Breaking News - CiRBA Challenges "Server Sprawl" With New Data Center Mapping Tool
CiRBA today introduced version 4.0 of its flagship data center intelligence solution, which the vendor says is designed to make it easier for IT organizations to identify consolidation and virtualization solutions. This is enabled through CiRBA 4.0's new interface as well as its interactive visualization, which also create step-by-step action plans, and provide pre- and post- consolidation metrics quantifying operational savings, according to the company.
"This is a product that is focused at the challenge of server sprawl," Chuck Tatham, vice president of marketing and business development, told 5 Minute Briefing. It is a software that analyzes "all of the constraints around what might be consolidated or virtualized in a data center and quickly maps the optimal path for IT leadership towards that end goal of a consolidated and more cost-efficient data center."
CiRBA 4.0 looks at three types of constraints involved in large-scale consolidation or virtualization initiatives, including configuration; workload patterns such as CPU utilization and network and disk I/O; and business constraints such as geography, business service or maintenance windows. The major advancement in the new release "is the user interface and the flexibility with which someone can analyze all of this data in their environment," said Tatham. "It is a very interactive and rules-based way of looking at what the potential is in a organization down to a very detailed level."
CiRBA's interactive visual representation is derived using empirical information about system configurations, workloads and business constraints, which "really tell you what can go together from a technical perspective, what should go together from a business perspective and what will fit together from an activity perspective," Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of CiRBA, said. "When you factor all those things in, that's how you deal with large environments."
Using patent-pending algorithms, the information gathered by CiRBA is analyzed through the use of "best-practice" rule sets for virtualization and OS, database, and application stacking. The results are visually represented on the user's screen through a grid-shaped map that can be iteratively modified and re-evaluated. "You can zoom in and out and add and remove constraints," said Hillier. "You can do a lot more what-if analysis in the product."
CiRBA offers a departmental edition as well as an enterprise edition. For additional details on CiRBA 4.0, go here.
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ClearApp Announces Performance Management Tools for Linux on z
ClearApp, a performance management tools vendor, announced that its QuickVision 6.0 performance management solutions are now certified to manage applications running on Linux on System z.
The QuickVision toolset uses modeling to facilitate automatic deployment of managed applications. The solution manages J2EE, portal and integration applications running on BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, Apache Tomcat, and Red Hat JBoss platforms. QuickVision can also monitor individual services of SOA applications.
ClearApp's focus has been in the area of SOA and J2EE portal application support. QuickVision has always been strong in managing the performance of complex J2EE portal and SOA application environments, according to Chris Farrell, vice president of marketing at ClearApp. Now, as customers deploy these applications on mainframe platforms, QuickVision's modeling approach will allow users to take advantage of the automatic deployment of QuickVision application management in the same fashion as they would on distributed systems.
Going through the certification gives customers "an extra level of comfort that what we are providing is supported and working in a mainframe environment," Farrell told 5 Minute Briefing. "Any time you sell a large system, an aspect of comfort comes into play - and management systems are no different," Farrell said. "There are many opportunities to provide this management solution into mainframe environments." For more information, go here.
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Data 21 Releases Electronic File Transfer Tool for Mainframes
Data 21, a provider of mainframe computing solutions, has announced the availability of SecurePartner Edition of ZIP/390 and ZIP/VSE for zSeries, which enables secure electronic exchange of files between business partners to meet new data privacy mandates.
With data privacy mandates now requiring that data remain secure at rest as well as during transmission, secure transmission alone is no longer enough, David Kennedy, vice president for marketing and sales at Data 21, told 5 Minute Briefing. "The fact is that data is more vulnerable to unauthorized access while being stored on a server than it is during its transmission," said Kennedy. Therefore, there is the need to encrypt the data itself so that it is always protected, "and an easy way to do that is to encrypt the file that you are sending," he explained.
However, companies that want to exchange strong encrypted files must agree upon and implement a file encryption format. "The two sides of the transmission need to agree upon a file encryption method and two very simple ones are the ZIP AES and PGP," said Kennedy. SecurePartner Edition supports both formats, he added.
The tool enables the transfer of files with no licensing expense to business partners, the company said. The SecurePartner program enables a company that wants to share data with partners, and seeks cooperation from those partners to share this data in a secure way, to do so without placing an additional burden on the partners, said Kennedy. "They don't enforce on their partners the requirement to buy special software or hardware to do this. The sponsor or host site will purchase our product and pay a slight premium for what we call our SecurePartner Edition." This allows their partners to run a free secure client version of the software so they can exchange compressed and encrypted files between each other, he explained.
Data 21 also said that ZIP/390 5.x and ZIP/VSE 5.x are available for download by licensed users and companies interested in a 30-day trial. For more information on SecurePartner Edition, go here.
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GT Software Unveils New "Green Screen" Modernization Tool for Web Service Calls
GT Software, a provider of legacy-to-SOA development solutions, has announced a new version of Ivory VisualConnect, its tool for modernizing legacy IBM applications for the Internet and intranets. Ivory VisualConnect version 5.3 brings Web Services and email integration to the system, which converts 3270 or 5250 screens into graphically intuitive Web front-ends, without any programming.
