Data Center Management Articles
Oracle has announced StorageTek Tape Analytics, monitoring and management software for its StorageTek tape libraries. The software is intended to simplify tape management by eliminating manual intervention and help improve operational efficiency. It captures library, drive and media performance metrics and presents them in a single pane of glass, identifying potential problems while providing immediate recommendations to prevent data loss. StorageTek Tape Analytics software also allows rapid drill-down into detailed drive and media health specifics, enabling customers to make decisions about their tape infrastructure, and reduce downtime and data management resources.
Posted April 18, 2012
IBM introduced a new family of "expert integrated systems" with built-in expertise based on IBM's collective experience running customers' IT operations. The company says the new system, dubbed PureSystems, offers clients an alternative to today's enterprise computing model, in which multiple and disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain.
Posted April 16, 2012
HP announced HP Converged Cloud, which it describes as the industry's first hybrid delivery approach and portfolio based on a common architecture spanning traditional IT, private, managed and public clouds. "The whole idea of converged clouds is to say that, increasingly, as the cloud matures, companies are no longer looking at just one cloud to provide for all their needs," Christian Verstraete, chief technologist for Cloud Solutions at HP, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "They are going to start using multiple clouds to respond to the needs of their business people."
Posted April 16, 2012
OpDemand, a provider of solutions for agile IT operations, announced it is shipping a cloud infrastructure management platform, designed to enable software development teams to leverage raw cloud infrastructure without being overwhelmed by technical complexity. "I think there is still a false assumption that mission-critical apps must be kept on-premise. While it's true that certain issues like security compliance and I/O performance may necessitate on-premise deployments, by and large you're going to see higher availability utilizing a cloud provider like Amazon who boasts eight geographic regions with dozens of isolated data centers. The trick is managing it all," Gabriel Monroy, CTO of OpDemand, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 16, 2012
Red Hat announced the beta availability of Red Hat Storage 2.0, based on new capabilities that build upon the company's support for unstructured data storage. In December, Red Hat launched the Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, its first integrated storage product, and since then, it says, there has been significant interest as organizations look to address the growth of unstructured data.
Posted April 16, 2012
Intel Corporation introduced its Solid-State Drive 910 Series, a high-performing SSD designed to address data center storage demands driven by cloud computing, virtualization and online transactions. The Intel SSD 910 Series expands Intel's offerings for data center applications with its first entry in the 900 family of its highest-performing, PCIe-based SSDs. The Intel SSD 900 Family joins Intel's other high-volume SSD solutions for the data center including the Intel 700 SSD Family of SATA-based SSDs with High Endurance Technology and the Intel SSD 300 Family of SATA SSDs for a broad range of server and storage applications
Posted April 16, 2012
NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a provider of communication and IT solutions, has upgraded its grid storage platform to deliver encryption for data at rest, instant file copy, and shared system mode. NEC's system, HYDRAstor HS8-3000, is available to existing customers via software upgrade.
Posted April 16, 2012
Dell has acquired Clerity Solutions, a provider of applications modernization and re-hosting solutions and services. Clerity's capabilities will enable Dell Services to help customers reduce the cost of transitioning business-critical applications and data from legacy computing systems and onto more modern architectures, including the cloud. "The addition of Clerity gives us a clear advantage in helping customers modernize and migrate their applications off outdated hardware infrastructure to more current architectures," says Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services.
Posted April 16, 2012
Oracle announced two x86 world record benchmark results delivered by its software and hardware. An x86 world record result was achieved on the SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark, with Oracle WebLogic Server 12c, Oracle Database 11g Release 2, running Oracle Linux on Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 M2 server. In addition, an x86 world record TPC-C benchmark result was set with the Sun Fire X4800 M2 server, running Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2, Oracle Tuxedo, and Oracle Database 11g Release 2.
Posted April 11, 2012
Last month, I told you about my favorite master-level blogs for the SQL Server professional. This month, I'm reviewing my favorite blogs for working SQL Server professionals who seriously want to grow their skills. What's the difference between a master-level blog and a practitioner-level blog, you ask?
Posted April 11, 2012
Quest Software, Inc. has announced the availability of vFundamentals, a new product suite that delivers backup, capacity planning and resource optimization for VMware virtual environments. vFundamentals is intended to enable virtualization administrators to grow their virtual environments knowing that critical assets are properly utilized and protected. The new bundle includes Quest vRanger Pro, a VMware backup, replication and recovery solution, as well as capacity management and optimization technology from VKernel's vOps Server Standard Edition. VKernel was acquired in November 2011 by Quest.
