Data Center Management Articles
Jaspersoft, a BI software provider, has announced the development of what it describes as the first BI architected for platform-as-a-service, with the planned integration of Jaspersoft BI with Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS. "With Jaspersoft's suite of reporting and analysis capabilities now available on OpenShift, organizations can quickly realize the benefits of the cloud while gaining deep insights from the data that powers these applications," says Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat.
Posted January 17, 2012
The argument that "everyone is doing it and you should too" holds no value for strategic decision-making in IT. Yet critical thinking often goes by the wayside when a hot, new trend catches on and it seems like the masses are following along. Cloud computing is certainly in vogue - most industry analysts are bullish on cloud computing adoption and anticipate enterprise spending to increase - but organizations need to steer clear of falling into the trap that moving to the cloud always delivers cost savings.
Posted January 11, 2012
Along with thousands of IT professionals, I was in the San Francisco Moscone Center main hall last October listening to Larry Ellison's 2011 Oracle Open world keynote. Larry can always be relied upon to give an entertaining presentation, a unique blend of both technology insights and amusingly disparaging remarks about competitors.
Posted January 11, 2012
At the outset of each new year, I devote an edition of my column to review the significant data and database-related events of the previous year. Of course, to meet my deadlines, the column is written before the year is over (this column is being written in November 2011), so please excuse any significant news that may have happened late in December.
Posted January 11, 2012
SHARE's webcast series kicks off 2012 with a new installment aimed at helping you determine how to incorporate data encryption in your enterprise to maximize security. Enterprise Encryption 101 will take place Thursday, January 26 at 10:00 a.m. CST. Led by Philip H. Smith III from Voltage Security, Inc., this webcast will look at the issues and opportunities surrounding encryption technologies.
Posted January 09, 2012
BMC Software announced the availability of the latest release of the BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping solution, which adds collaborative application mapping. According to BMC, application discovery and the mapping of dependencies is critical for succeeding with strategic IT initiatives such as IT service management, data center automation and transformation, cloud computing and virtualization management, service impact management and service costing. With this new capability, BMC aims to help reduce the time, effort and cost of mapping multi-tier applications to the IT infrastructure supporting them, enabling IT to better understand how applications and infrastructure work together to deliver the services that enterprises depend on.
Posted January 09, 2012
Veryant, a COBOL modernization vendor, is shipping three integrated new products, including a package designed to help companies improve productivity and reduce costs as they modernize COBOL legacy applications. The new offerings, Veryant ODBC, isCOBOL File Server, and isCOBOL Graphical Terminal, are new additions to Veryant isCOBOL Evolve (2011 Release 3), a platform for COBOL application development, deployment, maintenance, and modernization.
Posted January 09, 2012
CiRBA Inc., a provider of data center analytics software, has begun shipping CiRBA version 7, which provides a console for visualizing and controlling virtual and cloud infrastructures.
Posted January 09, 2012
IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Green Hat, a software quality and testing solutions vendor for the cloud and other environments. Financial terms were not disclosed. Green Hat, which is jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware, delivers automated testing solutions for complex systems relying on cloud, web services, messaging, service oriented architecture, enterprise service bus, business process management, complex event processing, and SAP
Posted January 09, 2012
IBM has completed the acquisition of Platform Computing, a provider of cluster, grid and cloud management software for distributed computing environments. Financial terms of the acquisition of the Toronto, Ontario-based company were not disclosed. The acquisition was first announced in October 2011.
Posted January 09, 2012
Oracle has introduced a new release of Oracle Tuxedo 11g, an application server for C/C++, COBOL, and dynamic languages. Optimized to run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2, the new release of Oracle Tuxedo 11g provides a dynamic, scale-out solution for low-latency mission-critical applications. The new release also includes Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for IMS 11g, a new product within the Oracle Tuxedo family that Oracle says will help customers reduce IT costs and increase business agility by simplifying the migration of IBM mainframe IMS applications to open systems.
Posted January 09, 2012
The European Commission says it has reached a settlement with IBM on its antitrust actions in the mainframe maintenance market. IBM commits to make spare parts and technical information swiftly available, under commercially reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, to independent mainframe maintainers, according to a statement released by the commission.
Posted January 09, 2012
Brocade, a network backbone vendor, says that its latest storage area network (SAN) controllers are now qualified for mainframe environments, enabling enterprises to fully exploit the capabilities of their IBM zEnterprise FICON infrastructures. Brocade's DCX 8510 directors, based on 16 Gbps Fibre Channel SAN technology, are part of its line of FICON-capable directors and switches. Brocade DCX 8510 FICON directors are intended to help organizations leverage the capabilities of System z, particularly IBM zEnterprise 196 (z196) mainframe solutions.
