Cloud Computing Articles
Storage I/O bottlenecks present a major challenge for high performance, data-intensive environments that, until now, required big IT budgets to attempt to eliminate them, Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "If you look at the different emerging markets, especially cloud computing, and you look at their economics, their business model and the different parts of the data center, the one part that breaks their model is the storage part," he explains. "You see all of these relatively inexpensive, very powerful servers connecting to storage that is kind of yesterday's technology, but very expensive."
Posted November 29, 2010
Red Hat, which recently launched the latest major release of its flagship operating platform, has announced ecosystem support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 from leading independent software vendor (ISV) partners. With a simple certification model that allows partners to deploy applications in any environment - physical, virtual and cloud - with a single certification, Red Hat enables its ISV partners to deliver flexible and portable solutions to their customers.
Posted November 23, 2010
Red Hat, which recently launched the latest major release of its flagship operating platform, has announced ecosystem support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 from leading independent software vendor (ISV) partners. With a simple certification model that allows partners to deploy applications in any environment - physical, virtual and cloud - with a single certification, Red Hat enables its ISV partners to deliver flexible and portable solutions to their customers.
Posted November 23, 2010
Sentrigo, Inc., a database security software provider, has announced the latest version of its database vulnerability assessment and security scanning software solution. The new release, Repscan 4.0, available with more flexible pricing options, offers expanded support for cloud-based and open source database platforms, productivity enhancements for database administrators (DBAs), and added management capabilities.
Posted November 23, 2010
Talend, an open source data management software vendor, announced it has acquired Sopera, a provider of open source SOA and middleware platforms, creating a global company specializing in open-source middleware solutions.
Posted November 23, 2010
Pervasive Software, a provider of data integration solutions, has introduced a new release of its flagship product, Pervasive Data Integrator v10, Cloud Edition. Running on the new Pervasive DataCloud2 Fall Release, the hosted integration platform offers a new browser-based design interface and cloud connectivity.
Posted November 23, 2010
The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) held the annual PASS Summit last week drawing 2,814 delegates and 993 pre/post-conference attendees for a total of 3,807 registrations. It is the largest turnout since the inception of the conference, and represents a 25% increase in attendance over 2009. The SQL Server community is growing "and we are very much a part of that community," Rick Heiges, vice president of marketing, PASS, told 5 Minute Briefing. The record conference attendance was not a surprise, he added. "Last year, our numbers were down about 10% but that was actually fantastic because a lot of other shows were down as much as 50%. We knew that we had a strong base to build upon. We saw signs of the economy coming back so when we started to budget for this year we had a good feeling that we would be able to have record attendance because our community is just so passionate about being here and getting together each and every year."
Posted November 16, 2010
Netuitive, Inc., which provides a self-learning analytics platform for cloud management, has announced a new integration with IBM Tivoli, a provider of systems management tool for large enterprises. According to Netuitive, the enhanced, native integration is aligned with all of Tivoli's management features and significantly expands the ability of Netuitive to scale to the size of the IBM Tivoli estate. IBM Tivoli customers can now better leverage Netuitive for automated performance and capacity management in virtualized and cloud environments.
Posted November 15, 2010
OpTier has announced the release of OpTier BTM version 4, a solution for end-to-end business transaction management, from the end-user, cross-application, data center and cloud perspectives.
Posted November 15, 2010
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been notoriously critical of cloud computing - or at least of the way in which the term "cloud" has been applied. He often has expressed his frustration when "cloud" is applied to long established patterns such as software as a service (SaaS), especially when this is done by Salesforce.com. While there's widespread agreement that "cloud" has become a faddish, over-hyped and often abused term, some have speculated that Ellison's obvious frustration has been fueled by Oracle's inability to fully engage in the cloud computing excitement prior to the conclusion of the Sun acquisition.
Posted November 09, 2010
While public clouds have gotten much of the cloud computing attention over the past years, a new Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) survey, conducted by Unisphere Research, finds that private cloud formations are growing in many companies, often outpacing adoption of public cloud services.
