Data Center Management Articles
Companies are facing serious external challenges managing aging IT infrastructures and application portfolios. To decrease costs and risks while increasing flexibility and innovation, many are turning to cloud technologies. By adopting cloud platforms, companies enable the delivery of "everything as-a-service." This empowers the workforce with faster any-device access to solutions that are available, affordable and ready to use. However, in order to realize cloud computing benefits, organizations must first transform and modernize their applications portfolios. Modernization is a key to business success and a significant challenge for chief information officers (CIOs).
Posted November 13, 2012
Backup appliances now have some maturity. How mature are they really? Unfortunately, not very. Why? Backup appliance vendors have resorted to bundling rather than architecting purpose-built appliances. Bundling simply packages a server and storage with off-the-shelf software. And, now, these "immature" bundles are starting to crumble the appliance revolution.
Posted November 13, 2012
IT process automation software company UC4 Software and CollabNet, a provider of enterprise cloud development and Agile ALM products and services, are jointly developing, marketing, selling and supporting a DevOps platform. The companies say the partnership supports their mutual goals of driving agility and collaboration across the entire IT organization by offering a single, common platform that manages all aspects of emerging DevOps and continuous delivery initiatives.
Posted November 12, 2012
iWave Software, a provider of storage automation software, has released a new version of its automation product that is intended to lower storage administration costs by allowing end users to provision, extend and reclaim enterprise storage, while enabling storage administrators to retain total control of the automated storage services through storage automation policies. "The whole idea behind Storage Automator is to automate some of the mundane tasks associated with enterprise storage management and to empower end users to actually perform those tasks. It is really attempting to help companies and organizations deliver storage as a service to storage users," Brent Rhymes, CEO of iWave Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted November 12, 2012
CA Technologies, an enterprise IT solutions provider, has updated its mainframe application tuning tool, which now provides a consolidated view of enterprise applications through a graphical interface. CA Mainframe Application Tuner 9.0 is designed to help administrators more quickly resolve performance inefficiencies in z/OS-based systems. "Any application program, no matter what platform it's running on, can experience performance problems," Mark Combs, distinguished senior vice president for CA Technologies' Mainframe Customer Solutions Unit, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted November 12, 2012
SOA Software, a provider of SOA governance, cloud and enterprise API management products, launched what it calls one of the industry's most scalable and capable API developer platforms. The new SOA Software Open platform brings app developers and API providers together to build apps with scalable APIs. The service enables companies to manage their APIs for either private or public developer communities.
Posted November 12, 2012
BMC Software announced a new enterprise software solution which it says enables employees to take personal control over the delivery of the IT services and information they need - anytime, anywhere, from any device. The BMC MyIT solution is designed to be used from any device, delivering a personalized portfolio of technology and services to each individual employee, including a content locker, mobile corporate app store and other location-aware services and solutions. MyIT integrates with the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite.
Posted November 12, 2012
Agiliance, Inc., a provider of solutions for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs, is shipping a risk management solution that integrates the COBIT framework intended to enable organizations, in automated fashion, to link business goals to IT goals, use metrics and maturity models to measure their progress, and assign governance responsibilities to appropriate business and IT process owners. This new content pack also improves regulatory compliance monitoring and reporting.
Posted November 12, 2012
Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernization solutions, is shipping a free-of-charge Enterprise Developer Personal Edition product. An integrated development environment (IDE) for IBM mainframe applications, Enterprise Developer Personal Edition is an entry-level version of the full Micro Focus Enterprise Developer product for IT development professionals and students. The toolset offers a choice of Eclipse or Visual Studio IDE to develop enterprise-class mainframe and distributed applications.
Posted November 12, 2012
In a new survey of 207 IT and data executives, respondents report that their organizations are behind the curve when it comes to managing the risks that could come from exposing live data to less secure settings—including development departments and outside contractors. This is an Achilles' heel that is being overlooked in data security efforts. The survey, which drew responses from the membership of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by IBM. The executive summary of the report titled "Testing the Bounds of Data Governance: 2012 IOUG Test Development & QA Survey" is publicly available - and IOUG members may access the full report from the IOUG website.
