NEON Announces IMS Solutions for zIIP Processors
NEON Enterprise Software, a provider of enterprise data management solutions, has announced that NEON Eclipse Reorganization Utilities now support IBM's z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP). By offloading more than 70 percent of processing to IBM's zIIP, the company states, the NEON products provide a cost-effective solution for IMS database maintenance.
While hardware has become less expensive over the last two to three decades, the rising cost of software has had the effect of deterring customers from upgrading their hardware, Tom Harper, software developer at NEON, observed to 5 Minute Briefing. That’s because vendors historically price software based on the general-purpose formula of millions of instructions per second (MIPS) of the machine. Companies that want to upgrade their mainframe may face steep software fee increases.
With the zIIP, "IBM designed it to be disruptive in the marketplace," said Harper. zIIP processors free up general computing capacity and lower the total cost of computing by moving selected types of workload from general-purpose processors to zIIP processors. Customers incur no additional software costs for zIIP processing, resulting in reduced software costs and additional processing capacity, which can eliminate or delay the need to upgrade.
"A lot of the smaller, more nimble software vendors who still have development staffs have come out with products that exploit the zIIP processors," said Harper. "Essentially in order to write software that runs on a zIIP processor, you have to redesign and essentially rewrite all of your software."
The NEON Eclipse Reorganization Utilities include iUnload, iLoad, iBuild, iCheck, iSurvey, iExtract, iReorg and iCopy. Version 5.1 of iCheck, iSurvey, iBuild, iUnload, iExtract, iLoad and iReorg include initial support for zIIP processors. According to NEON, with NEON Eclipse Reorganization Utilities, it is possible that a customer could experience capacity gains of more than 70 percent for some IMS database maintenance processing. NEON is planning a release in the second half of 2008 that will provide 97 percent zIIP processing support for all the NEON Eclipse Reorganization Utilities, including iCopy.
IBM is providing a free 90-day trial of its zIIP processors, as part of its Specialty Engine Loaner Program. For more information from NEON, go here.
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FalconStor Introduces ‘Thin’ Disaster Recovery
FalconStor Software, provider of network storage solutions, has announced it is enhancing its line of storage and recovery products with a common virtualization platform, enabling what the company calls ‘thin’ disaster recovery. The vendor said it is powering its Network Storage Server (NSS), Continuous Data Protector (CDP), and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solutions on an optimized version of its IPStor virtualization platform.
FalconStor also said it is formalizing its market positioning of the FalconStor NSS, CDP and VTL as three distinct offerings that all run on the IPStor platform, Peter Eicher, director of product marketing, FalconStor, told 5 Minute Briefing. In the past, IPStor was positioned as both a platform and a product, making messaging difficult. The company is not going to market anymore with IPStor but rather with these three different offerings that fit more easily into pre-conceived silos in the market. "Since these terms are already well understood, it saves us a whole lot of introductory discussion by putting these things into those categories," said Eicher.
FalconStor's thin disaster recovery leverages thin provisioning, thin mirroring and thin replication volumes to deliver what FalconStor describes as an industry-first thin, end-to-end disaster recovery infrastructure, resulting in management and cost efficiencies. With FalconStor's Thin DR technology, storage allocations at the data center and the disaster recovery site no longer have to be identical.
FalconStor's Thin DR feature uses the IPStor platform to deliver any to any heterogeneous storage replication and MicroScan technology with built-in deduplication and compression to minimize the amount of data transferred at the granular disk-sector level. Customers can create a virtual volume to match the size of each data-provisioning request, and allocate a smaller amount of actual physical disk space, assigning additional physical disk space automatically as needed.
Thin provisioning reduces storage costs, thin replication reduces bandwidth costs and thin mirroring reduces over-provisioning of storage, all saving disk space and power consumption. With the high rates of data growth combined with escalating concerns about power consumption, Eicher noted, "It is very important now not to waste storage by over-allocation."
The enhanced IPStor platform also enables the construction of disk-based, data protection storage appliances using off-the-shelf components to create a virtual appliance integrated with the VMware ESXi. Small to medium-sized businesses can now create a virtual backup server on the fly for instant data recovery and business continuity. For additional details on the FalconStor IPStor platform, go here.
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HP Simplifies Database Archiving Deployments
HP has introduced an enhanced version of its software designed to help customers better retain, search and retrieve critical database information, from creation through destruction.
Version 6.0 of HP Database Archiving software is intended to make it easier to deploy database archiving, Kevin O'Malley, product marketing manager for HP, told 5 Minute Briefing. "All companies want to do database archiving if they are seeing significant growth in their databases – and their applications are either bogging down, or causing high management, storage and server costs," he said. "But the biggest impediment has been: how easily can you actually deploy an archiving solution on top of that? In other words, how easily can you start to actively move out data and business transactions?"
The new release includes a visual design environment to help simplify deployments of database archiving projects and reduce costs. The software also extends database coverage to include Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and provides new capabilities for Oracle. Plans for DB2 are also on the roadmap for next year, O'Malley said. "We are going at it systematically because our integration with these databases is very deep."
HP Designer module, the visual design environment of HP Database Archiving, enables users to rapidly model application transactions such as purchase orders and sales orders, and apply business rules and corporate retention policies. This allows organizations to "get away from a lot of database coding complexities," said O'Malley. By reducing the need for specialized skills during implementation, the module enables fast deployment of database archiving projects with existing resources. For example, ISVs and SIs can use HP Database Archiving software, including HP Designer and a developer's kit, to build and support integrations with third party and custom applications.
