Data Center Management Articles
Openness was the theme of the OpenForum Europe Summit 2010 earlier this month in Brussels. Speakers included Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president for the Digital Agenda, and Dr. Michael Karasick, vice president of technical and business strategy, IBM Software Group, as well as Don Deutsch, vice president, Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle, Prof. Yochai Benkler of Harvard University, and Prof. Nigel Shadbolt of University of Southampton.
Posted June 23, 2010
VMware and Novell have expanded their strategic partnership with an original equipment manufacturer agreement through which VMware will distribute and support the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Under the agreement, VMware also intends to standardize its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Posted June 23, 2010
Openness was the theme of the OpenForum Europe Summit 2010 earlier this month in Brussels. Speakers included Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president for the Digital Agenda, and Dr. Michael Karasick, vice president of technical and business strategy, IBM Software Group, as well as Don Deutsch, vice president, Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle, Prof. Yochai Benkler of Harvard University, and Prof. Nigel Shadbolt of University of Southampton.
Posted June 23, 2010
VMware and Novell have expanded their strategic partnership with an original equipment manufacturer agreement through which VMware will distribute and support the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Under the agreement, VMware also intends to standardize its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Posted June 23, 2010
Sybase has announced the availability of Sybase Advantage Server 10, the latest version of its client/server database with both ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) table-based and SQL-based data access.
Posted June 23, 2010
Confio Software which offers Ignite 8 performance analysis software, has unveiled IgniteFree, which the company describes as the only free response-time database performance analysis tool. IgniteFree is carved from Ignite 8's primary feature set and gives DBAs a point-in-time view of bottlenecks in their database. IgniteFree for Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and DB2/LUW can be downloaded from Confio at no cost. "We have taken the core feature of Ignite - which is the response time monitoring - and we have packaged it in a free version so that you get all the response time information for real time monitoring for the past hour at no cost," Don Bergal, chief operating officer of Confio, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 22, 2010
At the Innovate 2010 conference, IBM announced new software and services, based on its Rational line of software development tools, intended to help deliver a new "systems of systems" approach for integrating products and services. "The value, lifecycle and ecosystem of any smart product today are driven by software," says Dr. Daniel Sabbah, IBM Rational general manager. "In order to build an enduring and innovative competency in software delivery, it must be managed as an agile and cost-effective business process within a framework that allows continuous improvements and accommodates change."
Posted June 14, 2010
SOA Software, a SOA and cloud services governance provider, announced Service Manager product version 6.0, designed to provide advanced virtualization, management, security, monitoring and mediation capabilities for SOA and cloud services, implemented using an OSGi-based architecture. "Private internal and private external cloud implementations probably make up the majority of what we are seeing in enterprises today," Alistair Farquharson, CTO for SOA Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "They definitely add another layer of governance automation to the mix - not only are you governing how applications should be built but where and how they are run. Enterprises are trying to save costs by automating as much of this infrastructure as possible and this creates risk without governance."
Posted June 14, 2010
ScaleMP, a provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, introduced a new version of its server virtualization for aggregation software platform, designed to help companies handle larger workloads, larger applications and support more and more building block component servers.
Posted June 14, 2010
Nasuni, a gateway to cloud storage, has partnered with Rackspace Hosting to offer customers a scalable online storage solution that leverages the power of the cloud. Rackspace customers will now be able to use cloud-based files for their primary storage needs, as Nasuni extends the use of the service's backup and file archiving. The combination of Rackspace and Nasuni simplifies file storage by eliminating the intricacies of backup or needing to manage multiple storage tiers.
Posted June 14, 2010
iTKO, a provider of virtualization and validation solutions for enterprise cloud applications, announced integration of its LISA software with the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, based on the IBM Jazz platform. The combined products are intended to help to ease the challenges of developing and testing modern applications, including cloud-based services, integration platforms such as IBM WebSphere/MQ, DataPower and many more enabling technologies.
Posted June 14, 2010
Veryant, a COBOL and Java technology integration tool vendor, announced its isCOBOL Application Platform Suite (APS) 2010 Release 1 is "Compatible with Windows 7," having met all of Microsoft Corp.'s technical requirements for compatibility and reliability.
