Data Center Management Articles
Challenged to do more with less, Dundee City Council identified IT as an area in which it could cut costs. The council consolidated its Oracle Database environment supporting critical services from distributed servers to an IBM zEnterprise BC12 platform, dramatically improving efficiency.
Posted June 25, 2015
IBM Business Partner L3C LLP focuses on three ways to help businesses across the UK increase profitability and reduce costs: consultancy, managed services and complementary IT resources. L3C deployed IBM System z servers running Linux to provide companies of any size — including small, midsized and very large enterprises — with scalable, cost-effective, high-performance cloud services.
Posted June 25, 2015
Dell is releasing a series of updates to its Toad family of database solutions that will continue to prioritize managing data across a variety of platforms. The latest round of updates to the Toad family of solutions enables customers to automate agile development practices, improve data preparation for analytics and reporting, and gain flexibility in selecting database platforms, according to Dell.
Posted June 25, 2015
If a data center fails, so could the business. It is hardly surprising then, to see the results of a recent survey which named the top management issue as availability. To allay this concern, and to meet customer expectations of an always-available data center, operators are deploying technologies that marry availability with optimized efficiency. Central to this outcome are database and software integrations.
Posted June 25, 2015
Software is "eating the world," as Marc Andreessen famously said in The Wall Street Journal. Companies such as Amazon, Netflix and Pandora have upended the retail, video, and music industries by operating, at their heart, as software-based companies. A software-defined approach to enterprise storage has begun to infiltrate the enterprise data center as well.
Posted June 25, 2015
What matters most in data management in 2015? There are a lot of moving parts that data managers and professionals need to attend to in today's enterprises. Databases need to be wide open and accessible to all parts of the business, but at the same time, secure and free of tampering. Unstructured forms of data—such as log data, documents, graphics, video, and social data—need to be prepared and ready for analysis in the same way structured files have been ready for years.
Posted June 25, 2015
A lot has happened in the MultiValue database market over the last 50 years. Mark Pick, CEO of Pick Cloud, will reflect on 50 years of Pick and what is to come in the future in a presentation at the Zayo Group's (formerly Latisys) data center in Irvine
Posted June 24, 2015
Rocket has announced there will be an updated version of Rocket U2 Web DE coming this quarter, and that D3 connection pooling is now available. In addition, the company says registration for Rocket MultiValue University (MVU) is now open.
Posted June 24, 2015
Despite a growing need for real-time information, only about one-quarter of big data projects result in tangible success, according to a survey by Capgemini and EMC, that was explored by Andreas Schmitz in a recent blog on the SAP website. Seventy-three percent of the 1,000 decision makers who responded to the survey declared their big data projects failures because of the lengthy process, sometimes taking months to get the information they need.
Posted June 24, 2015
By and large, it seems like today's IT professionals belong to one of two camps: either traditional on-premises IT or the cool, new age cloud. Sometimes, it can even seem like we are talking about two different species. After all, for many of us who come from the client-server era, cloud can be intimidating. Even worse, it can be a source of real anxiety; becoming obsolete is a constant risk in an industry that evolves as fast as ours.
Posted June 24, 2015
If you've been managing databases for any length of time, you've probably had to contend with the "noisy neighbors" scenario. In this scenario, you have several applications, each with their own database residing on a single instance of SQL Server, which don't share the resources of the server nicely. To deal with this issue, you might want to investigate Resource Governor as an alternative.
Posted June 23, 2015
Announcing its fiscal 2015 Q4 results, Oracle said its business was significantly impacted by the strengthening of the U.S. dollar compared to foreign currencies. Oracle reported that total Q4 revenues were $10.7 billion, down 5% but would have been up 3% without the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.
Posted June 22, 2015
IBM announced an initiative that enables business partners, application developers and university students to conduct innovation, development and learning for the OpenPOWER ecosystem. SuperVessel, an open access cloud service created by Beijing's IBM Research and IBM Systems Labs, is now available to the global community of developers who want to participate in the OpenPOWER ecosystem. The cloud acts as a virtual R&D engine for the creation, testing and pilot of emerging applications including deep analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things.