Posted April 10, 2012
Oracle Corporation announced that GAAP total revenues for fiscal 2012 Q3, which ended Feb. 28, were up 3% to $9.0 billion, and non-GAAP total revenues were up 3% to $9.1 billion. Among the highlights for the quarter were Oracle's engineered systems. Hardware revenue for engineered systems grew 139% in the third quarter and bookings are strong going into the fourth quarter, said Oracle president Mark Hurd in a statement released by the company with the announcement of its quarterly financial results.
Posted April 04, 2012
HP has announced a new line of Application Transformation solutions that target the need to integrate consumer-led technologies into enterprise systems. The expanded portfolio is intended to help clients to design, build and manage applications that support consumer-driven solutions entering the enterprise realm, including smartphones, mobile applications, and social networking platforms. "Modern enterprise applications require a different approach to design and testing than traditional applications," says Jonathan Rende, vice president and general manager for application transformation solutions at HP.
Posted April 02, 2012
Symantec Corp. plans to announce, on Tuesday, a new solution intended to help organizations improve storage I/O performance and availability for VMware vSphere implementations. The product, Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware, is designed to help companies increase I/O performance, increase visibility and improve management of underlying storage, as well as enhance the availability of the virtual machine and applications. "Organizations are moving mission-critical applications to VMware, but when they do that, they add certain SLAs or performance requirements that they have to meet," Dan Lamorena, director of product marketing for Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 02, 2012
Compuware Corporation and Rosetta, part of the Publicis Groupe and a member of the Compuware Partner Network, announced a partnership designed to help customers ensure high performance with their e-commerce sites. The integrated offering offers pre-production testing and ongoing application performance management.
Posted April 02, 2012
GT Software, a provider of enterprise modernization solutions, announced availability of a new version of its legacy modernization suite, which includes support for JCA Resource Adapters and a new IMS/TM Application Wizard.
Posted April 02, 2012
gen-E (formerly generationE Technologies), an IT process automation software company, has received a private equity investment from Solis Capital Partners, enabling the company to expand its data center solutions business across new channels. The vendor's Resolve Social ITPA software, first launched in 2009, combines automation with social media-powered collaboration and knowledge management capabilities to help companies break down traditional organizational and process constraints.
Posted April 02, 2012
KPMG LLP, a financial advisory firm, and Apptio, a provider of technology business management solutions, are working together in a concerted effort to beef up clients' IT operations. KPMG will leverage Apptio's enterprise software as a service (SaaS) platform, as well as its applications in IT strategy and CIO advisory engagements to help clients better understand how costs are flowing through their IT infrastructures.
Posted April 02, 2012
Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc., has unveiled its next generation Mobile Commerce platform. With the updated platform, Sybase 365 seeks to enhance the customer engagement experience that financial institutions and mobile operators can offer their end-users, by providing a complete set of rich features for mobile banking, mobile payments and mobile money services - on a single platform. The Sybase mobile commerce platform has been architected to meet increasing demands as mobile commerce moves from a minor service to a mainstream service offered to a vast array of customers worldwide.
Posted March 29, 2012
Oracle has unveiled release 20.2 of Oracle AutoVue, an enterprise visualization solution to help customers in the energy, public sector, high tech and manufacturing industries increase operational efficiency and capitalize on information. "The goal is really to unlock the technical data and let it flow throughout the lifecycle so people can make the best decisions possible," Celine Beck, manager of Product Management and Strategy, Oracle AutoVue, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted March 28, 2012
Social media business intelligence is on the rise, according to a new Unisphere Research study sponsored by IBM and Marist College. The study found that while social media monitoring and analysis is in its early stages, many organizations plan to monitor, collect, stage and analyze this data over the next 1 to 5 years and. In particular, LOB respondents, who are closer to customers, show appreciation for the benefits of monitoring SMNs.
Posted March 21, 2012
Novell announced an update to its ZENworks suite, which includes integrated Mac device management, and full disk encryption capabilities. ZENworks 11 Support Pack 2 enables customers to lock out threats without shutting down IT access, the vendor says. ZENworks 11 now offers a more holistic approach to supporting Mac devices in the enterprise. With this release, Mac support is provided through Remote Management for Mac, Asset Management for Mac, Mac OSX Patching and Mac Bundles.
Posted March 21, 2012
At last week's SHARE conference in Atlanta, CA Technologies announced the first five recipients of $35,000 scholarships to its Mainframe Academy, an accelerated educational curriculum that helps promising young technologists expand their skills and fill potential talent gaps in future mainframe management. CA announced the scholarship program last March as part of its workforce education effort, promising over $1 million in grants to attend the Mainframe Academy through 2016. Recipients are selected by SHARE representatives, who award scholarships to applicants that demonstrate a desire to master mainframe programming skills.