Posted November 03, 2010
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced that Sentrigo Hedgehog Enterprise and vPatch solutions are now available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for database audit, protection and breach prevention. Sentrigo's database compliance and security solutions allow organizations to more easily run applications subject to PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SEC regulations and more on Amazon EC2.
Posted November 03, 2010
Microsoft Corp. is partnering with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to the OpenStack project, an open source cloud computing platform. The addition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V will provide organizations and service providers running a mix of Microsoft and non-Microsoft infrastructure with greater flexibility when using OpenStack.
Posted November 02, 2010
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced that Sentrigo Hedgehog Enterprise and vPatch solutions are now available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for database audit, protection and breach prevention. Sentrigo's database compliance and security solutions allow organizations to more easily run applications subject to PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SEC regulations and more on Amazon EC2.
Posted November 02, 2010
CA Technologies today announced CA Automation Suite, a package of new and enhanced products and solutions that offers dynamic deployment and elastic scaling of IT infrastructure and services by automating, orchestrating, integrating and standardizing the provisioning and management of physical, virtual and cloud resources.
Posted October 18, 2010
Compuware Corporation has announced a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based application performance management (APM) solution that provides visibility from what it calls the "first mile" (the data center) to the "last mile" (the end user). Compuware's Gomez First Mile, together with Gomez outside-in monitoring, is intended to enable organizations whose businesses depend on web applications to quickly assess the business impact of a problem.
Posted October 18, 2010
IBM expanded its CloudBurst family of pre-integrated cloud service delivery platforms with a POWER7-based hardware appliance, as well as separately offering the software to run on currently installed IBM and non-IBM systems.
Posted October 18, 2010
Actuate Corporation, developers of the open source BIRT business intelligence environment, announced ActuateOne, a product suite for rapidly developing and deploying custom BI applications and information applications. ActuateOne, the vendor says, is based upon one design, one server and one user experience to improve developer productivity, optimize the end user experience within a unified environment, and deploy from on-premises to the cloud. "ActuateOne is our latest product delivering value-added features around BIRT," Nobby Akiha, senior vice president of marketing for Actuate, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 12, 2010
Cloud computing offers the promise of greater agility, resource optimization, and user performance, yet many businesses are understandably leery about jumping onto the cloud bandwagon until they have assurances that hosted resources will be secure. In fact, security concerns are the main obstacle to widespread cloud computing adoption among enterprises today. Before taking advantage of these capabilities, businesses need to assure users they have a simple way to access all their applications, and trust that their information is secure in the cloud.
Posted October 12, 2010
Reinforcing their OEM partnership, CommVault and Dell have introduced the Dell PowerVault DL Backup to Disk Appliance, powered by CommVault with Simpana 8. This latest addition to the Dell PowerVault product line provides integrated data management with scalability, cloud support, faster throughput, optimized deduplication and a smaller form factor for increased cost savings and operational efficiencies.
Posted October 05, 2010
InterSystems Corporation will next week roll out a new version of its Caché high-performance object database. The new release targets the growing demand by CIOs for economical high availability by introducing database mirroring, while also now addressing Java developers' need for high-volume high-performance processing combined with persistent storage for event processing systems. Robert Nagle, InterSystems vice president for software development, recently chatted with 5 Minute Briefing about the release and the new features it offers. Commenting on the growing interest in NoSQL databases, Nagle observes that many of the beneficial characteristics people see in NoSQL are in fact true of Caché - a flexible data model and zero DBA cost. "But for us, what is unique is that it is not NoSQL, it is that it needs to be SQL - without the overhead of relational technology - because I think SQL is extremely important for almost every class of application that is deployed."
