Newsletters




Cloud Computing

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud approaches as well as services such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are being embraced for cost efficiency, scalability, and consolidation. Hypervisor technologies, Open Source versus Proprietary Hypervisor technologies, Security, Open Standards, Interoperability, High Availability, and Backup & Recovery are among the issues that are critical to consider when evaluating a move to the cloud.



Cloud Computing Articles

At the recent Oracle OpenWorld event, Oracle announced a series of new enhancements to its Java middleware stack, which incorporates application server and Java tools from last year's BEA acquisition. Dubbed the Oracle Fusion Middleware Application Grid, the offerings are intended to enable faster development and deployments within the Java framework. At the core of Oracle's offerings is WebLogic application server, acquired from BEA, which integrates some functionality of the now discontinued Oracle Application Server.

Posted October 19, 2009

The rising popularity of web 2.0 and cloud computing services has prompted a reexamination of the infrastructure that supports them. More and more people are using web-based communities, hosted services, and applications such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis and blogs. And the number of businesses adopting cloud computing applications such as software as a service and hosted services is climbing swiftly.With all this growth, internet data centers are struggling to handle unprecedented workloads, spiraling power costs, and the limitations of the legacy architectures that support these services. The industry has responded by moving towards a "data center 2.0" model where new approaches to data management, scaling, and power consumption enable data center infrastructures to support this growth.

Posted October 13, 2009

Zmanda, a provider of open source backup and recovery software, has introduced the second generation of its Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) product, which provides new features such as cloud backup of MySQL and SharePoint; geography control; selective restore; and security and performance enhancements.

Posted October 08, 2009

Veryant, a COBOL modernization vendor, announced two new products in its isCOBOL Application Platform Suite (APS), which helps businesses develop, deploy, and modernize COBOL applications. isCOBOL Web Direct 2.0 connects business applications to the cloud, offering the ability to deploy fully interactive Web 2.0 applications on demand as part of Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. isCOBOL SQL Server adds a flexible relational database engine to ISAM files without changing current program code or data. This eliminates the need to choose between maintaining ISAM files or moving to a mainstream RDBMS to meet evolving requirements.

Posted September 28, 2009

Eucalyptus Systems, an open source cloud infrastructure provider, announced the company's first commercial offering, the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE), which enables customers to implement an on-premise cloud with VMware's virtualization technologies, including vSphere, ESX and ESXi.

Posted September 28, 2009

Linux is at the center of computing now as well as computing that is being built for the future, emphasized Bob Sutor, vice president of Open Source and Linux, IBM, in his Monday keynote address at the first annual LinuxCon in Portland, Oregon, hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Posted September 24, 2009

Yesterday, IBM and Canonical introduced a new personal computing software package for netbooks and other thin client devices. Part of IBM's Smart Work Initiative, the new package targets the rising popularity of low-cost netbooks to make IBM's industrial-strength software affordable to new audiences in Africa. This is the first cloud- and premise-based Linux netbook software package offered by IBM and Canonical.

Posted September 24, 2009

IBM has opened a new Africa Innovation Center in Cape Town to foster the development of information technology and business skills and to expand its customer and business partner ecosystem in the region. The IBM Africa Innovation Center in Cape Town will provide local customers, business partners, start-up companies, ISVs, IT professionals, and the academic community with access to training workshops, consulting services, a broad technical infrastructure, as well as hands-on assistance to help solve business challenges and bring new technologies to market.

Posted September 24, 2009

Inna Kuznetsova is Director, IBM Linux Strategy. Her team drives Linux business across IBM, sets business goals and ensures business management system support for them. The team also follows the market trends and identifies key short- and long-term strategies; and works across the broad IBM organization to provide proper coverage of Linux in sales, marketing and product management. Kuznetsova recently talked with Linux Executive Report about IBM's Linux strategy, how the approach has evolved, and what she sees ahead for Linux in the enterprise.

Posted September 24, 2009

Inna Kuznetsova is Director, IBM Linux Strategy. Her team drives Linux business across IBM, sets business goals and ensures business management system support for them. The team also follows the market trends and identifies key short- and long-term strategies; and works across the broad IBM organization to provide proper coverage of Linux in sales, marketing and product management. Kuznetsova recently talked with LinuxLine about IBM's Linux strategy, how the approach has evolved, and what she sees ahead for Linux in the enterprise.

