Data Center Management Articles
Although big data promises to dramatically alter the business environment, technology is only a decision enabler.
Posted October 29, 2014
In 2013, Bon Ton Stores invested in upgrading IT, continuing to update and expand its eCommerce sites, and launching a new mobile site supporting delivery of promotions and online purchasing.
Posted October 29, 2014
Rocket Software has announced Rocket Data Virtualization version 2.1, a mainframe data virtualization solution for universal access to data, regardless of location, interface or format.
Posted October 28, 2014
Miss out on SHARE® in Pittsburgh this summer? Get caught up with SHARE's latest blog post featuring key takeaways from security keynote Robert Andrews, co-founder and chief information security officer for Mainstream Security.
Posted October 27, 2014
IBM's third quarter was a rough one for the company. There are tougher economic conditions in Europe and Asia, usurping revenue from IBM's global business. More significantly, however, is the underlying historical shift now shaping information technology. No longer do enterprises wait for the next big software or hardware release from their vendors - they go to the cloud and get the resources they need at the time they are needed. Plus, there's less lock-in as resources become available on a temporary basis.
Posted October 27, 2014
IBM and Microsoft are working together to provide their respective enterprise software on Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. As part of the deal, IBM and Microsoft will make key IBM middleware such as WebSphere Liberty, MQ, and DB2 available on Microsoft Azure. In turn, Windows Server and SQL Server will be offered on IBM Cloud.
Posted October 27, 2014
CA Technologies has introduced a new release of CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM), intended to bolster its offering for unified monitoring and management of critical IT services and infrastructure. "IT organizations are increasingly facing the critical need to develop and deploy applications with precision and speed, while also delivering the reliability and responsiveness that users demand," said John Smith, general manager of enterprise management, for CA Technologies.
Posted October 27, 2014
Dynatrace (formerly Compuware APM), a provider of application performance management (APM) tools, has launched an early access program for Data Center Real User Monitoring (DC RUM) 12.3, delivering self-learning analytics to simplify the identification and resolution of bottlenecks in production systems.
Posted October 27, 2014
HP is making available a new "hyper-converged" offering that combines software-defined storage, compute, management and VMware integration, which the vendor says will enable deployment of virtualized environments from power-on to provisioning of new applications in less than 15 minutes.
Posted October 27, 2014
BMC has added an IT service management package that is designed to upgrade IT service desk operations with mobility and collaboration features.
Posted October 27, 2014
IBM announced that the third quarter of 2014 was a difficult one for the company, buffeted by both economic and technology forces. Net income for the period was down 17% from the same period in 2013, $3.5 billion compared with $4.1 billion. The declines were seen across all of IBM's product lines, including mainframes.
Posted October 27, 2014
Worksoft has introduced an enhanced version of Certify Execution Manager, an offering in support of SAP solutions that will allow business users to perform daily business process validation across the enterprise. Worksoft, an SAP partner, is a provider of business process validation software for packaged enterprise applications. Scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of 2014, the enhanced solution will provide a faster, more seamless and user-friendly automated business process validation solution for thousands of entities, enabling around-the-clock coverage and support.
Posted October 22, 2014
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer 9.0 (formerly Confio Ignite) provides database administrators and their IT teams with visibility across the application stack, and now covers storage resources, in addition to database, server, and virtualization resources, to speed identification of application performance bottlenecks and improve end user experience.
Posted October 22, 2014
The opportunity and imperative to optimize energy use in the data center industry is at an all-time high. In the modern digital era, data centers are as essential as power plants, a massive and critical infrastructure upon which our social, business, retail, healthcare, and government services are run. Gathering good data streams — metrics that matter to both business and IT — and correlating them through powerful analytics will amplify bottom line results. Here are 5 key ways more efficient power utilization can enable data centers to be more effective and efficient.
Posted October 22, 2014
Companies are facing the "big squeeze" created by IT budgets that are relatively flat, growing by only 3% to 4% a year, versus data growth that is averaging 30% to 40%, and a consensus that data is a valuable commodity that cannot be thrown away, said Monte Zweben, CEO and co-founder of Splice Machine in his presentation at the Strata + Hadoop World conference.
Posted October 21, 2014
The new Dell In-Memory Appliance for Cloudera Enterprise is designed to provide customers with a processing engine combined with interactive analytics in a preconfigured and scalable solution, and will begin shipping Oct. 15, 2014.
Posted October 14, 2014
In its first server announcement since completing the IBM System x server acquisition, Lenovo has announced plans to collaborate with VMware. This alliance extends the 16-year development relationship between System x and VMware and broadens the partnership to include the full range of Lenovo's expanded server business.