Posted March 19, 2012
Serena Software announced enhanced offerings that help automate, control and instrument important application development and operations processes to deliver DevOps and Orchestrated IT. DevOps is the growing practice of developers and operations teams working in tandem to roll out and manage applications, and Serena defines "Orchestrated IT" as IT management systems that tie together existing tools into a more streamlined process-driven human workflow.
Posted March 19, 2012
IBM has announced new software to beef up its SmartCloud line of management and monitoring tools for cloud deployments. IBM's new SmartCloud Foundation offerings enable organizations to install, manage, configure and automate the creation of cloud services in private, public or hybrid environments with enhanced levels of control, the vendor says.
Posted March 19, 2012
Symantec Corp., a provider of security, storage and systems management solutions, has released Symantec Data Insight 3.0, the latest version of its solution that helps improve information governance by providing information about ownership and usage of unstructured data such as documents, presentations, spreadsheets and emails. With data volumes growing rapidly, and unstructured data in the enterprise growing even faster, Symantec says it is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to stay on top of who owns the data and how it is being used. This makes it challenging to manage and protect it, a situation further complicated by data governance objectives to reduce costs, reduce risk and achieve compliance.
Posted March 19, 2012
UC4, a provider of IT automation solutions, announced the general availability of a tool that enables IT organizations to plan software releases, track progression and perform automated deployment. UC4 Application Release Automation V2 also is designed to simplify implementation by delivering built-in support for common middleware, source code management tools and issue tracking tools.
Posted March 19, 2012
For enterprises grappling with the onslaught of big data, a new platform has emerged from the open source world that promises to provide a cost-effective way to store and process petabytes and petabytes worth of information. Hadoop, an Apache project, is already being eagerly embraced by data managers and technologists as a way to manage and analyze mountains of data streaming in from websites and devices. Running data such as weblogs through traditional platforms such as data warehouses or standard analytical toolsets often cannot be cost-justified, as these solutions tend to have high overhead costs. However, organizations are beginning to recognize that such information ultimately can be of tremendous value to the business. Hadoop packages up such data and makes it digestible.
Posted March 19, 2012
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 for Oracle Linux is now generally available. The updated kernel includes performance and scalability enhancements. The new release, which is based on the 3.0.16 mainline kernel, also includes improved memory and resource management, and is optimized to be deployed as a virtual guest.
Posted March 14, 2012
IBM's Dan Frye writes about the evolution of KVM in his blog post: As virtualization becomes ubiquitous in enterprises, it's important to note that KVM in particular offers advantages that stem from its simple architecture. At its most basic, KVM is a feature added to Linux that allows Linux and other operating systems such as Windows to be virtualized - as opposed to a separate complete virtualized operating system à la the Xen model. This not only simplifies KVM, but allows KVM to leverage the world's largest and best development community (that's the Linux community in case you were confused...) instead of having to duplicate core operating system development work
Posted March 14, 2012
In a recent Virtualization@IBM guest blog, SUSE's Michael Miller writes about the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 2: It's a big step forward for us at SUSE. This is the first major product update since we started operating as an independent business unit within The Attachmate Group. It's also a good indication of our commitment to the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform.
Posted March 14, 2012
IBM rolled out a set of offerings geared towards helping its business partners more tightly integrate with the IBM SmartCloud by helping to connect them with customers, create new applications and improve their cloud computing skills. Expected to grow to more than $214 billion by 2020, cloud computing has become a catalyst for capturing new business value through innovation, stronger customer relationships, and faster time to market while reducing cost and complexity.
Posted March 14, 2012
Adam Jollans, program director, Cross-IBM Linux and Open Virtualization Strategy, hosted a panel discussion on open virtualization at Pulse 2012, a premiere IBM Software event held in Las Vegas earlier this month. In the past year, much has happened to KVM, from the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance, to security certification and leadership performance benchmarks, to enterprise cloud adoption. Titled "Open Virtualization - Ready for Business," the panel discussion focused on the reasons open virtualization is now enterprise-ready.
Posted March 14, 2012
IBM captured the number one position as the leading server vendor in the fourth quarter of 2011 with 33.7% revenue market share, according to a new report from Gartner, Inc. For the full year of 2011, IBM had 30.5% revenue market share, 1.5% ahead of its nearest rival.
Posted March 14, 2012
Open Invention Network (OIN) has expanded and updated the Linux System technologies covered by its protective network of royalty-free cross-licenses among hundreds of OIN licensees. More than 700 new software packages - including popular packages such as KVM, Git, OpenJDK, and WebKit - will now receive coverage. In addition, coverage for over 1,000 existing software packages has been updated.