Posted September 24, 2009

At the Sybase Techwave Symposium in Washington, D.C., last month, Sybase announced the availability of its data management and analytics servers, including Sybase SQL Anywhere, Sybase IQ, and Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. With these products, customers will have the ability to quickly develop and deploy on-demand data systems for mobile, analytics and transactional applications.

Posted September 23, 2009

Also at Techwave last month, Sybase announced the newest release of Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) Cluster Edition, its enterprise data management solution that reduces the complexity of deploying a database application across a shared disk server cluster environment.

Posted September 23, 2009

IT management software company CA, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held NetQoS Inc., a provider of network performance management and service delivery solutions, for $200 million.

Posted September 14, 2009

Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, announced availability of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, which the vendor says will be integral to Red Hat's cloud foundation.

Posted September 08, 2009

SpringSource, a Java application infrastructure and management software vendor, has introduced SpringSource Cloud Foundry, a new Enterprise Java Cloud offering that enables developers to deploy and manage Spring, Grails and Java applications within a public cloud environment.

Posted September 08, 2009

CA, Inc. announced that it is bringing enhanced automation and management of existing internal IT infrastructures and external cloud services to the enterprise. CA's Business-Driven Automation, Service Management, Application Performance Management, and Database Management solutions now support the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). CA also plans to extend the capabilities of several Systems Management solutions to support Amazon EC2. The power and flexibility to manage applications in the Amazon EC2 environment as an extension of their enterprise helps customers achieve Lean IT.

Posted August 24, 2009

RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica have announced an integrated solutions stack intended to enable customers to increase agility and lower costs by combining the power of the cloud, a high-performance analytical database, and BI and data integration software. RightScale is a cloud computing management provider and offers a fully automated cloud management platform that enables customers to design, deploy, and manage business-critical applications on the cloud. Vertica provides the analytical database which is based on column-structure architecture. The BI software is provided by open source BI vendor Jaspersoft, and the data integration software by open source vendor Talend. This BI stack is an example of the power of collaboration among vendors to deliver integrated solutions, and by focusing their efforts on delivering BI on the cloud, customers now have tools to help them move quickly with BI projects.

Posted August 18, 2009

SHARE will provide hundreds of enterprise technology professionals with education they need to support their organizations' strategic IT initiatives during the SHARE summer conference August 23-28 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colo.

Posted August 17, 2009

With the SHARE event in Denver coming up this month, 5 Minute Briefing caught up with Pam Taylor to talk about what attendees can expect in terms of hot topics and programs. As important as the online community is, Taylor observes that the in-person event provides unique opportunities for education and networking. "I think we have proof positive from just our experience as an organization that it's not ‘either/or.' It's 'both/and.' There are things you can conduct in a virtual online environment that are highly positive and extremely important and very helpful. But there's also that face-to-face engagement where you have the opportunity to take the conversation in real time in a way that it might not go if you're doing an online kind of exchange."

Posted August 05, 2009

Informatica Corporation, a provider of data integration software, has announced the beta release of Informatica PowerCenter Cloud Edition, a cloud data integration infrastructure that combines the Informatica data integration platform (PowerCenter) with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Complementing this new product is the latest Informatica On Demand offering, PowerCenter Service, which enables IT and business users to remotely execute and manage data integration jobs on Amazon EC2, simply by using an Internet browser.

Posted August 04, 2009

Novell has announced that independent software vendors (ISVs) are demonstrating support for its SUSE Appliance Program, a complete appliance solution that enables ISVs to quickly build, update, configure and go to market with fully supported software and virtual appliances.

Posted July 29, 2009

Bob Sutor, vice president of Open Source and Linux at IBM, will be a featured keynote speaker at the Red Hat Summit 2009. Red Hat's premier annual event will be held September 1-4 in Chicago, providing a unique opportunity to obtain up-to-date information on Red Hat Enterprise Linux products and open source initiatives.