Posted October 14, 2014
MongoDB has introduced enhancements to MongoDB Management Service (MMS), a cloud service to simplify operations for MongoDB deployments and reduce operational overhead.
Posted October 14, 2014
To help IT organizations extend the agility provided by continuous integration into continuous delivery, VMware also unveiled a major update of VMware vRealize Operations (formerly VMware vCenterOperations Management Suite. The new VMware vRealize Code Stream enables DevOps teams to deliver frequent, reliable software releases.
Posted October 14, 2014
It is no secret that companies are embracing analytics as one of the key drivers of future growth. During the Global Technology Outlook at SHARE® in Pittsburgh this August, IBM Watson's Donna Dillenberger further noted that new mainframe technologies are enabling organizations to harness increasingly meaningful results from data gathered from disparate sources.
Posted October 13, 2014
IBM is adding new analytics capabilities to the mainframe platform, helping enable better data security and providing clients with the ability to integrate Hadoop big data. By applying analytic tools to business transactions as they are occurring, mainframe systems can enable clients to have true real-time insights. With the analytics on the System z platform, clients can also incorporate social media into their real-time analytic.
Posted October 13, 2014
GT Software has added enhancements to its flagship Ivory Service Suite line, incorporating greater support for big data elements and messaging formats.
Posted October 13, 2014
DBI Software has introduced pureFeat V6.1 Performance Management Suite for IBM DB2 LUW which adds new capabilities for Stored Procedure Visibility and insight into Current Activity Functions. With Stored Procedure Visibility, DBI is "taking the lid off" the black box, and, with insight into Current Activity Functions, DBI allows users to quickly answer the question, "What's happening right now?" said Scott Hayes, president and founder of DBI Software.
Posted October 13, 2014
One feature of the big data revolution is the acknowledgement that a single database management system architecture cannot meet all needs. However, the Lambda Architecture provides a useful pattern for combining multiple big data technologies to achieve multiple enterprise objectives. First proposed by Nathan Marz, it attempts to provide a combination of technologies that together can provide the characteristics of a web-scale system that can satisfy requirements for availability, maintainability, and fault-tolerance.
Posted October 08, 2014
Check constraints are supported in all of the major DBMS products, including DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server. But they are too-often ignored and not implemented in production databases. Properly defined, check constraints can provide enhanced data integrity without requiring procedural logic.
Posted October 08, 2014
Organizations have been collecting data for years, but never before has there been such urgency to have it immediately available. The business need is pressing—decision makers need up-to-the-minute situational awareness in a volatile global economy.
Posted October 08, 2014
A goal at many organizations is to make the data that matters more broadly accessible to more users in a timely fashion. However, at the same time, enterprise data environments are becoming more complex and costly, running on many platforms, supporting many applications, and handling growing volumes of data. IT is expected to respond quickly to new initiatives that can support the business but as IT environments become more unwieldy, agility is an elusive concept.
Posted October 08, 2014
EnterpriseDB, a provider of enterprise-class Postgres products and database compatibility solutions, today introduced Enterprise DB (EDB) Backup and Recovery Tool (BART), a single tool to set up, manage and automate processes for backup and recovery. The new product is intended to replace the series of complex steps and coding that Postgres users have had to deploy in order to ensure databases back up on schedule, and can be rebuilt.
Posted October 07, 2014
Approaching the fourth year of its planned five-year turnaround, HP today announced its intention to separate into two new publicly traded companies. One will include HP's enterprise technology infrastructure, software and services businesses, which will do business as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and the other will include HP's personal systems and printing businesses, which will operate as HP Inc. and retain the current logo.
Posted October 06, 2014
Mainframes represent some of the most important log data available, since they host the most mission-critical applications. However, according to the companies, the terabytes of data in more than 200 different log types produced by a typical mainframe system were previously inaccessible to Splunk software without significant work. Delivering on the technology alliance recently announced by Splunk and Syncsort to pull mainframe data into Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud, Syncsort has introduced Ironstream.
Posted October 02, 2014
GridGain Systems, a provider of open source in-memory computing solutions, has launched the GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric. According to the company, the GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric is designed to serve the emerging needs of the real-time enterprise, which does not view datasets as historical events, but instead as actionable intelligence for immediate decision-making, and as a way to deal with changing market forces. Although analytics and transactional data functions have traditionally operated separately, companies now need to view them as part of the same "data fabric," and should implement strategies that are able to connect enterprise-wide data from all sources.