Posted January 09, 2012
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a provider of high-performance solid-state drives for computing devices and systems, and Marvell, an integrated silicon solutions vendor, have unveiled what they call the industry's fastest and most versatile PCI Express (PCIe) storage system. The jointly developed Z-Drive R5 is designed to offer an intelligent, hardware-meets-software managed solution designed to help accelerate database, enterprise, and virtualization applications, the vendors add.
Posted January 09, 2012
IBM has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Green Hat, a provider of software quality and testing solutions for the cloud and other environments. Financial terms were not disclosed. Founded in 1996, Green Hat is jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware. Upon the acquisition close, Green Hat will join IBM's Rational Software business.
Posted January 04, 2012
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3, a C, C++, and Fortran development platform for building fast, scalable enterprise applications for Oracle Solaris systems. According to Oracle, the new release accelerates performance of SPARC T4 and x86-based applications up to 300% by leveraging Oracle's advanced compiler technology.
Posted January 04, 2012
Big data and the cloud, two important IT trends, are fueling new deployments of Linux, according to The Linux Foundation. The non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux has just released its latest report on Linux adoption trends, which includes new data about Linux's role in supporting cloud computing, big data and new, greenfield deployments.
Posted January 01, 2012
Red Hat has announced the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, with expanded capabilities for both its server and desktop virtualization management tools and its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, Red Hat provides an open virtualization alternative to customers that offers performance, scalability, security, manageability and cost benefits.
Posted January 01, 2012
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) is organizing its next educational webinar: "Open Virtualization for Open Clouds." The webinar is free and open to any one interested in learning more about KVM.
Posted January 01, 2012
The oVirt project has announced that Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat and SUSE have joined together to help create a new open source community for the development of open virtualization platforms, including virtual management tools to manage the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.
Posted January 01, 2012
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) has made significant gains in participation since its launch last spring - the group now has more than 240 members and has been further bolstered by the creation of the oVirt Project, writes Alan Radding in a BottomlineIT blog post, "OVA and oVIRT Drive KVM Success."
Posted January 01, 2012
The clouds are rolling in. And, as more organizations move to evaluate and deploy cloud technologies, there are considerations to keep in mind to help avoid being buffeted in the future by winds of change across the IT landscape. Virtualization is a step on the road to the cloud - whether it is a public or private cloud. In order to build a cloud you need to have virtualization underpinning it.
Posted January 01, 2012
Watch this Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) webcast to learn more about KVM as an enterprise-grade solution from industry leaders IBM, Red Hat and thought leader, Gary Chen, IDC analyst. This webcast, originally presented in December 2011, showcases KVM's key capabilities, including record-breaking performance, superior scalability, advanced security, as well as lower cost - companies that have deployed KVM-based solutions saved up to 80% over deploying similar configurations based on proprietary solutions.
Posted January 01, 2012
2011 was another impressive year for Linux, writes Sean Michael Kerner in an article, "Linux in 2011: What a Great Year," at LinuxPlanet.com. Kerner looks back at some of the year's highlights including the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the operating system's founding, as well as new kernels and distributions that advanced the state of Linux, new releases from Red Hat and Ubuntu, and the return of SUSE Linux as its own business unit, separate from Novell.
Posted January 01, 2012
Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0, the first release providing extended high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities for Oracle Solaris 11, is now available. Oracle Solaris Cluster extends Oracle Solaris to provide the HA and DR infrastructure required for deploying mission-critical workloads in private, public and hybrid clouds as well as enterprise data centers.
Posted December 21, 2011
Oracle has introduced a new release of Oracle Tuxedo 11g, an application server for C/C++, COBOL, and dynamic languages. Optimized to run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2, the new release of Oracle Tuxedo 11g provides a dynamic, scale-out solution for low-latency mission-critical applications that require the highest qualities of service. The new release also includes Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for IMS 11g, a new product within the Oracle Tuxedo family that Oracle says will help customers reduce IT costs and increase business agility by simplifying the migration of IBM mainframe IMS applications to open systems.
Posted December 21, 2011
The first calendar year following SAP's acquisition of Sybase is coming to a close. David Jonker, director, product marketing - Data Management & Analytics, Sybase, discusses key product integrations, IT trends that loom large in Sybase's data management strategies, and the emergence of what Sybase describes as DW 2.0. 2011 has been "a foundational year," with effort focused on making Sybase technologies work with SAP and setting the stage for 2012, says Jonker. "We believe 2012 is going to be a big year for us on the database side."