Posted November 07, 2012
Oracle has announced general availability of Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1. Oracle Solaris 11 is the first operating system built for cloud, Charlie Boyle, senior director of Solaris product marketing, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We have taken lessons learned from our customers and feature requests and built those into Solaris 11.1 to enhance our cloud platform." In addition, Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 extends high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of Oracle Solaris and includes virtual cluster features supporting efficient application consolidation.
Posted November 07, 2012
Oracle announced the latest generation of its mainframe virtual tape system, which the company says is the first and only mainframe virtual tape storage system to provide a single point of management for the entire system that leverages the security of the mainframe environment. StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager 6 is designed to manage data and storage resources with automated, policy-driven management that simplifies deployment and streamlines ongoing tape operations for data protection, disaster recovery and archive.
Posted November 07, 2012
A new software as a service solution from HP, Service Anywhere, aims to help organizations more quickly resolve IT incidents, while ensuring availability of critical IT systems. HP Service Anywhere provides service desk capabilities, including handling of inbound requests and IT service configuration as well as incident, problem and change management.
Posted October 29, 2012
Sepaton, Inc. is shipping a next-generation data protection platform that features Hitachi Data Systems HUS 100 storage arrays for 25% more capacity, delivering what Sepaton says is 350% more single system capacity than other system on the market. Sepaton's S2100-ES3 series 2922 purpose-built appliance, with version 6.3 software, "is an extremely large system that is designed for the largest enterprises," Peter Quirk, director of product management, at Sepaton, tells 5 Minute Briefing.In addition, with the advanced capabilities provided in the new appliance, there is the advantage of being able to protect up to 2 petabytes of data, notes Florin Dejeu, director of production management for Sepaton.
Posted October 29, 2012
IBM announced a tough third-quarter 2012, with revenues down across most sectors, with the exception of Websphere. For the quarter, IBM saw $3.8 billion in net profit on total revenues of $24.7 billion. The company's revenues were down 5% from the third quarter of 2011. Currency negatively impacted revenue growth by nearly $1 billion, the company adds.
Posted October 29, 2012
GT Software, a provider of enterprise modernization solutions, announced that it has joined the partner program for Rackspace Hosting, a relationship that provides a cloud infrastructure and services program that enables organizations to take legacy mainframe applications, data and processing to the Rackspace cloud environment
Posted October 29, 2012
Avere Systems, a provider of optimized network attached storage (NAS), announced its intent to develop a new joint solution with Fujitsu to provide customers with 100TB of capacity and 100,000 IOPs for $100,000 (US). Labeled the "100/100/100" bundle, the new solution marries the Fujitsu Core filer with UDS NAS controllers and ETERNUS DX80 S2 Disk Storage System with a two-node Avere FXT 3100 Edge filer cluster. "Avere's Edge filers give customers the ability to easily scale performance for the most demanding application workloads, while the Fujitsu storage systems deliver high capacity along with rich data management functionality," says Bill King, executive vice president, Platform Products Group of Fujitsu America.
Posted October 29, 2012
Attachmate Corporation, a provider of web-to-host solutions, announced it has updated its family of terminal emulation and PC X server software for connecting desktop and mobile users to data center systems. Compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8 Certified, Attachmate's new terminal emulator software - Attachmate Reflection 2011 R3 - connects users to enterprise applications running on IBM mainframes (including the new IBM zEnterprise EC12), IBM System i, UNIX/Linux servers and HP NonStop.
Posted October 29, 2012
Power Analytics Corporation has completed a software integration and license agreement with Envirotrol, a provider of building management systems. Power Analytics integrated its software, Paladin Gateway and Paladin DesignView, with Envirotrol's Niagara-based open platform to present visualization of automation projects and process environments
Posted October 29, 2012
Compuware Corporation, a technology performance company, announced pricing for what it says is the industry's first deep transaction management solution for optimizing performance of Apache Hadoop applications. Compuware APM's dynaTrace Enterprise for Hadoop will be offered starting at just $1,000 per Hadoop Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
Posted October 29, 2012
The recent explosion of mobile applications has dramatically altered the consumer landscape, making it the norm for users and customers alike to expect access and support anytime, anywhere. With Cisco recently reporting that mobile-connected devices are set to exceed the world's population this year, it's no surprise that the surge is overflowing into the enterprise. While there are a few leading innovators in enterprise mobility, the vast majority of businesses are still struggling to take the first steps towards a streamlined strategy. The question is no longer "Do we?" but "How do we?"