Posted July 29, 2009

Visual i/o, a technology vendor that provides business analytics and and visualization software, has announced a cloud-based Software-as-Service (SaaS) solution that allows employees and managers throughout an enterprise to simultaneously access, visualize, analyze and collaborate with one another on essential data.

Posted July 21, 2009

BMC Software announced it is offering its Business Service Management (BSM) set of services and solutions to facilitate "private cloud" development, and that it is leveraging Amazon Web Services to optimize hybrid IT infrastructure deployments via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Posted July 20, 2009

FastScale Technology today announced the introduction of FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 Enterprise Edition, a platform for building, optimizing, managing and deploying Windows and Red Hat Linux server software for physical, virtual and cloud-based environments.

Posted July 13, 2009

Oracle today announced availability of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. This new version of the middleware suite offers increased functionality across its product portfolio, including new capabilities in Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle WebLogic Suite, Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle Identity Management

Posted July 01, 2009

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc.-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, has announced the availability of Fedora 11, the latest version of its free open source operating system. The Fedora Project, which now has almost 29,000 project members, aims to release a new complete, general-purpose, no-cost operating system approximately every six months.

Posted June 18, 2009

IBM announced a new social networking community, called PartnerWorld Communities, designed to help partners more easily connect and collaborate with each other from anywhere around the world to bring new technologies to market and close sales faster and more efficiently.

Posted June 15, 2009

This is a time of great change for data centers. Technology is advancing and getting smarter, and workloads and performance demands keep growing. For this issue of Database Trends and Applications, we sought a range of industry views on the most profound—and perhaps unexpected—changes reshaping data centers and enterprise it.

Posted June 15, 2009

Virtualization has changed the IT landscape more dramatically than perhaps any other technology introduced over the past decade. Virtualized environments are omnipresent in the modern data center due to their economic advantages in hardware consolidation and manageability.

Posted June 15, 2009

Greenplum, a provider of database software for the next generation of data warehousing and analytics, has unveiled its Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) initiative. The EDC Initiative is a new vision for bringing the power of self-service to data warehousing and analytics, encompassing the primary areas of platform (the EDC platform, based on self-service provisioning, elastic scale and massively parallel processing), methodology (an agile approach to data analytics that embraces large-scale data collection, getting data into the hands of business users, and iterating quickly), and ecosystem (customers and partners that embrace these new capabilities with tools, infrastructure and creative methodologies).

Posted June 09, 2009

TIBCO Software announced TIBCO Silver, an application delivery platform designed specifically for building and deploying cloud applications inside large IT environments.

Posted June 08, 2009

CA has announced the acquisition of certain data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets from Cassatt Corporation, a provider of cloud computing software that helps makes data centers more efficient. Cassatt's Rob Gingell, executive vice president of product development and chief technology officer, and Steve Oberlin, chief scientist and co-founder, have joined CA, along with their team of developers, engineers, and other key employees. In addition, CA has acquired several Cassatt patents and patent applications, as well as other intellectual property.

Posted June 08, 2009

Sybase, Inc. has announced an initiative targeting developers that will enable enterprises to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud computing model to develop, test and deploy various classes of applications including transactional, analytics and mobile applications using Sybase server infrastructure.

Posted May 27, 2009

Both open source software ( OSS) and cloud computing continue to experience strong interest and growth despite the economic downturn. Clearly, both provide the promise of reduced operating and software licensing costs. For instance, corporations looking to reduce the cost incurred by Microsoft Office licensing are looking more closely at the open source OpenOffice alternative, or at Google's online application suite, Google Apps. There's understandable resistance to moving from the rich experience offered by Microsoft to these lower-cost alternatives, but resistance has a way of disappearing in the face of financial imperatives.

Posted May 15, 2009

Hubspan, a leading provider of business integration solutions, and IBM have announced WebSpan, a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration platform. WebSpan combines the Hubspan on-demand integration platform and IBM WebSphere integration software into a single platform that can help businesses reduce the cost, time and complexity associated with traditional integration and business process automation solutions.

Posted May 12, 2009

As part of the announcement of its recent WebSphere Cloudburst appliance, IBM announced a toolset that helps automate the deployment and configuration of applications for the cloud. IBM Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere is designed to optimize configuration and application deployment to customize WebSphere CloudBurst patterns.