Posted December 21, 2011
IBM has launched what it calls its new Smarter Computing Workload Simulator, an online tool that is designed to provide chief information officers a way to view areas of potential savings and efficiency. The tool is part of IBM's Smarter Computing strategy, intended as a way to help organizations realize greater efficiencies, improved reliability, and better performance at lower costs. The strategy centers around three fundamental aspects: leveraging analytics to exploit vast amounts of data for business goals; utilizing optimized systems that are designed for specific tasks; and managing as much of the IT as possible with cloud-computing technologies.
Posted December 12, 2011
Clerity Solutions, a provider of mainframe modernization solutions, introduced new software designed to help organizations consume and reuse multiple data sources from multiple platforms without having to write new application code. The software, Clerity Transforming Enterprise Applications (TEA), part of the company's IT modernization suite, supports a mix of server environments, including IBM mainframes, Linux, UNIX, and Microsoft Windows-based systems, by exposing business logic to mobile computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and other IT initiatives.
Posted December 12, 2011
HP Enterprise Services announced the HP Social Intelligence Solution, which it says enables clients to exploit human information - social media and unstructured data - to optimize customer experiences, manage brand reputation, empower resources and drive innovation. "Social media channels and mobile technologies have fundamentally changed consumer behavior. People are sharing their opinions and thoughts all the time through many different public channels. As a result, the customer information traditionally collected now represents only a small proportion of what is available," Val Logan, strategy & global practices leader, Enterprise Information Solutions, HP, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted December 12, 2011
IBM announced that 1,067 schools worldwide have signed on to its System z educational program, teaching courses and offering labs in IBM's mainframe technology. The IBM System z Academic Initiative, which now spans 66 countries, enables schools either to use their own mainframe resources or access them at no cost from IBM using innovative cloud computing technologies. Using the System z mainframe, professors in the program are exposing students to the enterprise computing environments that are solving some of the world's most complex and demanding computing challenges.
Posted December 12, 2011
SOA Software, a provider of SOA governance and management products, has rolled out a new version of its repository solution that is designed to automatically discover dependencies across processes, services and schema. Repository Manager Version 6.4 combines these advanced capabilities with support for service and operation-level consumption governance.
Posted December 12, 2011
Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernization solutions, released a cross-platform migration solution intended to enable mainframe PL/I applications to be moved, with minimal changes, from an IBM mainframe to Linux, UNIX or Windows Server platforms. The solution, Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition for PL/I, is intended to help manage the soaring costs companies incur running PL/I applications on IBM mainframes.
Posted December 12, 2011
Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source platform solutions, has introduced an integrated product that provides scale-out storage for unstructured data. The product, Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, is based on technology from Red Hat's recent acquisition of Gluster, a provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions that extends the Red Hat solution portfolio with capability for managing the storage of unstructured data.
Posted December 12, 2011
Platform Computing, a provider of cluster, grid and cloud management software, launched new software for building private and hybrid clouds. The solution, Platform ISF 3.0, includes a feature called Platform Cloud Application Designer, designed for the creation of reusable templates for deploying business applications in the cloud. The product also includes a completely redesigned user interface, automated capabilities for application and service-level management, Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) support and a self-service portal aimed at easing cloud administration for IT and line of business managers.
Posted December 12, 2011
At HP Discover 2011 in Vienna, HP announced new cloud solutions that advance deployment of private, public and hybrid clouds, enabling enterprises, service providers and governments to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. Fundamentally, the solutions are aimed at helping IT organizations move from a technology-centric view to a service-centric view, and how they can deliver the right services to the right customers with the right parameters, costs, flexibility, and service levels at the right time, Frances Guida, manager of HP Cloud Solutions and Infrastructure, Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted December 12, 2011
Aternity Inc., a provider of end user experience management solutions, has announced that Aternity and Unisys Corporation have taken a further step in the collaboration that enables Unisys to integrate Aternity's Frontline Performance Intelligence (FPI) Platform into its managed end-user services solutions. The expanded agreement will enable Unisys to provide tailored options for managed-service solutions based on Aternity's FPI Platform. Through these solutions Unisys can manage performance of applications used by clients' employees.