Posted October 24, 2012
Application performance management (APM) software provider Precise has announced the availability of Precise 9.5, a major product release designed to help organizations deliver a better experience for customers using their cloud and mobile applications. Precise 9.5 rapidly detects and analyzes application problems resulting from server and storage virtualization resource contention, and also addresses the challenge of managing mobile traffic growth. The new release focuses on three key themes, all with the common goal of identifying and resolving potential problems before they can affect the customer experience or cause an outage, Sherman Wood, vice president of product at Precise, tells DBTA.
Posted October 24, 2012
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 was recently introduced with capabilities for deploying and managing business applications in an enterprise private cloud, such as Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS), enhanced business application management, and integrated hardware-software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. According to Oracle, "engineered-together management" is especially important for a consolidation platform such as Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, where multiple business applications need to run reliably and securely. In addition, as a result of demand from customers leveraging Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, a new IOUG Management Special Interest Group (SIG) has been created.
Posted October 16, 2012
Research teams from CornellUniversity and Microsoft are setting forth a proposal for building data centers without wires or cables. "Conventional data centers, based on wired networks, entail high wiring costs, suffer from performance bottlenecks, and have low resilience to network failures," the researchers say. Instead, they propose a new methodology for building wire-free data centers based on emerging 60GHz RF technology. Ultimately, they claim, wireless data centers can deliver "higher aggregate bandwidth, lower latency, and substantially higher fault tolerance than a conventional wired datacenter while improving ease of construction and maintenance." Interestingly, the proposal draws upon schematics laid out in a paper written in 1889 by mathematician Arthur Cayley
Posted October 15, 2012
AT&T and IBM announced a business agreement to deliver a "network-enabled" cloud service that uses private networks rather than the public Internet. The companies are combining AT&T virtual private networking, new technology from AT&T Labs, and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ cloud capabilities to create what they say is a faster and more secure shared cloud service. "As more organizations realize that cloud can be secure, easily managed, and a key part of their business strategy, cloud will quickly evolve as a tool for innovation rather than just for infrastructure," says Erich Clementi, senior vice president for IBM Global Technology Services.
Posted October 15, 2012
BMC Software delivered major updates to its IT Service Management portfolio, that enable organizations to transform their service desk into a flexible, proactive "genius bar" experience. This new approach, to be built into a number of BMC's ITSM products, helps IT organizations transition from passive, infrastructure-oriented support functions to ones that deliver more proactive, personalized enablement to today's highly mobile workforce. "Enterprise IT organizations and service providers want to deliver a differentiated, modern service experience," says Kia Behnia, BMC's chief technology officer.
Posted October 15, 2012
SnapLogic, a provider of enterprise cloud integration tools, announced new enterprise platform features intended to help lower the effort to integrate with traditional data sources. Meeting the needs of enterprise IT architects, the latest release of the SnapLogic Integration Platform provides high availability and rollback support, smarter server shutdown options, and a more intuitive interface for administrative tasks. "This release, like most other SnapLogic releases, is for both private and public clouds," Zeb Mahmood, principal of product management for SnapLogic, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 15, 2012
GT Software, provider of technology solutions for enterprise modernization, has rolled out Ivory Hub, a product suite targeted at mainframe enterprises seeking to address the demands for rapid application delivery for mobile, web, and cloud. Ivory Hub is designed to help organizations modernize their mainframe investment in a secure and low-maintenance environment. "The overall purpose and intent of the technology is to simplify accessing resources on the mainframe that are valuable, yet in many ways hidden due to the lack of skilled resources in the marketplace today," Chris Garner, senior vice president of the products group at GT Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. GT Software will also present a webcast about Ivory Hub Thursday, Oct. 18 at 11 am ET.
