CiRBA Announces Cross-Platform Virtualization Planning Capabilities
CiRBA, a provider of data center intelligence software, has released a new version of its virtualization and consolidation analysis software. CiRBA Version 4.6 offers improved and cross-platform workload analysis, enabling organizations to plan and design virtualized infrastructure on any platform, including mainframes, based on workload characteristics, risk tolerance, service level agreements, and performance requirements. The advanced workload modeling also calculates the impact of iSCSI storage and network connectivity on virtualized servers, to optimize placements and use of these technologies.
The enhancements in version 4.6 address the demand to do accurate cross-platform analysis as well as analysis of workloads onto large end points, Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of CiRBA, told 5 Minute Briefing.
A key new feature of the release is called "personality-based benchmarking," Hillier said. CiRBA Version 4.6 helps teams determine which benchmarks are appropriate for specific workloads and then enables analysis using multiple benchmarks within a single virtual pool, resulting in accurate modeling of combined workloads. CiRBA supports widely used benchmarks including those from Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) and Ideas International.
"If you have an app that is running CPU-intensive workloads - it is number crunching - it might look pretty good on an x86 box and it might look for example terrible on a mainframe," said Hillier. "We have actually defined a number of workload personality types and we have added benchmarking strategy to allow you to properly analyze each of them."
Another key concern is "to figure out how high you can stack them safely without incurring too much risk on that end point - and this becomes very important when you are talking about large end points," said Hillier. "We have added some very interesting analysis features that let you analyze for example transactional workloads separate from batch workloads," he noted. "When you virtualize, you really have to take into account what the apps need and meet those requirements."
Additionally, critical applications that must always provide high performance for transaction processing may be analyzed by specifying a very low "peak contention" tolerance, reducing the risk that workloads will compete for resources and performance will be adversely affected. CiRBA provides a variety of workload scoring strategies based on peak or sustained activity to be applied in conjunction with tolerance ratings so that organizations can balance service levels, potential risk, and consolidation ratios.
Particularly in large organizations there are these "fit for purpose" projects being kicked off, "where companies are saying: now that we are virtualizing, let's actually step back and figure out the exact right place for each type of workload to run in our environment," said Hillier, noting this presents an increasing need for cross-platform analysis. "Every workload has kind of best place to be." For more information, go here.
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ASPG and Innovation Data Processing Announce Strategic Alliance
Advanced Software Products Group (ASPG) and Innovation Data Processing, providers of OS/390 and z/OS data center solutions, announced a strategic alliance that enables customers to purchase both ASPG's MegaCryption and Innovation Data Processing 's FDRCRYPT at a substantial discount.
"We found between ourselves that we both have best of breed data protection solutions and there was an overlap, but at the same time we found that we protect data in different circumstances for the customers - and we both do that exceedingly well," Thomas J. Meehan, vice president of Innovation Data Processing, told 5 Minute Briefing.
FDRCRYPT from Innovation Data Processing allows for the use of unique individual backup keys, true random key generation, an easily transportable universal key database file, decryption master keys, decryption validation & RACF master key storage. MegaCryption from ASPG is an enterprise (zOS, Unix, Linux, Windows) data encryption software solution designed to secure sensitive data within a company, and includes support for OpenPGP, GnuPG, OpenSSL and X.509. MegaCryption will encrypt data-at-rest, data-in-transit and data-in-process while FDRCRYPT provides encryption for local backup and B2B exchange of FDR backup files being sent off-site.
This combination of encryption software-based products is intended to satisfy requirements to encrypt data-at-rest, data-in-transit, data-in-process and FDR backups at an affordable cost. By choosing MegaCryption and FDRCRYPT, companies are maximizing their investment in z/OS cryptography, according to the vendors.
"We looked at this from a ‘co-opetition’ standpoint and found that by offering customers an alliance package where the two products are available to the customer at a substantially reduced price, the answer was going to be 'yes' to any kind of question that they came up with - protection, cross-platform, transparency, efficiency and performance," said Meehan. "It was a natural alliance. You have everything you could possibly imagine covered in regards to data protection for data at rest, data in transit, data being backed up, data being put into a recovery site."
Product details can be viewed at the ASPG Web site and the Innovation Data Processing Web site.
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IBM Debuts New Category of Server for Web 2.0 Computing
IBM has introduced what it describes as a new category of server designed to address the technology needs of companies that use Web 2.0-style computing to operate massive data centers with tens of thousands of servers.
IBM iDataPlex is a new rack system featuring design innovations in cooling and efficiency that can help replace the inefficient "white-box" servers commonly used by Internet companies. As consumers demand richer content and more immediate access to Web-based applications, iDataPlex is intended to allow social network, search, Internet, and online gaming companies to meet this need. iDataPlex is built for stateless computing that effectively turns many separate computers into a pool of shared resources, or "cloud."
iDataPlex more than doubles the number of systems that can run in a single IBM rack, and uses 40 percent less power while increasing the amount of computing that can be done by a factor of five, IBM said. The system can be outfitted with a liquid-cooled wall that enables it to run at "room temperature" with no air conditioning required. The system uses all industry standard components as well as open source software such as Linux to help lower costs, IBM added.
"With iDataPlex, IBM is making Web 2.0-style computing more efficient and commercializing it for Internet companies and other high performance segments like financial services and research," said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM Systems and Technology Group, at the time of the announcement. "iDataPlex can provide a foundation that companies can build on to provide improved services to Web users around the world."
Each iDataPlex system can be made to order and arrive to the client integrated and ready to run from the factory. This delivery model also helps to keep the cost of iDataPlex below that of a comparable number of "white box" systems, according to IBM. Among early clients who have adopted or are actively considering iDataPlex are Web 2.0 companies and other organizations from China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, including Yahoo! and Texas Tech University, said IBM.
iDataPlex will be available in the U.S. and Canada in June and globally by the end of the year, IBM said. For more information, go here.
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Symphoniq Ships User Monitoring Solution for Rich Internet Applications
Symphoniq Corp., a provider of end-user performance monitoring solutions, has released new software designed to provide visibility into Web applications including AJAX, Flash/Flex and Silverlight. The new package, TrueView 2.0, monitors how usage and performance are affecting end-users, and now includes support for major rich Internet applications (RIA) platforms.
As businesses rapidly adopt Web 2.0 technologies to drive customer loyalty and revenue growth through a richer user experience, Symphoniq has observed, they often experience unforeseen performance issues. TrueView 2.0 represents the evolution of the vendor's technology to address the changing needs of the market, allowing Symphoniq's customers to optimize their Web application and infrastructure performance, according to Hon Wong, CEO and co-founder of Symphoniq.
TrueView 2.0 is intended to help organizations to ensure end-user performance levels for their rich Internet applications via tagging and tracing problem transactions to provide visibility in heterogeneous environments. It is a comprehensive way to provide an early warning system as well as a quick response system for IT to manage a very complex environment, Wong told 5 Minute Briefing.
TrueView 2.0 offers support for monitoring popular Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, Flash and Silverlight from the browser; support for tagging and tracing page and non-page based requests through every tier of an application stack, isolating performance problems at the server, service, method call or SQL query level; and support across heterogeneous environments, including J2EE and .NET.
Additionally, the new release offers an enhanced user interface that leverages Web 2.0 technology to provide a richer set of data to the people who need it, both on the business and technical side. With the new interface, Symphoniq's customers can interact with the data, creating dashboards and charts in order to create environments for different viewing audiences, said Wong. It is "a very intuitive, very interactive way" to communicate very complex data related to system and application performance."
TrueView 2.0, built from the vendor’s TRUE technology is immediately available. For more information, go here.
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