Posted September 22, 2010
InterSystems Corporation will next week roll out a new version of its Caché high-performance object database. The new release targets the growing demand by CIOs for economical high availability by introducing database mirroring, while also addressing Java developers' need for high-volume high-performance processing combined with persistent storage for event processing systems. Robert Nagle, InterSystems vice president for software development, recently chatted with 5 Minute Briefing about the release and the new features it offers. Commenting on the growing interest in NoSQL databases, Nagle observes that many of the beneficial characteristics people see in NoSQL are in fact true of Caché - a flexible data model and zero DBA cost. "But for us, what is unique is that it is not NoSQL, it is that it needs to be SQL - without the overhead of relational technology - because I think SQL is extremely important for almost every class of application that is deployed."
Posted September 21, 2010
CiRBA Inc., a provider of data center intelligence software, has introduced a new version of its flagship software that combines cross-platform analytics with flexible role-based views of environments through customizable dashboards. Version 6.0 of CiRBA provides an enterprise solution for capacity and efficiency management, with cross-functional dashboards that enable executives, capacity managers, and operations to collectively manage efficiency and risk across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure.
Posted September 20, 2010
Symantec Corp. announced the availability of Symantec Enterprise Vault 9.0 and Enterprise Vault Discovery Collector, technology to help organizations store, manage and discover information across the enterprise. The vendor also announced NetBackup 5000 deduplication appliance and cloud storage for NetBackup and Backup Exec to help organizations reduce their data storage footprints and more effectively leverage cloud-based data storage services.
Posted September 20, 2010
Bluewolf is teaming with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to exhibit their joint services for Oracle technology at Oracle OpenWorld next week.
Posted September 15, 2010
CA Technologies has expanded its support for Amazon Web services (AWS), bundling a number of key products into a service offering to help manage and monitor cloud implementations through Amazon. The CA products now supporting Amazon include CA Virtual, CA Service Automation, CA Service Assurance and Nimsoft Monitoring Solution, which can now be plugged into the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
Posted September 14, 2010
The promises of public cloud computing - pay as you go, infinite scale and outsourced administration - are compelling. However, for most enterprises, security, geography and risk mitigation concerns make private cloud platforms more desirable. Enterprise customers like the idea of on-demand provisioning, but are often unwilling to take the performance, security and risk drawbacks of moving applications to remote hardware that is not under their direct control.
Posted September 07, 2010
Oracle is a fast-changing company, and in recent years, its pace has accelerated to blinding speed. The software giant has expanded well beyond its relational database roots to encompass applications, management tools, service-oriented architecture and middleware, and even hardware. There are now many components to Oracle - from three major databases, to enterprise resource applications, to web applications to development languages to open source desktop tools.
Posted September 07, 2010
Quest Software, Inc. announced today that it has added Apache Cassandra, an open source NoSQL database, to its list of supported NoSQL platforms with the second beta release of Toad for Cloud Databases. Toad now supports data access and management for Apache Cassandra, Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft Azure Table Services, Apache HBase, and any open database connectivity-enabled relational database.
Posted September 07, 2010
Oracle recently hosted a 6-hour online forum to showcase its strategy for virtualization. Oracle's Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, and John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, kicked off the agenda of analyst, customer and product webcasts, by explaining how Oracle delivers a complete virtualization offering, all the way from desktop through the data center and why that approach provides more customer benefits than point solutions.
Posted September 02, 2010
At VMworld 2010, HP yesterday introduced HP CloudStart, an all-in-one solution for deploying an open and flexible private cloud environment within 30 days.
Posted August 31, 2010
HP also announced that it has acquired Stratavia, a privately held database and application automation company based in Denver. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to HP, the acquisition of Stratavia will strengthen the HP Software and Solutions portfolio, adding deployment, configuration and management solutions for enterprise databases, middleware and packaged applications. The solutions will help clients simplify application deployment and management in hybrid IT environments, which consist of on-premise, off-premise, physical and virtual environments.
