider, has announced a new line of IT automation tools that supports a range of environments across enterprises. The company simultaneously announced it is shipping ONE Automation, a new solution for cross-platform automation, along with UC4 Automation Platform version 9, designed to provide end-to-end enterprise automation.
Posted March 29, 2011
A member of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) since 1992, Mark C. Clark recently took over as president of the organization. He spoke with DBTA about what's in store for members at the annual Oracle users conference COLLABORATE as well as for the year ahead. Helping members prepare for an upgrade to Oracle Applications Release 12, providing additional smaller, more targeted regional events, and a continued emphasis on a return to the basics with networking and education are at the top of his to-do list for 2011.
Posted March 23, 2011
CA Technologies and Unisys Corporation have announced that they have extended their alliance to offer joint solutions that accelerate customers' path from virtualization to the cloud. The solutions will combine CA Technologies' virtualization management, service automation, and service management products with Unisys' virtualization and cloud advisory, planning, design and implementation services. The first solution, available now in North America, is designed to help organizations overcome "virtual stall" - the complications that can arise from enterprise virtualization projects. According to the vendors, this is a challenge for enterprises - both in their existing data centers and as they evolve their infrastructure toward cloud computing.
Posted March 22, 2011
Embarcadero has introduced DB PowerStudio for DB2 to provide DB2 developers and DBAs with a toolset that brings greater functionality and efficiency to their development, database administration and performance tuning tasks. According to Embarcadero, the new DB PowerStudio for DB2 combines several essential database tools into an aggressively priced suite that extends beyond the capabilities of IBM's database utilities. Following recent introductions of similar toolsets aimed at Oracle, SQL Server and Sybase ASE users, DB PowerStudio for DB2 meets the needs of both DB2 database developers and administrators, helping both improve the performance and availability of their databases.
Posted March 21, 2011
Cloud.com announced the latest version of an open source cloud computing platform intended to help manage highly-scalable public and private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds. The new release, CloudStack 2.2, is a foundation designed to enable data center operators to build on-demand, elastic cloud services within their existing IT infrastructures.
Posted March 21, 2011
CiRBA Inc. says it is shipping a new release of its data center intelligence software, designed to provide IT organizations with "fully-loaded utilization," a new metric for measuring the infrastructure efficiency. CiRBA Version 6.1's fully-loaded utilization feature provides a precise and simultaneous measurement of server infrastructure requirements that factors in utilization patterns, technical constraints and business and operational policies. Leveraging this measure, organizations can identify exactly how much infrastructure is required to safely service workloads, allowing excess capacity to be accurately measured and reclaimed for other purposes, according to the vendor. According to Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, data centers can face challenges in understanding how efficiently and how well utilized their IT and virtualized environments are running. This is because they tend to rely solely on traditional measurements such as CPU utilization, I/O rates and other measurements. But these can be misleading, he says.
Posted March 21, 2011
On the heels of the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge, in which the IBM Watson system demonstrated the capability to understand natural language, IBM launched a global skills initiative to educate clients, business partners, and college students on how to use IBM business analytics and information management software, and many of the underlying technologies of the Watson computing system, to capture information from new sources and use it to create business opportunities.
Posted March 21, 2011
IBM has announced new software and the creation a new consulting practice dedicated to the emerging category of "Smarter Commerce," focused on helping companies adapt to rising customer demands in today's digitally transformed marketplace. The new software and services offerings, supported by global sales and marketing resources, will address the spectrum of enterprise commerce activities - new ways to buy, sell and secure greater customer loyalty in the era of mobile and social networks. "It's a buyer's world now," says Craig Hayman, general manager of IBM Industry Solutions. "Businesses require a tighter and highly responsive network of suppliers and partners to ensure they deliver the right product or service at the right price, time and place. The key to business success in this unfolding environment is predicting trends and automating market responses in advance to eliminate the gaps between buy and sell, supply and demand."
Posted March 21, 2011
Cloud.com today announced CloudStack 2.2, the latest version of its open source cloud computing platform. CloudStack is an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of scalable public and private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds. Using CloudStack as the foundation, data center operators can build cloud services within their existing infrastructure to offer on-demand, elastic cloud services. CloudStack is available for immediate download from the open source cloud computing community.