Posted June 22, 2015
IBM and Sogeti, a subsidiary of the Capgemini Group, are partnering to bring IBM's cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Bluemix, to developers and clients. As the largest deployment of Cloud Foundry in the world, Bluemix has the potential to help Sogeti build hybrid cloud applications across public, private and on-premises infrastructure faster with more streamlined integration.
Posted June 22, 2015
HostBridge Technology, a provider of integration and optimization software for IBM z Systems, has introduced a product that makes Redis - the in-memory NoSQL data store at the heart of today's ultra-scalable cloud and mobile apps - available to enterprises worldwide. These organizations can use HostBridge Redis for z/OS to meet the exploding demand for data via mobile and cloud far more efficiently and at the lowest possible cost.
Posted June 22, 2015
ProfitBricks, an infrastructure-as-a-service provider, is offering an early preview of its new Docker hosting platform that enables users to build fully-portable applications within the ProfitBricks cloud. ProfitBricks' Docker provides developers and system administrators with a platform with dedicated resources that autoscales the Docker hosts. Early access customers will be able to utilize up to 2,500 CPU core hours as part of ProfitBricks' early access Docker preview.
Posted June 22, 2015
Loggly, a log management solution provider, has added a capability intended to provide intelligence and structure to automatically catalog and summarize logs for one-click navigation and analysis. The vendor's Derived Fields and Field Explorer, development and DevOps teams can troubleshoot problems faster, more effectively monitor their log data for emerging issues, and do sanity checks after code releases without relying on cumbersome, manual queries.
Posted June 22, 2015
Oracle Database 12c includes lots of new functionality, some of which streamline management, improve capacity utilization, and increase overall storage performance. If you're ready to shrink your footprint and improve your application environments, storage optimization will be a key skill set.
Posted June 17, 2015
Oracle Utilities has introduced Oracle Utilities Service Order Management, which it says is the industry's first commercially available service order automation solution designed to help utilities improve operational efficiency, accelerate issue resolution, reduce costs, and enhance customer service.
Posted June 17, 2015
The latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager offers enhancements designed to help customers manage, migrate, test and deploy applications and databases across hybrid clouds, with reuse of existing management tools and practices, from a single pane of glass.
Posted June 17, 2015
Every now and then, somebody will raise the age-old question "How can I measure the effectiveness and quality of my DBA staff?" This can be a difficult question to answer. And it almost always hides the actual question that is begging to be asked, which is "How many DBAs do we need?"
Posted June 17, 2015
SQL Sentry, a developer of software for SQL Server database professionals, has secured a $25 million growth equity investment from Mainsail Partners. The company plans to use the capital infusion to accelerate its product development, sales and marketing, and expand and enhance its client services.
Posted June 16, 2015
ProfitBricks, a provider of cloud infrastructure IaaS, has launched an early preview of its new Docker hosting platform. "This is making us the most painless infrastructure available," said Achim Weiss, CEO at ProfitBricks. "We combine the flexibility of the platform with the ease of use of containers and still maintain a high level of security."
Posted June 16, 2015
Syncsort is working with Dell to help businesses improve operational efficiency and lower costs by shifting expensive workloads and associated data from enterprise data warehouses (EDW) to Hadoop.
Posted June 10, 2015
Kevin Kline, director of engineering services at SQL Sentry, Microsoft SQL Server MVP since 2004, founding board member of PASS, and DBTA columnist, is hitting the road this summer to reach cities across the country with large SQL Server user groups. The reason for the road trip is two-fold, said Kline.
Posted June 09, 2015
Map R is releasing version 5.0 of the MapR Distribution including Hadoop that will process big and fast data on a single data platform that enables a new class of real-time applications.
Posted June 09, 2015
Petabytes, and more, of data are meaningless without guides to what it all is. Future data users need to know where it came from, how it was filtered, and how it was transformed. Without some functional level of governance we are headed toward a "datapocalypse"—having lots of content but little of value.
Posted June 09, 2015
BMC has introduced a self-service web design tool designed to enable applications to be integrated into the vendor's Control-M Workload Automation offering. The new tool, Control-M Application Integrator, includes a community hub that enables sharing of development information.
Posted June 08, 2015
HP announced enhancements to the HP OneView management platform, which unifies processes, user interfaces and the application programming interfaces (APIs) across HP server, storage, and Virtual Connect networking devices. The company has also formed a new partnership with Arista Networks to enhance data center network efficiency.