In addition to new support for SQL Server 2005, HP Database Archiving provides extended capabilities for Oracle databases, enabling Oracle customers using partitioning as part of their information management strategies to now use HP Database Archiving to archive complete sets of data spanning both partitioned and non-partitioned tables.
"We have also made some other improvements in the XML archiving area, and that tends to be more about long-term preservation of data," said O'Malley. "We have added an access layer so that customers can easily get at their XML archives, with their standard business intelligence tools that they use today against their standard applications. We think that that access will open things up a little bit more and make archiving more ubiquitous." More information is available here.
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IONA Introduces New Data Services Development Tool
IONA Technologies, a provider of service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions, announced the latest release of a development tool that enhances the collaboration and capabilities of SOA development teams. Artix Data Services, designed for building model-driven data services, is a key component of IONA's Artix advanced SOA infrastructure suite, which "is used for service enablement, creating services, connecting services, mediating services, orchestration and governing services," Ray Christopher, senior product marketing manager for IONA, told 5 Minute Briefing. Artix Data Services shortens the data services development, test and maintenance lifecycle and improves the quality of data as it flows across heterogeneous environments.
Artix Data Services provides a graphical development tool to model data structures and semantics, and configure reusable, real-time data validation and transformation services. The new release has three key themes, Christopher noted. They include improved productivity, enhanced collaboration between the IT and the business group, and, third, broader platform support.
A new transport abstraction layer enables rapid integration of over 50 common message transports, reducing the need for custom coding and making it easier for developers to change underlying transports, the vendor said. Developers can test transports from within Artix Data Services Designer, eliminating the need for multiple testing tools and reducing the data services development and test lifecycle. "It facilitates the whole data interoperability process," Christopher said.
Additionally, "smart mappings” offer developers new productive visual cues including auto-layout and transform route highlighting, intelligent data conversion to automatically bridge different data types, and a search feature to quickly navigate the data model. "In combination, all these features just make it easier to manage large XML and non-XML data sources."
In the area of improved collaboration between business and IT, there is an "aliases" feature, said Christopher. "As we know, IT has their set of terms and business usually speaks in the terms of business processes, so we’re allowing the ability to have one data model but different views of it." The aliases feature allows users to define alternate names for message structures to more meaningful terms for the business user or a regional localized dialect, facilitating data model collaboration enterprise-wide and with business partners. The new release also includes support for Apple OS X and Solaris, in addition to previously supported Windows and Linux. For more on the new release of Artix Data Services, go here
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Opalis Announces IT Process Automation Solution for CA Spectrum
Opalis Software, a provider of IT process automation software, announced certification of Opalis Integration Server integration with CA Spectrum, a network fault management product that provides proactive management of the network infrastructure through root cause analysis, impact analysis, event correlation, and service level management. The new release enables customers to automate fault detection and management of device configurations and provides tools to capture, modify, load, and verify configurations for hundreds of devices from leading network equipment vendors.
"Opalis is committed to providing integrations that provide a very wide breadth of coverage for enterprise customers," said Charles Crouchman, CTO for Opalis Software, in making the announcement. "With Opalis and the Integration Pack for CA Spectrum, enterprise IT organizations realize true value by now being able to automate repetitive, time consuming tasks such as corrective actions, diagnostic routines, and message response, saving a great deal of time and money for enterprises and improving service delivery for IT."
The Opalis Integration Pack for CA Spectrum allows users to monitor for key alarms in Spectrum. Additionally, it allows the user to integrate those alarms into Opalis automated processes and enables the creation of events from Spectrum alarms that trigger additional automated processes. Opalis workflows can automate diagnostic or corrective actions, creating trouble tickets pre-filled with any existing Spectrum alarm data and collected diagnostics. For more about Opalis, go here. For more about CA, go here.
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IBM Announces Faster-to-Market Development Tools
IBM has announced new enhancements to its Telelogic portfolio of software and systems development tools designed to speed up the application development process. The new enhancements – part of IBM’s newly acquired Telelogic line – enable developers to work across global teams, cutting development time and cost. IBM acquired Telelogic in April, and the company is now formally known as Telelogic, an IBM Company.
The new enhancements to Telelogic’s portfolio provide a common change management environment for diverse teams, enhanced collaboration capabilities, SOA governance, and model-driven workflow. "Customers need to respond proactively to the changing dynamics of their markets faster than their competitors," said Ingemar Ljungdahl, acting president and CEO of Telelogic. "With these new enhancements from Telelogic, IBM is helping organizations turn change into a competitive advantage by adapting their systems and software development at the speed of global business, while ensuring control over the process and outcome."
Telelogic Dashboard 3.5 provides managers project status and trend information to measure progress across multiple application development projects. Another upgraded feature, Telelogic Change 5.0, enables global development teams to adopt consistent, proven processes as best practices as they move from project to project. Organizations can unite development teams around a single change management product, even if they use diverse configuration management solutions and are based around the world. This allows management to enforce common processes and collect consistent metrics, without the potential risk and burden associated with SCM tool migration, the vendor said.
Another new feature, Telelogic DOORS, enables systems development teams to define, review, analyze and change requirements, trace progress toward goals, collaborate and validate results. New capabilities include a Rich Internet Application that promotes the review and discussion of requirements from anywhere in the world by providing Web access to the DOORS database, as well as new visual methods for managing complexity in requirements and their relationships.
The vendor also announced integration between its Telelogic System Architect and Telelogic Change offerings, which now provide a layer of granularity for change management as well as a formal approach to governance for projects and related initiatives, including SOA and business process analysis. In addition, enhanced integration between System Architect and Telelogic Tau provide a model-driven workflow that helps customers implement an enterprise-wide approach to SOA. For more information about Telelogic, click here.
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