Posted December 11, 2011
Unisys Corporation has announced Version 2 of its Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution, its flagship cloud solution for clients' and cloud service providers' data centers. The solution incorporates improvements to the core software stack, as well as expanded management, security and infrastructure automation capabilities.
Posted December 11, 2011
Veryant has introduced a new version of vCOBOL Enterprise, which provides an environment for developing and deploying business-critical COBOL applications across Linux, UNIX, and Microsoft Windows systems. With vCOBOL Enterprise 2011 Release 3, organizations that migrate COBOL applications and relational databases, such as IBM DB2, from the mainframe to open systems can now take advantage of a new application migration utility to simplify the transition. In addition, post-migration, vCOBOL now offers companies the choice of accessing relational databases, such as IBM DB2 or Oracle, through JDBC or through the SQLJ convention, which the company says is popular at shops that are heavy Java application users.
Posted December 07, 2011
A new blog on the SHARE website places the focus on the mainframe as a big data workhorse and the reigning alternative to internal (or external) cloud provision. Pedro Pereira, authoring the blog in SHARE's "President's Corner," makes several astute observations including identifying security and availability as unknowns in a cloud environment.
Posted December 06, 2011
Join Oracle and Unisphere for a live webcast to learn more about common practices that are most vulnerable to fraud and error, and the best practices and technologies used by leading vs. laggard organizations to drive the hidden costs out of operations and enforce process controls. Speakers will include Thomas J. Wilson, president, Unisphere Research; Joseph McKendrick, analyst, Unisphere Research; and Stephanie Maziol, director GRC Applications, Oracle.
Posted December 06, 2011
Three columns ago, I started a series of articles pointing out that tough times are a-comin' for the DBA profession due to major disruptive changes in the wider IT world (see "2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It"). In previous columns, I have told you about how our lives will change due to major technological changes caused by things such as Solid State Disks (SSD) and massively multicore CPUs.
Posted December 06, 2011
At the recent CA World conference, CA Technologies announced what it calls its Next-Generation Mainframe Management strategy, intended to leverage mainframe computing power to help businesses compete in a more competitive economy. The new strategy expands on CA's Mainframe 2.0 initiative launched a few years ago, Mark Combs, distinguished senior vice president for CA Technologies Mainframe business, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Enterprise IT environments are changing, and the new Next-Generation Mainframe Management theme is oriented more toward CIOs' current core pain points - the business demand for agility at lower risk and lower cost.
Posted November 28, 2011
nlyte Software, a data center infrastructure management solution (DCIM) provider, today launched what it calls the first DCIM solution to provide large-scale data center project lifecycle management. The new release, nlyte 6.2, is a DCIM project lifecycle management designed to help customers auto-allocate assets, create what-if models for data center projects, automatically convert those models into actionable project plans with associated work orders, and predict the impact those projects have on the availability of power, space, cooling and connectivity. "DCIM needs to become simpler to adopt and use," says Jon Temple, president and CEO of nlyte.
Posted November 28, 2011
F5 Networks, Inc., a systems management tools provider, has announced improved live virtual machine migration capabilities for customers using NetApp unified storage and VMware virtualization solutions. The new solution combines the companies' technologies to help customers migrate live virtual machines between data centers without perceivable disruption to users or applications. Combining F5, NetApp, and VMware technologies, customers can improve the effectiveness of live migrations of virtual machines as well as applications that were not originally designed for distributed deployment.
Posted November 28, 2011
Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernization solutions, has begun shipping a new suite of application testing software intended to help organizations achieve higher levels of quality, flexibility and scalability throughout the software development lifecycle. SilkTest 2011 is designed to run on any terminal-based host system through its integration with Micro Focus Rumba, and supports browser and Rich Internet Applications such as Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flex and Firefox.
Posted November 28, 2011
BMC Software is beefing up its Application Performance Management solution with enhancements designed to accelerate problem detection, isolation and resolution. These new capabilities are intended to enable organizations to improve their ability to proactively detect and quickly isolate root causes of problems. "With this announcement, BMC is advancing application root cause analysis - extending operations teams' ability to perform root cause analysis across all monitored assets," according to Ali Hedayati, vice president of End User Management Application Performance Management for BMC Software.
Posted November 28, 2011
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), a cloud requirements consortium, and The Green Grid (TGG), which promotes resource efficiency in data centers, announced a strategic collaboration in which the two organizations will utilize TGG's IT efficiency metrics, including Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), to align with ODCA's cloud usage model requirements to deliver resource efficient computing for industry solutions. Initial delivery of collaboration work is expected in the first half of 2012.
Posted November 28, 2011