Posted June 14, 2010
ARM, IBM, and four additional vendors have founded a new not-for-profit company, Linaro, committed to providing new resources and industry alignment for open source software developers using Linux on sophisticated semiconductor System-on-Chips (SoCs). Linaro's work will help developers and manufacturers provide consumers with more choice, more responsive devices and more diverse applications on Linux-based systems.
Posted June 09, 2010
IBM has successfully leveraged its experience managing the world's largest computing environments to offer IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud. This offering, which is now available in the U.S. and Canada, is specifically designed to meet the security and reliability needs of enterprise-class clients. The offering will be available in additional geographies later this year.
Posted June 09, 2010
In the newest version of the semiannual Top500 list, Linux continues to dominate as the operating system of choice for the world's most advanced supercomputers. According to the latest list, compiled by compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, more than 90% of the Top500 fastest supercomputers run some version of Linux.
Posted June 09, 2010
Navigate your business through the economic downturn by lowering your total cost of ownership and embracing enterprise-class solutions using Red Hat Enterprise Linux with IBM Client for Smart Work. Attend this Wednesday, June 23rd webinar to learn how to apply the Liberate-Migrate-Virtualize strategies, which will help you optimize software licensing and prepare your organization to get more value from user-segment driven desktop virtualization, cloud computing, and client access choices.
Posted June 09, 2010
IBM has successfully leveraged its experience managing the world's largest computing environments to offer IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud. This offering, which is now available in the U.S. and Canada, is specifically designed to meet the security and reliability needs of enterprise-class clients. The offering will be available in additional geographies later this year.
Posted June 09, 2010
In the newest version of the semiannual Top500 list, Linux continues to dominate as the operating system of choice for the world's most advanced supercomputers. According to the latest list, compiled by compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, more than 90% of the Top500 fastest supercomputers run some version of Linux.
Posted June 09, 2010
TeamQuest Corporation, a leader in IT Service Optimization, announced it is bringing automation one step closer to Unisys MCP users with the company's latest software offering. TeamQuest SMFII 15.100 adds the ability to track data per connection, analyze a workload set and return the tasks for each workload, and supports ClearPath MCP Release 13.0. "This software release helps you define workloads easier, quicker, and in real time," states TeamQuest software engineer manager Brenda Bonnstetter. "The immediate feedback when defining workloads will save time, provide workload definition accuracy and allow for quick updates in adjusting workloads to meet changing environments."
Posted June 09, 2010
According to a new Unisys online poll of 124 IT professionals, 62% said that their companies had plans to migrate to Windows 7 - with 36% likely moving within 6 to 12 months. In Unisys' view, IT executives need to look beyond the migration itself to consider the new management challenges and benefits Windows 7 affords them. For example, they must capitalize on the the innovative support automation features of Windows 7 not only to save money, but also to help information workers resolve service events quickly and remain productive through anywhere, anytime access to the desktop environment.
Posted June 09, 2010
UNITE held its 2010 conference in May at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel. Highlights included a talk Monday morning by Unisys CEO Ed Coleman, who spoke about Unisys' results, and the company's commitment to customers and ClearPath, and later visited the vendor floor; as well as a keynote by IDC's John F. Gantz, who addressed the consumerization of IT.
Posted June 09, 2010
Customer service is always important but never more critical than during difficult economic times, when wasting time is just not acceptable and customer satisfaction is an imperative. Atlantic Detroit Diesel-Allison sells and services a full line of Detroit Diesel, Mercedes-Benz, and MTU engines, and the automatic transmissions offered by the Allison Transmission Division of General Motors Corporation. Atlantic DDA had initiated a plan to improve its service department by improving order processing, thus driving more revenue, with additional goals of gaining operational efficiency and heightening customer satisfaction. In order to achieve these objectives, Atlantic DDA needed to make real-time information available to its teams of service representatives.