Posted March 15, 2011
ScaleBase is seeking 50 additional customers to participate in an expanded private beta program for the ScaleBase Database Load Balancer, which enables multiple database servers to work like a single database. The ScaleBase private beta was first announced on January 1, and since then dozens of customers have registered for the program. The company is now seeking additional users of MySQL on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS who would like to try the technology.
Posted March 15, 2011
Did you miss a webcast covering important information about technologies you need to learn more about? IBM offers replays on-demand of webcasts presented by IBM experts and partners.
Posted March 09, 2011
"z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0" and "z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for SLES 11 SP1" are now available from IBM.
Posted March 09, 2011
The IBM Software Product Availability tool provides you the latest information about IBM software available for the Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) versions for System z.
Posted March 09, 2011
Wall Street is adopting high speed HPC systems with low latency to create new profit centers in arbitrage trading, and is using virtualization to increase back office efficiency and cost savings of existing HPC systems, according to the conference organizers. The 2011 show and conference will feature low latency and virtualization as two strategies to increase speed and increase full operations performance of HPC systems.
Posted March 09, 2011
Following Watson's winning performance against Jeopardy! game show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, IBM hosted a keynote session about its Jeopardy! Watson project at The Linux Foundation End User Summit. But Watson wasn't the only computer system that won last month when it competed successfully on Jeopardy! The other computing system is called World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer that helps scientists solve humanitarian challenges by tapping the unused computing power of personal computers around the world. Scientists who use World Community Grid are not only set to receive Watson's $500,000 in prize money - but are already earning support worldwide because the day after the tournament's conclusion, World Community Grid saw a 700% spike in the number of people who normally volunteer their computers' spare power for the effort.
Posted March 09, 2011
Dundee is Scotland's fourth largest city, home to 145,000 people. Like all U.K. local authorities, the Dundee City Council needs to handle increasing demand for IT and e-government services, while also reducing costs in line with central government targets. When the lease on its server and storage hardware needed to be renewed, the council saw an opportunity to enhance its capabilities and increase value for money. Dundee worked with IBM to upgrade its mainframe environment with two powerful IBM System z10 servers, and introduced the IBM XIV Storage System to replace a mixed storage environment.
Posted March 09, 2011
"The Mainframe and the Cloud" and "Scaling Your Oracle E-Business Suite with IBM System z and Linux" are available for download.
Posted March 09, 2011
"z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0" and " z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for SLES 11 SP1" are two new IBM Redbooks publications available.
Posted March 09, 2011
The IBM Software Product Availability tool provides you the latest information about IBM software available for the Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) versions for System z.
Posted March 09, 2011
The High Performance Computing (HPC) Linux Financial Markets event will take place April 4 at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, NY. Wall Street is adopting high speed HPC systems with low latency to create new profit centers in arbitrage trading, and is using virtualization to increase back office efficiency and cost savings of existing HPC systems, according to the conference organizers. The 2011 show and conference will feature low latency and virtualization as two strategies to increase speed and increase full operations performance of HPC systems.
Posted March 09, 2011
Following Watson's winning performance against Jeopardy! game show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, IBM hosted a keynote session about its Jeopardy! Watson project at The Linux Foundation End User Summit. The project incorporates IBM Power 7 systems with Linux and analytics software. But Watson wasn't the only computer system that won last month when it competed successfully on Jeopardy! The other computing system is called World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer that helps scientists solve humanitarian challenges by tapping the unused computing power of personal computers around the world. Scientists who use World Community Grid are not only set to receive Watson's $500,000 in prize money - but are already earning support worldwide because the day after the tournament's conclusion, World Community Grid saw a 700% spike in the number of people who normally volunteer their computers' spare power for the effort.
Posted March 09, 2011
IBM has announced that the Dundee City Council has implemented a cost-effective IT architecture with IBM System z and IBM XIV Storage System technologies. Dundee is Scotland's fourth largest city, home to 145,000 people. Like all U.K. local authorities, the Dundee City Council needs to handle increasing demand for IT and e-government services, while also reducing costs in line with central government targets.
Posted March 09, 2011
When computers first started to infringe on everyday life, science fiction authors and society in general had high expectations for "intelligent" systems. Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" series from the 1940s portrayed robots with completely human intelligence and personality, and, in the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," the onboard computer HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) had a sufficiently human personality to suffer a paranoid break and attempt to murder the crew!
Posted March 09, 2011