Data Center Management Articles
Dystopian visions of a future in which automation eliminates the vast majority of jobs are nothing new. However, even though previous predictions of doom have been misplaced, there is new concern about the impact of the latest generation of automation on the nature of work and the prospects for universal employment in the future. In particular, we're increasingly seeing automation disrupt jobs that were long considered to require human judgment or abilities.
Posted July 08, 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 July 08, 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 July 08, 2015
Veritas, Symantec's information management business, has introduced new offerings, which it says, address the needs of rapidly evolving enterprise data centers, and provide significant upgrades to its core portfolio of backup and information management products. A previously announced operational separation of Veritas and Symantec is scheduled for October 2015, with the complete separation to take place by January 2016.
Posted July 07, 2015
The latest version of EMC's disk library for mainframe is designed to ease the growth pressure created by so-called "third-platform" applications. "Outside of mainframe operators, few people using enterprise applications today have even a vague idea that mobile applications drive enormous amounts of data back to mainframes, increasing demands on storage as well as pushing the limits of physical tape systems that tie back to mainframes," said Greg Gotta, vice president of the enterprise and midrange systems division at EMC.
Posted July 06, 2015
Compuware Corporation, a mainframe software company, has released what it describes as a "substantial upgrade" to Topaz, its development-and-operations suite that empowers customers to get maximum value from their IBM z Systems environments. The new release features the debut of Topaz for Java Performance.
Posted July 06, 2015
GT Software has made enhancements to Ivory Service Architect, which provides application and data integration tools to simplify and accelerate access to business-critical, mainframe applications, data, and processes. "With the newest capabilities of Ivory Service Architect v5.0, organizations can more fully support mobile initiatives and address modern integration needs, getting the most out of their mainframe assets without writing additional code," said Adam Redd, CTO for GT Software.
Posted July 06, 2015
IBM has introduced enterprise-class containers to make it easier for clients to deliver production applications across their hybrid environments. Containers give developers the flexibility to build once and move applications without the need to rewrite or redeploy their code. Enterprises will now be able to use the combination of IBM, Docker, Cloud Foundry, and OpenStack to create a new generation of portable distributed applications.
Posted July 06, 2015
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA is now available in the AWS Marketplace, providing customers with additional deployment options for their big data workloads. "Now with many implementation options, ranging from bare-metal hardware to vast, scalable operations in the cloud, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA can fit nearly every enterprise big-data scenario, from the mundane to the extreme," said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager for the Platforms Business Unit at Red Hat.
Posted July 06, 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 July 01, 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 July 01, 2015
Jut has come out of stealth mode with the announcement of the beta release of the Operations Data Hub for DevOps, a streaming analytics platform for operational data.
Posted June 30, 2015
With the emergence of big data, cloud, high performance computing, and new engagement technologies, data has become the basis of competitive advantage today, Doug Balog, general manager, IBM Power Systems, emphasized in his keynote at Red Hat Summit 2015 going on this week in Boston. But with these disruptive new forces, organizations must innovate in terms of how they build their infrastructure, he noted.
Posted June 25, 2015
Think administering z/VM will be difficult? Think again. With IBM Wave for z/VM (IBM Wave) with Oracle, IT organizations can unleash the power of z/VM virtualization, improve productivity, simplify management, and accelerate the cloud journey with innovative technology that helps reduce the barriers to management of virtualized environments.
Posted June 25, 2015
IBM Research and SCA are partnering to create a shared service cloud for the municipalities of New York that is predicted to eliminate 25% of government's IT budget by streamlining applications and connecting siloed municipalities. The IBM mainframe is the platform that New York trusts to host that cloud. In addition to its time-tested scalability, reliability and security, it offers the lowest total cost of ownership — supporting the state as it strives for reduced spending and a smarter, future-ready IT infrastructure.
Posted June 25, 2015
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
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
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
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