Posted March 14, 2012
IBM has announced a world-record 4-processor result on Linux on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark. This new result was achieved on the IBM System x 3850 X5, running IBM DB2 9.7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, and SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP application Release 6.0.
Posted March 14, 2012
IBM's Dan Frye writes about the evolution of KVM in his blog post: As virtualization becomes ubiquitous in enterprises, it's important to note that KVM in particular offers advantages that stem from its simple architecture. At its most basic, KVM is a feature added to Linux that allows Linux and other operating systems such as Windows to be virtualized - as opposed to a separate complete virtualized operating system à la the Xen model. This not only simplifies KVM, but allows KVM to leverage the world's largest and best development community (that's the Linux community in case you were confused...) instead of having to duplicate core operating system development work.
Posted March 14, 2012
In a recent Virtualization@IBM guest blog, SUSE's Michael Miller writes about the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 2: It's a big step forward for us at SUSE. This is the first major product update since we started operating as an independent business unit within The Attachmate Group.
Posted March 14, 2012
IBM rolled out a set of offerings geared towards helping its business partners more tightly integrate with the IBM SmartCloud by helping to connect them with customers, create new applications and improve their cloud computing skills. Expected to grow to more than $214 billion by 2020, cloud computing has become a catalyst for capturing new business value through innovation, stronger customer relationships, and faster time to market while reducing cost and complexity.
Posted March 14, 2012
Adam Jollans, program director, Cross-IBM Linux and Open Virtualization Strategy, hosted a panel discussion on open virtualization at Pulse 2012, a premiere IBM Software event held in Las Vegas earlier this month. In the past year, much has happened to KVM, from the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance, to security certification and leadership performance benchmarks, to enterprise cloud adoption. Titled "Open Virtualization - Ready for Business," the panel discussion focused on the reasons open virtualization is now enterprise-ready.
Posted March 14, 2012
Open Invention Network (OIN) has expanded and updated the Linux System technologies covered by its protective network of royalty-free cross-licenses among hundreds of OIN licensees. More than 700 new software packages - including popular packages such as KVM, Git, OpenJDK, and WebKit - will now receive coverage. In addition, coverage for over 1,000 existing software packages has been updated.
Posted March 14, 2012
IBM has announced a world-record 4-processor result on Linux on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark. This new result was achieved on the IBM System x 3850 X5, running IBM DB2 9.7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, and SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP application Release 6.0.
Posted March 14, 2012
Quest Software said it has entered into definitive agreements with affiliates of Insight Venture Partners to become a private company. In the deal, stockholders would receive $23 per share in cash, valuing the company at approximately $2.0 billion. Upon closing, Quest will be a privately held company and will continue to be led by chairman and CEO Vinny Smith and the existing senior management team. "As a private company, we will have increased flexibility to drive innovation across our product lines and execute our long-term strategy," said Smith in a statement released by the company.
Posted March 09, 2012
SUSE has announced the general availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 2 (SP2), offering improved performance, enhanced file system support and virtualization capabilities. SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 is notable from two perspectives, Kerry Kim, director, Solution Marketing, SUSE, tells 5 Minute Briefing. First, it is the first platform release since SUSE was reorganized as an independent business unit after The Attachmate Group acquisition. Second, the platform was created with a forward-looking development model, which will make it possible to deliver open source innovation faster to enterprises, while maintaining application compatibility.
Posted March 05, 2012
STORServer, a provider of data backup solutions, announced STORServer Console version 2.0 (SSC), which simplifies management of the STORServer Backup Appliance and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager servers. In addition to providing a major upgrade of the console, SSC version 2.0 can now be purchased as a standalone product for TSM users or can be used in conjunction with the STORServer Backup Appliance. The new version is also offered as an upgrade to existing users.
Posted March 05, 2012
Serena Software, a software development lifecycle vendor, has expanded its partnership with Information Builders, a provider of business intelligence solutions, to extend BI capabilities to application lifecycle management and IT service management. Using the Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform, Serena is enhancing its Serena Dashboard to provide higher-level intelligence across both its own solutions and third-party IT tools.
Posted March 05, 2012
BMC Software, a provider of enterprise systems tools, announced the availability of the winter release of its cloud-based Remedyforce Service Desk solution, which includes new capabilities for service request management and the integration of social media and external sources. BMC Remedyforce Service Desk solution is intended to help organizations manage the "consumerization of IT" phenomenon. Through the capabilities of Salesforce Chatter, a leading enterprise social network, BMC Remedyforce Service Desk helps IT professionals interact with each other, and archives Chatter feeds and other sources in the solution's knowledge management system.
Posted March 05, 2012