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September 2013 - UPDATE

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Trends and Applications

EMC's CEO and chairman Joe Tucci gave a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 on the transition occurring in IT and the data center of the future. There are four key macro trends driving the transformation in IT, said Tucci. These tremendously disruptive and opportunistic trends include mobility, cloud computing, big data, and social networking. Jeremy Burton, EVP at EMC, cited a recent IOUG-Unisphere Research survey report which showed that the daily DBA activities most on the rise are systems monitoring, performance diagnosis, and managing backup and recovery. Oracle and EMC are integrating their technologies to allow customers to spend less time in the back office so they can devote more time to the front office dealing with more impactful business issues, said Burton.

At LinuxCon 2013, IBM announced plans to invest $1 billion in new Linux and open source technologies for IBM's Power Systems servers. The new pledge recalled the company's announcement in 2000 that it would embrace Linux as strategic to its systems strategy, followed a year later with the promise of $1 billion dedicated to backing the Linux movement. The new investment will fuel two immediate initiatives - a new client center in Europe and a Linux on Power development cloud.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made three key announcements in his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, the company's annual conference for customers and partners in San Francisco. Ellison unveiled the Oracle Database In-Memory Option to Oracle Database 12c which he said speeds up query processing by "orders of magnitude," the M6 Big Memory Machine, and the new Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance. Explaining Oracle's goals with the new in-memory option, Ellison noted that in the past there have been row-format databases, and column-format databases that are intended to speed up query processing. "We had a better idea. What if we store data in both formats simultaneously?"

RainStor, a provider of an enterprise database for managing and analyzing all historical data, has introduced RainStor FastForward, a new product that enables customers to re-instate data from Teradata tape archives (also known as BAR for Backup, Archive and Restore) and move it to RainStor for query. The new RainStor FastForward product resolves a pressing challenge for Teradata customers that need to archive their Teradata warehouse data to offline tape, which can make it difficult to access and query that data when business and regulatory users require it, Deirdre Mahon, vice president of marketing, RainStor, explained in an interview.

There is no limit to the potential, business- building applications for big data, springing from the capability to provide new, expansive insights never before available to business leaders. However, the new forms of data, along with the speed in which it needs to be processed, requires significant work on the back end, which many organizations may not yet be ready to tackle. IT leaders agree that to make the most of big data, they will need to redouble efforts to consolidate data environments, bring in new solutions, and revisit data retention policies. These are the conclusions of a new survey of 322 data managers and professionals who are members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). The survey was underwritten by Oracle Corp. and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc.

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