Posted May 11, 2009

Pentaho Corporation, a provider of commercial open source business intelligence and data integration software, has announced Pentaho Data Integration 3.2, a new release of Pentaho's extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool with enhancements for cloud- and cluster-based ETL, as well as new product features such as additional transformation capabilities and connections to new data sources. Pentaho Data Integration is already in production on the Amazon cloud supporting cloud-based data warehouses, and now with

Posted May 05, 2009

IBM is holding its annual IMPACT SOA event this week, and despite rumors of the "death" of SOA, it's clear IBM sees SOA as an important strategy across its product line.

Posted May 04, 2009

IBM announced two new products that allow customers to extend their investment in service-oriented architecture (SOA) into a cloud services environment. These new offerings enable clients to easily create application environments that can be deployed and managed in a "private cloud."

Posted May 04, 2009

IBM has announced version 9.7 of DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software, focused on transactional performance improvements in the DB2 database, and on expansion of analytics to XML data in the InfoSphere Data Warehouse. Both new products also reduce an even greater amount of space needed to store data, helping clients to gain significant savings on related costs including energy. This offering is also the industry's first database software that will deliver business analytics capabilities for both relational and XML data at the same time, according to IBM.

Posted April 28, 2009

rPath announced an updated solution for automating the packaging and management of applications that are ready to run in traditional, virtual or cloud-based environments.

Posted April 27, 2009

Schooner Information Technology, Inc., a provider of data access appliances for information-intensive Web 2.0 and cloud computing data centers, says it emerged from "stealth mode" last week to move into the market with data access appliances in collaboration with IBM.

Posted April 20, 2009

The idea of "SQL Server in the cloud" is all the rage as I write this article. Many SQL Server experts already predict the demise of the IT data center and a complete upending of the current state of our industry, in which large enterprises can spend millions of dollars on SQL Server licenses, hardware and staff. I have to admit, when I first heard about this idea, I was ecstatic. What could be better for an enterprise than to have all the goodness of a SQL Server database with none of the hardware or staffing issues? However, on deeper examination, there is much about which to be cautious.

Posted April 15, 2009

Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), has announced Pentaho BI Suite Version 3, aimed at making it cost effective for businesses to deploy easy-to-use, robust BI capabilities to users throughout the organization. Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 allows business users to easily create interactive dashboards-including Adobe Flash-based visualizations-without training. Also, based on existing customer successes and growing customer demand, Pentaho is introducing a Cloud Computing Edition, packaged for deployment on the Amazon EC2 Cloud, providing companies with another way to drive down the cost of bringing BI into their organizations.

Posted March 31, 2009

Vertica Systems has announced a new version of its Vertica Analytic Database packaged as a virtualized appliance to run in VMware environments. The new Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database is a simple-to-deploy, self-contained software package that runs its own Linux operating system and copy of Vertica, on any VMware-supported hardware as if it were a physical computer.

Posted February 24, 2009

IBM revealed a series of new products, services, clients and partnerships for the next phase of its "Blue Cloud" initiative. The cross-company portfolio of cloud computing offerings for business includes server capacity on demand, online data protection, and Lotus e-mail and collaboration software.

Posted February 23, 2009

few years ago, it seemed as though the days of the "micro-ISV"-very small Independent software vendors consisting of one or two developers-were over. The role once played by shareware windows applications had been supplanted by free web applications financed by advertising revenue. The start-up costs for such web applications-including funding a scalable and reliable web hosting infrastructure-were beyond the reach of most small software entrepreneurs.

Posted February 15, 2009

In the classic comedy, "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy," a frustrated Ford Prefect can't understand why a bunch of marketing consultants shipwrecked on prehistoric earth can't invent the wheel.

Posted January 15, 2009

The old maxim, "may you live in interesting times" certainly holds true for data managers and professionals these days. The year 2008 was full of changes and challenges, and 2009 promises even more. To look ahead on the challenges emerging, we canvassed industry leaders across the IT landscape to get their views on what to expect in the year ahead.

Posted January 05, 2009

Pages
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160

Sponsors