Data Center Management Articles
Vitria Technology, Inc. has introduced five new data analytics applications that simplify and accelerate real-time business activity monitoring in the cloud. According to the company, the apps allow business users to uncover, analyze, and act on actual business activity patterns, thus helping them tackle supply chain challenges, fraudulent financial transactions, delayed order fulfillment and shipments, online customer service issues, and suspicious people of interest in real-time, before a customer or the broader organization is affected.
Posted December 09, 2013
Serena Software, a provider of orchestrated application development and release management solutions, has announced Serena Release Manager v5. The new release automates application deployments, provides visibility, control and standardization of the release process, and supports coordination and collaboration for release teams.
Posted December 09, 2013
Modern data centers contain a mix of physical and virtual systems and must be able to provide access to highly distributed collaborative applications as well as support systems that leverage cloud computing. Here are 8 best practices for achieving data center security and an in-depth analysis of the new security concerns presented by next-generation data centers.
Posted December 04, 2013
New technology from CA is aimed at helping organizations lower the cost of storing data processed on IBM System z by backing up the data and archiving it to the cloud. According to CA, by using its Cloud Storage for System z with Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage in conjunction with the Riverbed Whitewater cloud storage appliance from Riverbed Technology, organizations can decrease storage costs while also improving disaster recovery readiness.
Posted November 25, 2013
STORServer, a provider of data backup solutions, is now offering backup appliances built on CommVault Simpana 10 data and information management software. The launch of the STORServer Backup Appliance, powered by CommVault, marks the first time the company has offered an enterprise data protection software engine other than IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).
Posted November 25, 2013
Compuverde's flagship storage solution now provides support for both scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) and virtual machine (VM) environments, enabling users to scale rapidly using the infrastructure of their choice without sacrificing performance or cost.
Posted November 25, 2013
PKWARE has released two new versions of its flagship products - PKZIP and SecureZIP. The new releases allow customers to take advantage of IBM mainframe hardware facilities to offload compression and free up general computing capacity.
Posted November 25, 2013
Ipswitch File Transfer has added mobile support to the MOVEit Managed File Transfer (MFT) cloud service. The MOVEit MFT system is designed to transfer files between business partners, customers, and employees, as well as automate file-based workflows. MOVEit's mobile features are intended to bring mobile devices into companies' MFT system and automated file workflows.
Posted November 25, 2013
Two new approaches to application quality have emerged: "risk-based testing" - pioneered in particular by Rex Black - and "exploratory testing" - as evangelized by James Bach and others. Neither claim to eradicate issues of application quality, which most likely will continue as long as software coding involves human beings. However, along with automation of the more routine tests, these techniques form the basis for higher quality application software.
Posted November 20, 2013
When it comes to service recovery, speed matters. The costs of recovery from failures can be staggering in terms of business service downtime, in lost revenues and damaged reputations. For DR preparedness to significantly improve, companies should consider these 5 dimensions of disaster recovery.
Posted November 13, 2013
The number of databases continues to grow, but evolution tells us that not all may survive. Through the natural selection of most useful traits, intensifying the most crucial features, and implementing the best of both, databases will continue to flourish in new remarkable ways, helping organizations achieve specialized goals unique to their business. Here's a look at where the evolutionary path of the data center could take us in the coming years.
Posted November 13, 2013
IBM announced new business analytics and cloud software solutions to help zEnterprise clients take advantage of new workloads. These include a new version of the DB2 and IMS databases, and Cognos analytics tools configured for zEnterprise.
Posted November 13, 2013
Cisco announced what it calls its "Application Centric Infrastructure" (ACI) initiative, providing a bundle of network and software products, and new professional services to support the needs of applications. ACI unifies physical and virtual networks, and offers security, compliance and real-time visibility at the system, tenant, and application levels.
Posted November 11, 2013
Attachmate Corporation has introduced Attachmate Reflection Security Gateway 2014, a new software product that allows organizations to extend enterprise authentication and identity management investments to their access controls for host systems. In addition to its access control capabilities, Reflection Security Gateway also provides capabilities that assist IT desktop managers in their efforts to manage and maintain their terminal emulation environment.
Posted November 11, 2013
Two new programs from BMC are aimed at making it easier for companies to adopt cloud computing platforms. BMC's ZipKit program includes a library of pre-built application components for the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management and BMC Bladelogic Server Automation management systems. BMC's Express Cloud,designed as a "starter cloud," includes 250 managed server licenses, hybrid over VMW and AWS, and an implementation/education services bundle.
Posted November 11, 2013
SHI International Corp., an IT solutions provider, is opening an online portal designed to help customers source, procure, and manage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions from leading cloud service providers. According to the company, the new service addresses the challenge fo finding the best option which for many organizations can be a time-consuming and expensive process, the vendor says.
Posted November 11, 2013
IT infrastructure management solutions provider Infrastructure Solutions, Inc. (ISI) has introduced a tool to oversee server consolidation to IBM System z environments. Linux on System z offers the flexibility of running Linux with the advantages of mainframe hardware.