Posted September 30, 2014
During his SHARE in Pittsburgh presentation, Bryan Foley, IBM program director for System z strategy and Linux business line manager, noted the answer to this burning question: the mainframe."It's the ultimate virtualized system," said Foley. "You can throw all of your workload in, and it runs better as you do that."
Posted September 29, 2014
IBM and AT&T are jointly working on extending AT&T NetBond services to the SoftLayer platform to offer customers a combined security and performance solution. This alliance is intended to help enable businesses to create hybrid-computing solutions. AT&T Virtual Private Network (VPN) customers can use AT&T NetBond to connect their IT infrastructure to SoftLayer's cloud services.
Posted September 29, 2014
Phoenix Software, a provider of System z management tools, has begun shipping the latest version of its z/OS monitoring tool. The new release, product, (E)JES V5R4, includes (E)JES Web, a Java-based web interface that is engineered to sync to the response time characteristics of (E)JES under ISPF. All (E)JES displays are supported, including time-oriented browsers like OPERLOG. "Our intent is for (E)JES Web to be the de facto (E)JES interactive interface for users that are uncomfortable navigating traditional 3270 interfaces." said Ed Jaffe, chief technology officer for Phoenix Software International.
Posted September 29, 2014
HP plans to open a software-defined networking (SDN) App Store to support innovation within enterprises. The HP SDN App Store is intended to provide HP's partners a platform together with consulting and support services that will enable customers to uncover the business value of SDN. The HP SDN App Store will be generally available on Oct. 1.
Posted September 29, 2014
Brocade is beefing up its routers with capabilities to address the bandwidth, scale, and performance needed for emerging software defined networks. The Brocade MLX Series routers will include new hardware modules and software. As part of the update, Brocade is delivering software enhancements to the Brocade MLXe carrier-class routing platform, including support for OpenFlow 1.3 with significant features to help organizations deploy new application- and user-specific services in a secure manner.
Posted September 29, 2014
"Digital disruption" driven by technology is having an impact on the decisions IT organizations are making, Mark Hurd told the audience at the Moscone Center in his first OpenWorld keynote as Oracle CEO. Hurd described the dramatic impact cloud, exploding data volumes, social, business, consumer sophistication, and mobility are having on IT organizations, and then interviewed executives about the individual challenges faced by each, including Yael Cosset of dunnhumby; Stephen Little of Xerox; Jamie Miller of GE; Filippo Passerini of P&G; Kimberly S. Stevenson of Intel Corporation; and Tim Theriault of Walgreen Co.
Posted September 29, 2014
Attunity recently introduced the next generation of Attunity Maestro, its global-scale information flow management platform, to enable management and monitoring of its updated Attunity Replicate for Oracle.
Posted September 29, 2014
In what is being heralded as an epic change at Oracle, Larry Ellison, the charismatic CEO of Oracle, is stepping down and will be succeeded by Safra Catz and Mark Hurd who will share the CEO position. Despite the widespread pronouncements that this is the end of an era and that Ellison is relinquishing his membership in the exclusive club of rock-star tech leaders that has included Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates, some industry insiders believe that is simply not the case. Ellison, they say, will remain a force to be reckoned with at Oracle.
Posted September 25, 2014
In simpler times, businesses kept their data in one place. That made the data easy to access and control. Today, many large enterprises have a global component to daily business transactions, with customers, partners and employees located around the world. Given the distributed nature of an organization's users and increasing data location regulations, the traditional method of storing data on a central server to support worldwide stakeholders no longer meets business needs.
Posted September 25, 2014
The expectations for technology in business have never been higher—thanks to the consumerization of IT, disruptions across the tech stack, and the emergence of new technology-based business models. And the pressures facing corporate IT departments been greater. So, how can business leaders and CIOs maximize the value of their technology investments to drive competitive business advantage? By tackling three important areas.
Posted September 25, 2014
Oracle made two new announcements around NoSQL. It is extending Oracle Enterprise Manager capabilities to MySQL databases. With this new offering, customers can manage complex deployments of Oracle technologies that include MySQL, either on-premise or in a cloud. In addition, Oracle announced a new development milestone release for MySQL 5.7 which extends performance, scalability, reliability and management capabilities. The company also announced several MySQL product releases and early access features, as well as the availability of MySQL source code on GitHub.com.
Posted September 25, 2014
The Attachmate Group a privately-held software holding company owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital, Elliott Management and Thoma Bravo, has entered into a definitive agreement to merge with Micro Focus. The principal holdings of the Attachmate Group are Principal holdings include SUSE, Novell, Attachmate, and NetIQ.
Posted September 24, 2014