Posted June 07, 2010
Quality can be a hard thing to define. What is good and what is bad may not be easily identified and quantified. When a data mart accurately reflects data exactly as found in the source, should that be considered a quality result? If the source data is bad, is the data mart of high quality or not? If the data mart differs from the source, when is the difference an improvement of quality and when is said difference evidence of diminished quality? While it may seem self-evident that correcting the source of load data would be the "right" thing to do, in practice that direction is not necessarily self-evident. The reasons supporting this nonintuitive approach are varied. Sometimes changes to the source impact other processes that must not change, or the changes will expose problems that may provoke undesired political fallout, or it may simply be that making the proper adjustments to the source application would prove too costly to the organization. For all these reasons and more, in the world of business intelligence, the dependent data often is expected to be of higher quality than the source data. In order for that improvement to occur, data placed within the dependent mart or data warehouse must be altered from the source. Sometimes these alterations become codified within the process migrating data from the source. Other times changes are made via one-time ad hoc updates. Either way, this alteration leads to a situation in which the dependent data will no longer equate one-for-one to the source data. Superficial comparisons of this altered content will highlight the disparity that what exists for analytics is not the same as what exists for the operational system.
Posted June 07, 2010
Before we go any further, let me briefly answer the question posed in this column's title: "No Way!" OK ... with that out of the way, let's discuss the issue ... Every so often, some industry pundit gets his opinions published by declaring that "Database administrators are obsolete" or that "we no longer need DBAs." Every time I hear this, it makes me shake my head sadly as I regard just how gullible IT publications can be.
Posted June 07, 2010
In only a few years' time, the world of data management has been altered dramatically, and this is a change that is still running its course. No longer are databases run in back rooms by administrators worrying about rows and columns. Now, actionable information is sought by decision makers at all levels of the enterprise, and the custodians of this data need to work closely with the business.That's because, in the wake of the recent financial crisis and economic downturn, there's a push from both high-level corporate management and regulators to achieve greater understanding and greater transparency across the enterprise, Jeanne Harris, executive research fellow and a senior executive at the Accenture Institute for High Performance, and co-author, along with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics and Analytics at Work, tells DBTA. "In many ways, I think the ultimate result of the financial crisis is that executives realized they cannot delegate analytics to subordinates; they can't view it as technology or math that doesn't really affect them."
Posted June 07, 2010
In the midst of turbulent times, many successful businesses learned an important lesson: The closer IT works with the business, the better an organization can weather the storms that blow in. Thus, many savvy companies understand that the managers and professionals who oversee information technology and applications need to be well incentivized to stay on. At the same time, these professionals understand the need to develop expertise in business management and communications. Many companies are looking to information technology to provide an additional competitive edge, and see their Oracle enterprise systems as the cornerstone of this strategy. As a result, a survey finds that Oracle enterprise application managers and professionals appear to have weathered the economic storm. The survey, conducted among 334 members of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) by Unisphere Research, and sponsored by Motion International, finds an increase in the number of Oracle technology professionals who are near or surpassing the $100,000 mark in their base salaries.
Posted June 07, 2010
CAST, a provider of software analysis and measurement solutions, has announced the release of its automated analysis and measurement software for Siebel, PeopleSoft and SAP, which, the company says, addresses the growing need for consistent and objective measurement of these ERP platforms in order to eliminate costly customization errors in critical business applications.
Posted June 02, 2010
Bradmark Technologies, Inc., a provider of application solutions for database management, announced that its flagship product, SurveillanceDB, has been selected by Facets users, including Blue Care Network of Michigan, Kansas City, Wellpoint and others as their monitoring solution to ensure overall system efficiency by reducing the time to identify and resolve database issues and track departmental usage. Facets is TriZetto's enterprisewide software solution for health plan administration. The state-of-the-art platform, with integrated applications, automates processes across an entire enterprise and drives greater cost-efficiencies. Facets also helps organizations support the consumer-directed products demanded by today's retail healthcare market and deliver advanced care management capabilities.
Posted June 01, 2010
Addressing the increasing pressure on the budgets of organizations that rely on the mainframe, BMC Software introduced new mainframe cost optimization capabilities to help organizations better manage their mainframe investments. "We are working with our customers to try to reduce the cost of the mainframe. That is what our customers tell us they need help with," Jay Lipovich, director of product management at BMC Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 01, 2010
To help organizations benefit from the data explosion, IBM has unveiled a new portfolio of services and solutions open source technology designed for analysis of large volumes of data. IBM InfoSphere BigInsights is powered by Apache Hadoop, and is designed to help organizations analyze and visualize petabyte-sized quantities of data.