Posted November 11, 2013
Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced the next release of its cloud management platform, Red Hat CloudForms 3.0. This latest offering is targeted at both the deployment and management of public and private clouds based on OpenStack, and also expands support for AWS.
Posted November 11, 2013
CodeFutures has introduced dbShards/Migrate, a new continuous replication technology that is aimed at solving the problem of extended downtime when migrating a large database for an application across data centers or cloud environments.
Posted November 05, 2013
Revenues from System z mainframe server products increased 6% for the third quarter of 2013, compared with the year-ago period. Total delivery of System z computing power, as measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), increased 56%. Overall, however, total systems revenues decreased 19%.
Posted October 28, 2013
Red Hat is shipping a new version of its portal technology, JBoss Portal 6.1, with features and capabilities to help enterprises build innovative customer experiences, including integration with Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and enable users to log in using their third-party credentials.
Posted October 28, 2013
MuleSoft, a provider of integration platforms, is offering developer tooling for RAML (RESTful API Modeling Language) as a free service to enable any developer to build REST APIs that foster a standard, design-first approach. The new MuleSoft tooling includes API Designer: a modern, web-based, intuitive development tool that guides users through the API design process with RAML and builds a live, visual representation of an API on the fly.
Posted October 28, 2013
With expanded cloud management solutions that enable IT as a service, VMware is sending a message that it supports not only vSphere but also heterogeneous environments.
Posted October 28, 2013
Software Diversified Services (SDS) is partnering with McAfee to provide support, maintenance, new enhancements, and compliance upgrades for McAfee's E-Business Server, a comprehensive suite of products using industry-standard encryption to automatically protect corporate data within applications, email, file transfers, and transaction processing. As part of the agreement to take over support and development of E-Business Server, SDS says it will assume full and ongoing responsibility for all current and future customer support functions and also deliver a series of customer-requested upgrades and enhancements.
Posted October 14, 2013
Software AG announced cloud-based IT and process management technologies at its recent user conference in San Francisco. Portfolios Live is a cloud-based service that provides CIOs the ability to manage and transform IT landscapes based on budget, regulatory, legal and technical information. A sister product, Process Live, is a cloud-based service integrating social collaboration with process improvement. "We've changed our architecture from client/server to an event-driven architecture," Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost said at the keynote kicking off the conference.
Posted October 14, 2013
CA is offering a free version of its CA Nimsoft Monitor solution to help customers quickly achieve visibility into the health of their IT resources. With this, CA's first "freemium" offering, the company seeks to meet the requirements of emerging, high-growth enterprises, as well as reaching out to the system and admin people rather than the economic buyer, Bill Talbot, director of product marketing for CA's infrastructure management solutions and business unit at CA, said in an interview.
Posted October 14, 2013
IBM announced new systems and solutions intended to help clients and managed service providers build private and hybrid clouds to get the most out of big data, social, and mobile workloads. These include PureSystems, Power Systems, Smarter Storage Systems, System x, and Technical Computing offerings that provide the flexibility clients need to quickly deploy clouds. "IBM is positioned to compete aggressively for public, private and hybrid cloud computing opportunities," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems & Technology Group and Integrated Supply Chain.
Posted October 14, 2013
Veeam Software, a provider of backup, replication and virtualization management solutions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, has introduced Veeam Management Pack (MP) v6.5 for VMware. Veeam MP extends VMware monitoring, management and capacity planning to Microsoft System Center, providing complete visibility of physical and virtual infrastructures and applications, all from one console. The Veeam Management Pack connects the VMware virtual infrastructure and puts that data into Systems Center Operations Manager, and then the presentation is done through what is called the Management Pack, Doug Hazelman, Veeam vice president of product strategy, explained in an interview.
Posted October 14, 2013
Syncsort, a provider of data protection solutions, is shipping a new data management solution that provides a centralized way to catalog and search the NetApp ONTAP and VMware landscape, delivering information that helps IT to increase storage efficiency, accelerate the use of snapshot technology for efficient data protection and ensure compliance. The solution, ECX Enterprise Catalog, provides visibility into file and virtual machine environment across all tiers, helping them achieve a new level of operational efficiency to control costs, identify unprotected data or indicate where protection may have failed due to an errant configuration, change or other issues.
Posted October 14, 2013
Macro 4, a software and services company, introduced an Eclipse interface for its mainframe application performance management software, FreezeFrame. The new interface gives developers and support staff extra features to enhance productivity and collaboration and makes it easier for new or less experienced mainframe support staff to work with z/OS systems. "Our products are designed for the various stages of mainframe application deployment, whether in test or production environments, and they work in an integrated way in Eclipse," noted Michelle Harris, Group Product Release Manager at Macro 4.
Posted October 14, 2013
The mainframe continues to thrive even as new computing trends such as Big Data and cloud take hold. Mainframe experts ponder the perception and future of the mainframe.
Posted October 14, 2013
EMC's CEO and chairman Joe Tucci gave a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 on the transition occurring in IT and the data center of the future. There are four key macro trends driving the transformation in IT, said Tucci. These tremendously disruptive and opportunistic trends include mobility, cloud computing, big data, and social networking. Jeremy Burton, EVP at EMC, cited a recent IOUG-Unisphere Research survey report which showed that the daily DBA activities most on the rise are systems monitoring, performance diagnosis, and managing backup and recovery. Oracle and EMC are integrating their technologies to allow customers to spend less time in the back office so they can devote more time to the front office dealing with more impactful business issues, said Burton.