With Ivory VisualConnect, customers can reuse the familiar mainframe "green screens" and all of the embedded logic, in Web service calls. This simplifies the re-engineering of manual processes, such as data entry on forms, thereby reducing training requirements, the vendor said.
More GT Software customers have been looking for ways to extend legacy interfaces into the Web services world, Rob Morris, senior vice president of marketing and strategy at GT Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. Ivory VisualConnect "is a product that we have had for a while - and have some very large installations," he noted. "The biggest feature that we have added with the latest version is the ability to seamlessly integrate Web service calls into these new applications," he said.
With comprehensive Web-enablement and advanced application integration capabilities, Ivory VisualConnect 5.3 can be deployed in a variety of fashions to meet the architectural and business needs of zSeries and iSeries shops, according to the company. It can either run natively, requiring no additional hardware or software, or reside in a Windows, Unix or Linux n-tier environment, thereby eliminating the need to install software on the zSeries or iSeries. This new capability enables Ivory Service Architect-based Web services to be seamlessly integrated with Ivory VisualConnect applications.
"One of the things about VisualConnect that makes it very unique and again like a lot of our products is that it is very easy to learn to use," said Morris. The Ivory VisualConnect interface for the Java platform further extends and modifies Web-enabled 3270 applications, for more advanced integration requirements. In addition, the same installation of Ivory VisualConnect provides the flexibility to generate Java applets, or pure HTML, depending on end-user requirements, according to the company. For more information on GT Software, go here.
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Seagull Software Ships Three-Tier Host Access Solution
Seagull Software, a provider of legacy-to-SOA solutions, announced general availability of version 4.1 of BlueZone Access Server. BlueZone Access Server is a three-tier, Web-to-host solution which provides secure, browser-based pure HTML and thin client terminal emulation for IBM mainframe (3270), System i (5250) and Unix (VT100) environments. This is the first release of the former Farabi host access server product under the Seagull branding, Kim Addington, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Seagull Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. Seagull acquired Farabi Technology in early 2006. "There are a lot of new features around security, around ease of use and around HTML presentation."
New features of BlueZone Access Server Version 4.1 include: a quick configuration wizard; HTML page editing wizard; new HTML emulation client; HTML style sheet for the HTML client for easy customization; support for keyboard shortcut keys and function keys in HTML client; and access to management interface synchronized with Microsoft's Active Directory (ADS).
BlueZone Access Server 4.1 adds to the options available to Seagull's terminal emulation customers, and it was one of the business drivers behind the company's acquisition of Farabi Technology last year, according to Addington. "One of the strengths of this product and one of the reasons we acquired Farabi was to bring yet another deployment option to the terminal emulation table as we are talking to customers and this one offers a true zero-footprint HTML emulation option, so we are just making that HTML emulation option even stronger with some of the features that you see here in this new release."
According to the company, BlueZone Access Server is ideal for customers who have require a zero-footprint emulation in pure HTML; that the connection must run with the HTTPS protocol due to network security policies; whose mobile workers need secure remote access from public computers; that no direct telnet access to the host computer can be permitted; and HTTP printing. "In general, BlueZone Access Server is very complementary to our current emulation offering," Ardy Franssen, vice president of product management at Seagull Software, said. "Before, we only had a two-tier deployment to offer, and now we have a three-tier as well, so we have a full range of anything you could wish for in an emulation environment."
In additional news, the proposed acquisition of Seagull Software by Rocket Software remains on track to take place during the first quarter of 2007, according to the companies. For more information, go here.
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Breaking News - Symantec Unveils New Data and Application Availability Solution
Symantec Corp., a provider of infrastructure and security software, today announced Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 High Availability for Windows, a solution that delivers data and application availability to Windows environments. The new release, in effect, combines two popular Symantec products - Storage Foundation for Windows and Veritas Cluster Server - with usability tools to simplify storage management, high availability and disaster recovery for Windows applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint Portal Server.
"This is solving a huge challenge on the operational side of storage management," Sean Derrington, director of storage management for the Data Center Management Group at Symantec, told 5 Minute Briefing. "With IT budgets flat and the complexity of environments increasing, customers need a standard, central way to manage this all."
One of Symantec's key initiatives for improving Windows storage management is adding support for Storage Foundation Management Server. This centralized multi-host management capability will enable IT organizations to centrally manager their application, server and storage environments for problem resolution, greater visibility and control across the data center.
Symantec is also leveraging the Veritas Cluster Server to provide a secure, Web-based console for managing, monitoring and configuring multiple clusters on Windows, Linux and Unix - local and remote. Moreover, Veritas Cluster Server 5.0 for VMware ESX has been made available, extending high-availability and disaster recovery to virtual environments.
"We run at the hypervisor layer," Derrington noted. "So you can manage and monitor each instance," he said, noting, that the key take-away of this new Symantec release, is "one solution for everything. This goes across storage, across applications, across databases, operating systems, even physical and virtual machines," he explained.
Symantec is also releasing Veritas Storage Foundation Basic for Windows, a free version of Storage Foundation designed for edge-tier and infrastructure workloads. For more information, click here.
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