Posted June 01, 2010
Terracotta, a provider of Java infrastructure software, announced the availability of Ehcache 2.1, an upgrade to its distributed caching solution. New features include expanded support for IBM WebSphere, intended to help WebSphere users can take advantage of all the features of Ehcache.
Posted June 01, 2010
IBM and AT&T announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Sterling Commerce from AT&T for approximately $1.4 billion in cash. The acquisition of the Dublin, OH-based company will expand IBM's ability to help organizations create more intelligent and dynamic business networks by simplifying and automating the way they connect and communicate with customers, partners and suppliers both on-premise or through cloud computing delivery models.
Posted June 01, 2010
At CA World, CA Technologies launched three new and two enhanced products in its virtualization management portfolio. The three new products are designed to deliver robust virtualization management capabilities for virtualization-focused administrators. The company also announced enhancements to two existing products to offer more advanced capabilities for integrating specialized virtualization management into the end-to-end management of hybrid physical and virtual systems, networks, storage and applications.
Posted June 01, 2010
Sybase has unveiled the Sybase Mobility Platform, a framework of best-in-class mobility servers, mobile applications and mobile services to empower enterprises to transform the way they connect with their customers and enable their employees. With mobility driving significant evolution in the enterprise and the IT industry at large, Sybase leverages its proven expertise, leading solutions and strong partner ecosystem to help enterprises better communicate, work and transact, globally on a fully integrated mobility platform
Posted May 26, 2010
IBM has opened a Center of Innovation for Linux and Open Standards in the capital city of the Republic of Kazakhstan, with the goal of driving the development and adoption of open standards and open source technologies among the businesses and government organizations of Kazakhstan. Opened under a comprehensive Memorandum of Understanding, signed by IBM and the Kazakhstan Ministry of Information & Communications, the agreement covers several areas of cooperation. The IBM Center of Innovation for Linux and Open Standards will help local software developers increase their Linux and open standards expertise and better connect them to the worldwide Linux community. As part of this process, IBM will develop new ways to apply information technologies to improve business life in Kazakhstan.
Posted May 26, 2010
At BrainShare in Amsterdam last week, Novell launched SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which delivers enhanced virtualization capabilities, advances in high availability clustering, and more flexible maintenance and support options. As a result, customers can take advantage of the latest open source technologies to run their mission-critical services cost effectively on any platform - physical, virtual or cloud.
Posted May 26, 2010
In his recent Computerworld blog post, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols highlights the five best features of the latest Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration. Fedora 13 is a strong release, and because it is more user-friendly than past releases, Fedora is no longer just for Linux experts, he
Posted May 26, 2010
IBM has opened a Center of Innovation for Linux and Open Standards in the capital city of the Republic of Kazakhstan, with the goal of driving the development and adoption of open standards and open source technologies among the businesses and government organizations of Kazakhstan. Opened under a comprehensive Memorandum of Understanding, signed by IBM and the Kazakhstan Ministry of Information & Communications, the agreement covers several areas of cooperation. The IBM Center of Innovation for Linux and Open Standards will help local software developers increase their Linux and open standards expertise and better connect them to the worldwide Linux community. As part of this process, IBM will develop new ways to apply information technologies to improve business life in Kazakhstan.
Posted May 26, 2010
At BrainShare in Amsterdam last week, Novell launched SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which delivers enhanced virtualization capabilities, advances in high availability clustering, and more flexible maintenance and support options. As a result, customers can take advantage of the latest open source technologies to run their mission-critical services cost effectively on any platform - physical, virtual or cloud.
Posted May 26, 2010
In his recent Computerworld blog post, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols highlights the five best features of the latest Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration. Fedora 13 is a strong release, and because it is more user-friendly than past releases, Fedora is no longer just for Linux experts, he writes.