Posted August 31, 2010
At VMworld, Precise unveiled Precise for Cloud, a transaction performance management solution designed to ensure quality of service (QoS) for applications running on private cloud platforms at the Global 5000 and their global ISPs. Precise for Cloud is intended to solve what the company says are most pressing issues facing cloud architects and virtualization managers: application QoS, performance problem isolation, and problem resolution. Now in beta, the product is expected to be generally available before the end of the year.
Posted August 31, 2010
Translattice, a predictive data software startup, has announced a cloud-based computing infrastructure designed to anticipate application and data needs based on policy, usage and geography. Translattice offers data delivery across the network, supported by infrastructure components such as load balancing, application run times, and relational storage that reside on identical, deployed nodes. Capacity and scalability are increased by adding nodes, which may be deployed on-premise, in the cloud, or a combination of both. If a site becomes unreachable due to an outage, geographic redundancy preserves the availability of applications and data, the vendor says.
Posted August 24, 2010
CA Technologies continued its investment in virtualization and cloud management, by announcing the acquisition of privately-held 4Base Technology, a virtualization and cloud infrastructure consulting firm. 4Base will become the CA Virtualization and Cloud Strategy group, a competency practice within the CA Services division. With experience in more than 300 engagements, 4Base will help customers move quickly, pragmatically and successfully from virtualization to cloud by providing strategic advice and implementation expertise.
Posted August 18, 2010
Continuity Software, a provider of disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) management solutions, has announced the general availability of RecoverGuard version 5.2 (v5.2), featuring a Private Cloud Advisor designed to enable customers to ensure availability, recoverability and adherence to industry best practices in the private cloud. "Until about a year ago, no one really used private clouds in the mid and large enterprise for mission-critical systems, but in the last 12 months, we have started to see a shift toward people either deploying such systems or at least planning the deployment of private clouds in the medium and large data centers," Gil Hecht, founder and CEO of Continuity Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted August 18, 2010
IBM announced the zEnterprise mainframe server and a new systems design that allows workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system. "The new mainframe is the fastest enterprise server in the world and represents a giant leap forward in performance," says Tom Rosamilia, general manager for IBM Power and z Systems. "This new dimension in enterprise computing - extending mainframe governance to POWER7 and System x blades integrated into the zEnterprise System architecture - was developed over the past three years with direct involvement from a team of IBM's 30 top customers, which provided direct input at every stage of the development process."
Posted August 11, 2010
IBM announced the zEnterprise mainframe server and a new systems design that allows workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system. "The new mainframe is the fastest enterprise server in the world and represents a giant leap forward in performance," says Tom Rosamilia, general manager for IBM Power and z Systems. "This new dimension in enterprise computing - extending mainframe governance to POWER7 and System x blades integrated into the zEnterprise System architecture - was developed over the past three years with direct involvement from a team of IBM's 30 top customers, which provided direct input at every stage of the development process."
Posted August 11, 2010
CA Technologies announced new identity and access management (IAM) solutions intended to enhance security, ease compliance efforts, and automate IT processes within cloud computing environments. The company released a new version of CA Identity Manager, which extends identity management to cloud applications, as well as leverage CA SiteMinder portfolio to control access to its SaaS applications.
Posted August 10, 2010
First elected to Oracle Applications Users Group board of directors in 2009, David Ferguson became president of the OAUG this year. He talks with DBTA this month about how the users group is getting "back to basics" with educational sessions and networking opportunities as well as the new approaches it is taking to meet its members' evolving needs.
Posted August 10, 2010
Earlier this year, Andy Flower took over as president of the Independent Oracle Users Group from Ian Abramson. With Oracle OpenWorld right around the corner, Flower talks with DBTA about how the IOUG is changing to best meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the expanding Oracle ecosystem, despite what continues to be a difficult economy. For the IOUG, it is "the year of the member" and it all starts with the database, he says.