Posted October 02, 2013
IBM says it will be shipping z/OS Version 2 Release 1 (z/OS V2.1) today, which includes enhanced support for cloud and mobile computing. The new version of z/OS is engineered to help enterprises pursue the innovation to drive highly scalable workloads -- including private clouds and support for mobile and social applications, IBM said. The new operating system also is designed for big data workloads, with a new security infrastructure and an optimized data availability that supports data analytics solutions.
Posted September 30, 2013
Red Hat, a provider of enterprise open source solutions, announced new enhancements and a roadmap for its OpenShift platform, which facilitates the creation, integration and management of applications and business processes in the cloud. The new line of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings include Red Hat JBoss xPaaS services for OpenShift provide enterprise application, integration and business process automation capabilities and services in an extensible open PaaS platform, and is designed to enable development and deployment of enterprise applications and business processes in the cloud.
Posted September 30, 2013
The OpenDaylight Project, a community-led and industry-supported open source framework to advance software-defined networking (SDN), recently provided a first glimpse at the OpenDaylight SDN architecture for the first release called "Hydrogen." "The OpenDaylight community is developing an SDN architecture that supports a wide range of protocols and can rapidly evolve in the direction SDN goes, not based on any one vendor's purposes," explained David Meyer, Technical Steering Committee chair, OpenDaylight Project.
Posted September 30, 2013
ManageEngine, a provider of real-time IT management solutions, is shipping a Large Enterprise Edition of OpManager, its network and data center infrastructure management software. With this release, the vendor hopes to offer an alternative for companies seeking to replace their legacy network management tools from HP, IBM, CA and Microsoft.
Posted September 30, 2013
At LinuxCon 2013, IBM announced plans to invest $1 billion in new Linux and open source technologies for IBM's Power Systems servers. The new pledge recalled the company's announcement in 2000 that it would embrace Linux as strategic to its systems strategy, followed a year later with the promise of $1 billion dedicated to backing the Linux movement. The new investment will fuel two immediate initiatives - a new client center in Europe and a Linux on Power development cloud.
Posted September 30, 2013
Syncsort, a software company specializing in high speed sorting products, data integration and backup software and services, has formed a technology partnership with Cloudera. The joint effort is aimed a providing an approach that customers can leverage to exploit critical mainframe data in Hadoop for big data analytics. "We view Cloudera as enabling a lot of the enterprise-level services that Hadoop needs," said Jorge Lopez, director of product marketing, Syncsort, in an interview. "Together, we can really bridge the gap between the mainframe and Hadoop."
Posted September 30, 2013
We all know that one of cloud computing's most attractive attributes is flexibility, which some people may not associate with the mainframe. But those people are not mainframers. The mainframe actually does provide all the benefits of cloud computing - and the virtualization that provides the cloud's underpinnings. Pedro Pereira explores why the mainframe is a good investment for environments that demand flexibility in the most recent blog post on the SHARE President's Corner.
Posted September 30, 2013
There is no limit to the potential, business- building applications for big data, springing from the capability to provide new, expansive insights never before available to business leaders. However, the new forms of data, along with the speed in which it needs to be processed, requires significant work on the back end, which many organizations may not yet be ready to tackle. IT leaders agree that to make the most of big data, they will need to redouble efforts to consolidate data environments, bring in new solutions, and revisit data retention policies. These are the conclusions of a new survey of 322 data managers and professionals who are members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). The survey was underwritten by Oracle Corp. and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc.
Posted September 26, 2013
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has released a new version of its data replication software intended to address requirements for big data analytics, business intelligence, business continuity and disaster recovery initiatives. Addressing expanding use cases for the solution, Attunity Replicate 3.0, is engineered to provide secure data transfer over long distances such as wide area networks (WANs), the cloud and satellite connections, said Lawrence Schwartz, vice president of marketing at Attunity, in an interview.
Posted September 25, 2013
Oracle has rolled out the new StorageTek T10000D tape drive. With 54% more capacity per cartridge over the previous generation, up to 8.5 TB of native capacity per cartridge and native data rates of 252 MB/sec, Oracle says the StorageTek T10000D tape drive can help customers reduce acquisition costs for data center backup by 35%. Deployed in the Oracle StorageTek SL8500 tape library system, the StorageTek T10000D enables customers to scale in excess of 68 exabytes of capacity under a single point of management.
Posted September 18, 2013
Syncsort, a provider of big data integration solutions, has announced the availability of MFX ZPCopy, a new software product that can offload mainframe copy processing to zIIP engines, and can be licensed separately as an add-on to Syncsort MFX. After looking at mainframe processing from several customers, Syncsort realized that copy-related processing accounts for hundreds of hours of CPU processing time annually and contributes to batch window bottlenecks, inflating software costs and making it more difficult to meet SLA, said Jorge Lopez, director of product marketing at Syncsort, in an interview.
Posted September 17, 2013