Posted May 26, 2010
IBM announced on Monday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Sterling Commerce from AT&T for approximately $1.4 billion in cash. The acquisition of the Dublin, Ohio-based company will expand IBM's ability to help organizations create more intelligent and dynamic business networks by simplifying and automating the way they connect and communicate with customers, partners and suppliers both on-premise or through cloud computing delivery models. IBM and AT&T expect the transaction to close in the second half of 2010, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
Posted May 25, 2010
The Pillar Axiom's unified storage architecture allows users to consolidate SAN and NAS from a single storage pool within a single system, and its ability to be provisioned in a similar way as virtualized severs make it suitable for any virtualized environment. The unified storage system can be automatically and dynamically optimized for server virtualization environments. Additionally, the Pillar Axiom storage system allows administrators to provision storage uniquely tuned to the application need and priority, running on virtual servers. Storage can be provisioned in both a "thin" and "physical" context.
Posted May 20, 2010
CA has introduced new capabilities in its mainframe management product portfolio. These new offerings represent the second round of deliverables for CA's "Mainframe 2.0" initiative, announced in November 2008 to simplify the governance, management, and security of IBM's z/OS platform, notes David Luft, senior vice president of software engineering for CA's Mainframe Business Unit. Separately, the company unveiled its new name — CA Technologies — to demonstrate its commitment to managing and securing IT environments and to deliver more flexible IT services to its customers.
Posted May 17, 2010
AES has announced CleverView for cTrace Analysis v6.2, designed to help global enterprises accelerate virtualization migration and keep virtualized environments running smoothly.
Posted May 17, 2010
IBM announced that it has acquired Cast Iron Systems to broaden the delivery of cloud computing services for clients. Cast Iron Systems, a privately held company founded in 2001 and based in Mountain View, Calif., provides cloud integration software, appliances and services. Cast Iron Systems' clients include Allianz, NEC, Peet's Coffee & Tea, Dow Jones, Schumacher Group, ShoreTel, Sports Authority, Time Warner, and Westmont University.
Posted May 17, 2010
Luminex, developer and provider of the Channel Gateway Modern Mainframe Virtual Tape products, announced enhanced enterprise features of their Channel Gateway products. These new features and capabilities include real-time local and remote status monitoring of tape availability and integrity at a remote disaster recovery location and "Synchronous Copy" capability in which local tape operations complete only after replicated tape data is validated to be available.
Posted May 17, 2010
Clerity, a provider of mainframe management solutions, announced enhancements to Clerity Universal Test Manager (UTM), an automated tool for creating, managing, and validating automated application test cases during large-scale mainframe migrations.
Posted May 17, 2010
Brocade and EMC Corporation announced an agreement for EMC to resell the Brocade IP networking portfolio of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switching products through the EMC Select program. This new agreement reflects the companies' joint commitment to address key customer requirements with 10 GbE switching products as they consolidate and virtualize data centers on their journey to the private cloud.
Posted May 17, 2010
SAP and Sybase, Inc. announced Wednesday afternoon that SAP's subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Sybase for approximately $5.8 billion, in a transaction that will bring the companies together to enable customers to become better-run "unwired enterprises." The transaction is expected to close in July 2010, and Sybase will be run as a standalone company. "This is a strategic moment for SAP, for Sybase, our customers, and the IT industry," said Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP and a member of the SAP executive board, in a conference call for analyst and the press. "This acquisition is about accelerating growth for both businesses. This transaction is fully aligned with our strategic objectives to significantly expand our addressable market, opening up new opportunities in mobility, in-memory computing, and analytics."
Posted May 13, 2010
IBM Offers Linux Webcasts On-Demand Did you miss a webcast covering important information about technologies you need to learn more about? IBM offers replays on-demand of webcasts presented by IBM experts and partners.For a replay of "Discover the Benefits of Running Your WebSphere Workloads on Linux and System z" go here.For a replay of "Cloud Computing Made Easy with IBM and Linux," go here. For a replay on "System z and Linux: The Winning Combination," go here. For a replay on "Leveraging Linux with the IBM Client for Smart Work," go here.For a replay on "IBM Smart Business Development and Test with Linux on the Cloud," go here.
Posted May 12, 2010