Posted August 10, 2010
Many see 2010 shaping up as a boom year for cloud computing, with cloud adopters capable of realizing significant reductions in administrative IT costs compared to non-adopters. However, it's not enough to simply develop and implement a cloud strategy. Rather, enterprises must take into account the performance of their cloud-based assets and the impact of the cloud on their end users' and customers' experiences. After all, the apparent cost and elasticity advantages of the cloud won't yield any business benefit if the direct consequence is a poor end user experience. For this reason, businesses considering the cloud must do the due diligence and insist on performance guarantees from cloud service providers that map directly to business objectives - or risk impacting revenue, brand image and customer satisfaction.
Posted August 10, 2010
Unisys has introduced the first in a planned series of managed cloud solutions for its ClearPath family of mainframe servers. ClearPath Cloud Development and Test Solution is a "platform as a service" (PaaS) solution that is intended to extend Unisys' strategy for delivering secure IT services in the cloud and to set the stage for delivery of further ClearPath Cloud solutions. According to Unisys, in its recent online poll, 46% of respondents - the largest single percentage response to any question in the poll - cited development and test environments as the first workloads they would consider moving to the cloud.
Posted August 08, 2010
Aiming to help organizations simplify application security, Oracle today announced Oracle Identity Management 11g, an integrated and open set of best-of-breed components built on a common platform and engineered to deliver integration within and across the suite through a series of common components. As the industry's first "service-oriented security architecture," Oracle Identity Management 11g provides enterprises with shared services for everything from identity administration, password management, authentication and authorization, workflow, encryption, and auditing to simplify application security, Rohit Gupta, vice president of product management for Oracle Identity Management, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted July 21, 2010
Creating standards for cloud computing is key to its future evolution and broader adoption. What is the role of Linux in the cloud? What economic or technological advantages (if any) do open standards-based clouds have? Where else is open source software gaining traction in the cloud, and will customers choose to run a mix of open and 'private-source' software? How does the history of the evolution of Linux relate to the future of the cloud?
Posted July 21, 2010
A new IBM Cloud Computing Competence Center in Ehningen, Germany, will provide a broad range of cloud solutions and services to clients locally and internationally. "The opening of this center places IBM in a strong position to meet the growing demand for cloud solutions and services in the market," states Michael Diemer, general manager, Global Technology Services, IBM Germany. "Meeting the highest standards of technological innovation and data security - which is vital to clients in sensitive areas such as insurance, banking and the public sector - the new facility joins our Cloud Delivery Center in IBM Raleigh, North Carolina as part of our globally integrated cloud delivery network. It will offer local and international clients world-class secure and cost effective cloud capabilities to meet their fast-changing business needs."
Posted July 21, 2010
Did you miss a webcast covering important information about technologies you need to learn more about? IBM offers replays on-demand of webcasts presented by IBM experts and partners.
Posted July 21, 2010
IBM's solutions for New Intelligence - running on Linux - enable you to unlock the insights in your data, without overspending to do so. You can crystallize trends, patterns and anomalies that yield valuable insights without retraining your employees each time your IT needs change.
Posted July 21, 2010
A new IBM Cloud Computing Competence Center in Ehningen, Germany, will provide a broad range of cloud solutions and services to clients locally and internationally. "The opening of this center places IBM in a strong position to meet the growing demand for cloud solutions and services in the market," states Michael Diemer, general manager, Global Technology Services, IBM Germany. "Meeting the highest standards of technological innovation and data security - which is vital to clients in sensitive areas such as insurance, banking and the public sector - the new facility joins our Cloud Delivery Center in IBM Raleigh, North Carolina, as part of our globally integrated cloud delivery network. It will offer local and international clients world-class secure and cost effective cloud capabilities to meet their fast-changing business needs."
Posted July 21, 2010
Creating standards for cloud computing is key to its future evolution and broader adoption. What is the role of Linux in the cloud? What economic or technological advantages (if any) do open standards-based clouds have? Where else is open source software gaining traction in the cloud, and will customers choose to run a mix of open and 'private-source' software? How does the history of the evolution of Linux relate to the future of the cloud
Posted July 21, 2010