Posted October 15, 2012
Technology performance company Compuware announced two new solutions aimed at reducing complexity in the data center and the cloud. Compuware APM for Mainframe provides transaction management capabilities, intended to help administrators more rapidly resolve performance problems, reduce MIPS costs, postpone hardware upgrades and accelerate time-to-market for new applications. In addition, a second new solution, Outage Analyzer, tracks cloud and third-party web service outages with instant notification of cause and impact. Outage Analyzer is available now as a free service.
Posted October 10, 2012
Progress Software Corporation announced that it has signed a definitive agreement with Rocket Software for Rocket to acquire the Shadow product. According to the companies, Shadow middleware software is complementary to Rocket Software's existing product portfolio and will offer Rocket customers improvements in total cost of ownership and performance of integration projects that involve mainframe assets.
Posted October 09, 2012
Real-time IT management company ManageEngine, a division of ZoHo Corp., debuted key product portfolio enhancements at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. In addition to its flagship network monitoring software (NMS), OpManager, the company has upgraded its network configuration and change management (NCCM) solution, DeviceExpert, and enterprise password management software, Password Manager Pro. "Historically, IT has been more of a batch-oriented organization, where you submit a problem and wait for some resolution but as businesses make technology more ingrained in their overall revenue generation and profit generation functions, you just can't have that. It has got to move with the pace of business, and so a lot of the product announcement and development focus for us has been to deliver more real-time capabilities," Raj Sabhlok, president of ManageEngine, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 09, 2012
ExtraHop Networks, a provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions, has introduced ExtraHop Discovery Edition, a new 60-day, free trial version of the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system, and the EH2000v, a more powerful version of its EH1000v virtual appliance. The ExtraHop Discovery Edition is aimed at helping IT teams to easily explore the benefits of network-based APM, while the EH2000v supports enterprises' increasingly virtualized and distributed IT environments, providing up to a sustained 3Gbps throughput capacity and support for over 1,000 hosts or VMs.
Posted October 08, 2012
Business analytics vendor OpTier has released OpTier APM 5.0, a solution that provides real-time business transaction analytics and deep diagnostics, enabling improved visibility and gains in productivity. OpTier also released a new Big Data Analytics solution that takes advantage of OpTier's business transaction-based platform, providing real-time big data analytics already in context and reducing time and cost.
Posted October 01, 2012
CloudBees, Inc., a Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider, announced the availability of two new "one-click" services to customize cloud platforms and to streamline end-to-end application deployments across user-defined runtimes. The first new service, ClickStarts, is intended to reduce to a single click everything needed to create and deploy a running application that builds from source, is set up with continuous integration and deployment, and connects to other hosted services. ClickStacks enables end users to customize CloudBees runtimes and compose new runtimes that applications run on.
Posted October 01, 2012
EMC announced storage and backup support for customers deploying the new IBM zEnterprise EC12 Mainframe System. EC12 sites can now implement EMC VMAX Family, EMC Connectrix storage connectivity capabilities, fully automated storage tiering (FAST) software and the EMC Disk Library for mainframe.
Posted October 01, 2012
CA Technologies announced a global distribution agreement with Nastel Technologies, a middleware infrastructure monitoring and management company, which adds Nastel's AutoPilot for middleware management to CA's cross-platform offerings. CA will resell and distribute Nastel's AutoPilot for middleware, covering IBM WebSphere MQ, Message Broker, DataPower and TIBCO. The AutoPilot solution complements the performance management solutions that CA offers by extending the management and monitoring capabilities deeper in the middleware infrastructure.
Posted October 01, 2012
Emerson Network Power, a provider of infrastructure availability, capacity and efficiency solutions, announced it is teaming up with Joyent, a cloud infrastructure provider, to offer an integrated end-to-end solution that provides both physical and virtual infrastructure and dynamic management tools for enterprise cloud environments, including energy management.
Posted October 01, 2012
There is still great demand for terminal emulation, as a new release from Cybele Software, Inc. shows. The vendor released z/Scope Anywhere 7.0, a remote-computing solution for users of IBM mainframes, AS/400, and UNIX systems. Cybele says it designed z/Scope Anywhere 7.0 as a pure HTML5/JavaScript client. There is no ActiveX or Java applet to install, making z/Scope Anywhere "100% native-firewall friendly."