Posted June 08, 2015
IBM is acquiring Blue Box Group to simplify the running of private clouds using OpenStack-based solutions. Blue Box is a privately held company based in Seattle that provides businesses with a private cloud as a service platform based on OpenStack. IBM says the addition will help businesses integrate their cloud-based applications and on-premises systems into OpenStack-based managed cloud. Additionally, Blue Box strengthens IBM Cloud's existing OpenStack portfolio with the introduction of a remotely managed OpenStack offering. This offering provides clients with a local cloud and increased visibility, control and security.
Posted June 08, 2015
CA Technologies has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rally Software Development Corp. a provider of Agile development software and services, for approximately $480 million, net of cash acquired.
Posted June 08, 2015
To help users extract insights from data lakes,Teradata has made a multi-year commitment to contribute to Presto's open source development. Based on a three-part roadmap, Teradata's says its contributions will be 100% open source under the Apache license and will advance Presto's code base, scalability, iterative querying, and ability to query multiple data repositories.
Posted June 08, 2015
Veeam, which offers solutions for data backup and disaster recovery, is integrating its services with EMC when it releases its Veeam Availability Suite v9 later this year. The integration will enable IT to create backups and recover individual items from EMC storage snapshots. Enterprise IT will be able to use Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots to rapidly create backups from EMC VNX or VNXe storage snapshots up to 20 times faster than competing products, according to the vendor.
Posted June 04, 2015
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., has completed its acquisition of Pentaho, a data integration, visualization and analytics company. According to Hitachi, Pentaho will retain its existing brand and continue to operate independently as "Pentaho, a Hitachi Data Systems company" under the leadership of its CEO, Quentin Gallivan, who will now report to Kevin Eggleston, senior vice president of Social Innovation at HDS.
Posted June 04, 2015
Oracle has introduced Oracle Documaker Mobile, a new product that enables businesses to produce the same content for print and for mobile delivery. This new offering enables businesses to use content and business rules created for paper-style output in new device responsive documents designed for delivery to mobile devices.
Posted June 03, 2015
New and emerging companies are taking aim at data management challenges to help customers get more value from their data. Here, DBTA showcases the approaches of 10 companies we think are worth watching.
Posted June 01, 2015
SAP has announced the cloud edition of SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), which adds new simplification and innovations across core business functions. In addition, the new release gives customers the opportunity to deploy real hybrid scenarios — combining on-premise and cloud solutions.
Posted May 28, 2015
The Pure Storage FlashArray 400 Series is now certified by SAP as an enterprise storage solution for the SAP HANA platform. The certification enables Pure Storage to participate in SAP's program for SAP HANA tailored data center integration using its certified solution.
Posted May 28, 2015
CA Workload Automation Advanced Integration 1.0 for SAP Business Warehouse has received SAP certification. Specifically, the SAP Integration and Certification Center has certified that CA Workload Automation Advanced Integration 1.0 integrates with SAP Business Warehouse to provide a unified view for jobs running in both SAP and non-SAP applications.
Posted May 28, 2015
Many DBAs are now tasked with managing multi-vendor environments, and handling a variety of data types. Increasingly, DBAs are turning to strategies such as database automation to be able to concentrate more on the big picture of moving their enterprises forward.
Posted May 28, 2015
OpenStack turns five this year, and the project has come a long way in its short life so far. Last year brought major improvements in areas such as upgradeability between versions and overall usability, which upped the appeal of OpenStack to enterprises while also netting important backers such as HP (acquired private cloud vendor and one-time OpenStack competitor Eucalyptus) and VMware (OpenStack was a recurring theme at VMworld 2014).
Posted May 26, 2015
Cloud computing requires many features, and every company launching either public or private clouds seeks a range of features, including multi-tenancy with the greatest number of people sharing the same machine as possible, dynamic scaling of environments immediately without waiting to provision, capacity tracking, and support for thousands of users with a handful of IT professionals.
Posted May 26, 2015
Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) announced that its board of directors has unanimously approved a plan to separate the company into two publicly traded, pure-play leaders: one to serve commercial and government clients globally and one to serve public sector clients in the United States.
Posted May 26, 2015