Breaking News - Opalis Unveils Latest Version of Integration Server
Opalis Software, a provider of run book automation (RBA) software, today announced availability of the latest version of Opalis Integration Server. The new release ships this month and includes more than 90 out-of-the-box workflow process templates, five new integration packs, and an enhanced dashboard. In addition, the company unveiled five new automation solution areas. Opalis' RBA software provides the orchestration, integration, and automation of operational processes across multiple data, departmental, and application silos.
Opalis delivers two key benefits with its automation solution, Todd DeLaughter, CEO and president of Opalis, told 5 Minute Briefing. "First, we free up money and resources so that IT organizations can apply those resources, those people, to other larger problems," he explained. "We also improve the service delivery capability because what we do is not only shortening the time to deal with an outage, we take out the manual intervention." According to DeLaughter, roughly 70 percent of errors in IT environments result from someone touching a management system. By linking systems together, and automating the workflow between them, this percentage can be reduced.
In Opalis Integration Server 5.3, new ITIL-based, out-of-the-box process templates automate IT operational processes and provide visibility into incident, problem, configuration, change, and release processes. Most significant, the company states, is the addition of 20 new policies to specifically address virtualization and security tasks. "These are the blueprints for how you would actually implement ITIL process automation in the data center," said DeLaughter.
The 5.3 release includes new packs for BMC Atrium, BMC Remedy, Microsoft SCOM, Microsoft Active Directory, and VMware VirtualCenter 2. These new tools have been added to Opalis' existing 22 packs, enabling IT operations to connect and interact with a variety of systems management tools that exist in data centers. Additionally, new dashboard views are intended to give IT operations end-to-end visibility of IT process management, from administration to reporting. Capabilities include access to key metrics, such as success/failure status, duration, load distribution, and ROI on automated IT tasks. Activity and key statistics on IT tasks can be tracked from a single, unified view.
Finally, new Opalis solutions enable organizations to align IT services with business objectives by automating IT operations management through repeatable and standardized best practices. Opalis combines a set of policies, or workflows, to provide targeted solutions for: incident process automation; problem process automation; change process automation; configuration process automation; and release process automation. For more information, go here.
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z/OS Tool from William Data Systems Monitors Applications and Data in Transit
William Data Systems, a specialist in mainframe software development, has unveiled FERRET, a tool to improve the management and monitoring of IBM mainframe z/OS networks. "FERRET is a monitoring tool specifically for APPN/HPR and Enterprise Extender network protocols," Simon Cooper, business development manager at William Data Systems, told 5 Minute Briefing.
"Mainframe networks have traditionally been SNA-based but in the last 10 years, there has been a transition to TCP/IP networking," observed Cooper. For mainframe-based organizations making the transition to Internet Protocol-based data transfer from IBM's traditional SNA (Systems Network Architecture), FERRET allows them to determine potential bottlenecks and whether the right connections are being used. FERRET monitors IBM's data transfer solution known as Enterprise Extender (EE) and Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking/High Performance Routing (APPN/HPR), an SNA extension on which many applications are based. "The need for Enterprise Extender has grown over the last few years along with the transition to TCP/IP networking," said Cooper. Organizations continue to use EE for data transfer because of the high cost involved with re-writing many applications to IP standards.
There are existing monitors available that can provide limited performance information about EE, but there are no facilities for real-time or historical analysis except via repeated issuing of multiple Virtual Telecommunications Access Method (VTAM) commands, or use of IBM's SNA Management APIs, according to William Data Systems. The vendor states that FERRET overcomes this complexity and offers new levels of assured computing to mainframe users. It provides a detailed look at the routing activity inside the critical APPN/HPR extension as data and applications traverse APPN/HPR and EE networks. In addition, FERRET provides network technicians with dynamic detection of APPN/HPR and EE configurations, alerting capabilities, diagnostic tools, and historical data for trends, capacity planning and reporting.
FERRET was built with AJAX (Asynchronous, JavaScript and XML) technology and uses a browser-based graphical user interface (GUI) with no plug-ins required. Users must be running z/OS version 1.5 with the SNA Management API switched on. IBM Tivoli NetView and IBM z/OS console interfaces are available for submitting commands and for automation. For more information, go here.
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Hitachi Unveils 'Enterprise-Class' Blade Server
Hitachi has announced what it calls the first blade server to provide users with enterprise-class data center functionality. The new product, BladeSymphony with Virtage, is the latest member of Hitachi BladeSymphony series. Virtage is an embedded virtualization feature, which builds virtualization right into a blade server's hardware. "Virtage is virtualization that is embedded in the firmware of the Itanium system," Steve Campbell, vice president of marketing for Hitachi, told 5 Minute Briefing.
This capability provides customers an alternative to third-party software solutions and thus can enable them to decrease overhead costs while increasing manageability and performance. "It's very much aimed at solving the complete data center workload in a blade form factor," Campbell said. "Typically, blades have been very successful at the edge tier, where the Intel Xeon processor has been extremely successful. We are able to mix and match the processors in a single chassis, and deal with the edge, the application, and for the first time, in a blade form factor, the heavy lifting 64-bit applications in a data center, because the Itanium is available."
This technology has been brought over from Hitachi's mainframe solutions, Campbell continues. "The reason why it's in the firmware is, basically, historically, from Hitachi, 40 years of mainframe experience, that this virtualization capability is now in a blade server," he explained. "That provides the user with much lower overhead compared to today's traditional cobbled-together software solutions in virtualization."
The Virtage also provides higher levels of availability, "but also provides tremendous flexibility, where I can now take a system and divide it into various resources," Campbell said. This includes "either dedicated resources where I've got to have a specific CPU, I/O memory configuration to deal with those applications that must have their performance and response time, and I can also take the system and divide it into a shared mode, where I can share resources."
BladeSymphony with Virtage also includes unique blade SMP interconnect technology that improves scalability by enabling users to configure multiple blades, so that they work as a single system. BladeSymphony with Virtage will be generally available in North America in January, the vendor said. For more information, go here.
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Breaking News - SOA Software Announces SOA Governance Product
SOA Software, a provider of SOA infrastructure software, today announced the launch of an SOA governance product called Workbench. Workbench is a closed-loop SOA governance product that integrates UDDI v3 registry technology with a repository and policy management system. This unique solution provides a way for organizations to quantifiably enforce their run-time policies, accelerating service reuse and adoption.
SOA Software's Workbench is a standalone SOA governance system offering features, including support for UDDI version 3, publish and discover services, and synchronization with third-party UDDI v3 registries, design-time policy management for WS-I and enterprise architecture policy compliance, and runtime policy lifecycle management
"Until recently, our focus in infrastructure has been on runtime," Ian Goldsmith, vice president of product marketing for SOA Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. "Workbench is an integrated registry/repository that provides a comprehensive SOA governance solution from design time through runtime." Workbench can be deployed alongside Service Manager, SOA Software's SOA management and security product to provide a closed-loop governance system, Goldsmith said.
"Most of the security and management products, including ours, up until now, included their own integrated policy management technologies. It doesn't make sense to have a whole bunch of separate policy silos through the organization. You need central policy infrastructure, and it should be part of your policy solution. Workbench centralizes the definition and management of policies for SOA."
Workbench defines policies that are enforced by the Service Manager run-time security and management systems. Service Manager collects metrics and compliance data that it passes back to Workbench which implements an audit process comparing these metrics and manifests with the original policies to ensure that they are being correctly enforced. Workbench will be generally available in January, the vendor said. For more details, visit the SOA Software Web site here.
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