Posted October 01, 2012
Percona, Inc. has announced the latest release of Percona Server, which it describes as its "enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL." According to the company, Percona Server Version 5.5.27-28.0 includes new features that make it more valuable as an alternative for MySQL users. Offered free as an open source solution, Percona Server has self-tuning algorithms and support for high-performance hardware. In addition, the company is planning a two-day Percona Live Event for NYC in October and also for London in December, with speakers and tutorials spanning multiple tracks across the MySQL ecosystem. A more expansive, four-day conference, Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013, is planned for Santa Clara in April.
Posted September 26, 2012
Silver Peak Systems has announced Silver Peak Velocity, a combination of products, pricing and packaging that aims to allow storage administrators to accelerate their offsite replication workloads. SilverPeak Velocity is available for NetApp SnapMirror deployments, providing what the company says is on-average 20x faster offsite replication, and will be available for replication solutions from Dell, EMC, and Hitachi Data Systems in the coming months.
Posted September 26, 2012
Bradmark Technologies, Inc., an established provider of database tools for enterprise monitoring and administration, has announced the expansion of its seven-year global reseller agreement with Sybase, an SAP company, through the execution of an addendum granting Bradmark the right to sell SAP Sybase database products in North America. Under this agreement, Bradmark will offer SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), SAP Sybase IQ server, SAP Sybase Replication Server and Mirror Activator database products to its existing customers and prospects through its direct sales force and marketing campaigns in the United States and Canada.
Posted September 26, 2012
If you have not heard the buzz around Oracle's Engineered Systems, then you must not be keeping up with Oracle's marketing promotions, reading any technical journals, or even just walking through any airports lately. While the marketing claims are impressive, the use of Marvel's characters was imaginative and Oracle's use of the slogan "Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together" is enticing, you may be asking yourself, "What does all of this mean to me?" Well, let's illustrate by example.
Posted September 26, 2012
An educational and interactive webcast will review the findings of the 2012 IOUG Test, Development and QA Survey and discuss the best practices and issues that it highlights. This IOUG study was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by IBM. Presented by Kimberly Madia, WW product marketing manager at IBM, and Thomas Wilson, president and CEO, Unisphere Research, the webcast will be held Thursday, September 27, from 12 - 1 PM CDT. Attendees to the webcast will receive a copy of the study report.
Posted September 26, 2012
The first computer program I ever wrote (in 1979, if you must know) was in the statistical package SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), and the second computer platform I used was SAS (Statistical Analysis System). Both of these systems are still around today—SPSS was acquired by IBM as part of its BI portfolio, and SAS is now the world's largest privately held software company. The longevity of these platforms—they have essentially outlived almost all contemporary software packages—speaks to the perennial importance of data analysis to computing.
Posted September 19, 2012
In recent years, the networks of developers, integrators, consultants, and manufacturers committed to supporting database systems have morphed from one-on-one partnerships into huge ecosystems in which they have become interdependent on one another, and are subject to cross-winds of trends and shifts that are shaping their networks. Nowhere is this more apparent than the huge ecosystem that has developed around Oracle. With Oracle's never-ending string of acquisitions, new functionality, and widespread adoption by enterprises, trends that shape this ecosystem are certain to have far-reaching effects on the rest of the IT world. Concerns that percolate through the ecosystem reflect — and influence — broad business concerns. New paradigms — from cloud computing to big data to competing on analytics — are taking root within the Oracle ecosystem long before anywhere else.
Posted September 19, 2012
Serena Software announced advancements to its "Orchestrated IT" solution set, now designed to help enterprises take full advantage of mobile, social and cloud technologies. Serena's solutions are designed to help IT stakeholders to automate the continuous delivery of applications on-premise and to the cloud, as well as enable users to view release activity, analytics and key metrics from mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets.
Posted September 17, 2012
Layered Technologies, Inc. (Layered Tech), a provider of cloud and hosting services, announced a cloud platform that combines Layered Tech's management, security and compliance capabilities with self-service functionality. The LayeredTechCloudDataCenter includes a self-service portal, intended to give customers greater control, visibility and management of their cloud environments.
Posted September 17, 2012