Breaking News - NEC Expands Intel Processor-Based Server Offerings
NEC Corporation of America, a provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, plans to announce tomorrow the expansion of its server product line. The company plans to unveil two additions to the NEC Express5800 line, including a new “green” server and a new 4-socket blade server, further extending its line of Intel-based servers.
"NEC America has not been aggressive - in fact really not an entry - into the mainstream server market ever here in North America,” Ken Hertzler, director of departmental server products at NEC Corporation of America, told 5 Minute Briefing. However, he added, “NEC as a corporation in other parts of the world and particularly in Japan - which is where our headquarters are located - has been a major player in the server market for decades."
Over the past eight months, he said, NEC has launched its server product line in North America under the NEC branding. With the product announcements tomorrow, Hertzler said NEC America seeks to communicate to the North American market "that we are filling our server product line out under the NEC branding" on top of an existing OEM business and on top of an existing niche market fault-tolerant business.
According to the company, the NEC Express5800/i20Ra-e1, is designed for businesses of any size with the desire to become more energy efficient. The first in NEC's i-Series product line, it is designed with the new Intel low power chip, lower power consuming memory and redesigned power supply. Finally, the NEC Express5800/140Ba-10 uses the latest high density mounting technology, the vendor said. The new four-way blade is unique to the market because it includes 16 DIMM memory sockets for up to 64GB memory and is especially well suited for virtualization applications, according to the company.
Additionally, a new NEC Series1800 server product line designed for small and medium businesses is expected to be available later this year. The new Series1800 servers are intended to provide operational simplicity, system integrity and continuous availability for businesses. NEC America is expected to launch two Series1800 Pentium models, including the W110T/1 (entry model) and the W110T/2 (mid-model). The Series1800 product line represents the company's "entry into the small office or even the SoHo [small or home] office" market segment, said Hertzler.
The additions to the Express5800 Series are expected to be available in October and the Series1800 servers are expected to be available later in the year. For more information, go here.
Back
to top
Breaking News - HP Announces Consolidation Products as Part of Initiative to "Rethink" Virtualization
HP said today that it plans to ship a new solution that is designed to provide continuous availability of applications by virtualizing the connection between servers and storage to create a consolidated architecture.
HP StorageWorks 4400 Scalable NAS File Services is one component of an assortment of products, services, and solutions HP is announcing to help organizations transform and better manage their data centers by “rethinking” virtualization. HP’s offerings are targeted at introducing virtualization capabilities to applications and operations management; infrastructure barriers; and client architectures.
"There is a trend that seems to be fairly pervasive which is that the deployment of virtualization technologies today is predominantly in pursuit of efficiency goals," Ian Duncan, director of marketing for NAS for HP’s StorageWorks division, told 5 Minute Briefing. However, "there is really an emerging opportunity to use these enabling technologies that virtualization is a huge part of," said Duncan, "to drive business growth."
For example, the File Services solution integrates the HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA4400), file servers, management software and Windows or Linux support to virtualize the connection between servers and storage. The solution aims to lower maintenance costs and mitigate the risk of data loss with advanced replication software.
"What we did with the 4400 is break the connection between server and storage. We virtualized storage and we virtualized the server so what you get is pool of compute resources and a pool of storage," explained Duncan. The virtualized connection results in every server in a network having access to all data storage, so servers and storage become flexible, dynamic pools of resources that can be applied whenever necessary, according to the vendor.
"You actually can get to a point where you have moved from this very fragmented server sprawl model to a consolidated architecture where you can scale performance easily by adding nodes and you can scale capacity easily by adding disks on the back end," said Duncan. StorageWorks 4400 Scalable NAS File Services will be available in the fourth quarter. For more information, go here.
Back
to top
Breaking News - DataDirect Technologies Announces New JDBC Database Drivers
DataDirect Technologies, a data integration vendor and operating company of Progress Software Corp., plans to announce today the availability of version 4.0 of its DataDirect Connect for JDBC database drivers. DataDirect Technologies' data connectivity components provide standards-based data access to all major databases, including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, Informix and MySQL.
The latest release of the JDBC drivers represents "a significant improvement" and includes performance enhancements and developer productivity features, Mark Troester, director of marketing for DataDirect, told 5 Minute Briefing.
DataDirect Connect for JDBC version 4.0 now has full support for the JDBC 4.0 specification, which has "important functionality that makes a lot of what developers have to do interacting with the database much easier," Troester said. For example, he explained, it is much easier to manage pooling, an important optimization technique that is used to either pool connections or to pool statements.
Additionally, he noted, with this release the company has introduced a flexible application failover feature. Flexible application failover is automatically implemented by the DataDirect Connect for JDBC driver, enabling users to choose the level of failover to be deployed for improved application uptime - ranging from simple connection failover to failover support for select based statement. This feature "eliminates a lot of application code that has to be written," explained Troester. The application failover "is a unique capability," he said.
DataDirect Connect for JDBC version 4.0 continues to offer support for new database versions and releases, such as IBM DB2 v. 9.5 and Oracle Database 11g, Troester added. For a detailed list of what's new in release 4.0 of DataDirect Connect for JDBC, go here.
Back
to top
New Embarcadero Release Paints Database Performance History
Embarcadero Technologies announced a new version of Performance Center, a monitoring tool that incorporates features to help DBAs resolve performance issues and improve end-user service satisfaction levels.
"We are pushing the notion of three very simplistic ways to link together performance resolution issues," Greg Keller, Embarcadero's chief evangelist for DatabaseGear products, told 5 Minute Briefing. This includes detection, diagnosis and correction of database performance issues. Performance Center is a detection agent. It "sits there, lights out, 24x7 and just trolls and looks for anomalies that database administrators are interested in looking at."
All of this falls in line with the data explosion problem and the fact that there are too many databases and not enough people resources, said Keller. "Anything that can help tether together lots of infrastructure - in this case databases - and automating a particular job - in this case automating monitoring - is what we are about."
The latest release, version 2.5, enables DBAs to review both current and historical performance information for all monitored databases. Understanding the historical performance spike patterns helps avoid future performance problems. Details on database activities that could be hampering performance, such as memory, I/O, contention, space, network, and other information can be tracked from a single Web-based console that also provides point-in-time health summaries and customizable reports.
New graphical productivity features in Performance Center 2.5 enable DBAs to easily monitor multiple database platforms from a single view. New graphing zoom features and an enhanced Enterprise View with enterprise-wide alert and health status information help mitigate large-scale database monitoring. Also, the addition of configurable alert thresholds, notifications and escalation paths allow users to anticipate database issues and capture a wide array of performance metrics.
Performance Center, like other Embarcadero DatabaseGear tools, offers cross-platform support for IBM DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows, as well as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE). For more information, go here.
Back
to top |
