Dynamic Solutions International (DSI) and B&L Associates have partnered to offer a fully integrated solution including the DSI9000 Virtual Tape Library family of solutions with B&L's data center operations automation and management products, enabling a single point control of the automated VTL environment. This partnership provides current B&L users with a solution for virtual tape which improves reliability, performance and functionality over physical tape libraries. According to the vendors, the combined software and VTL results in a best-of-breed package for the MCP market space.
Posted April 11, 2011
With the annual Oracle users conference COLLABORATE about to begin, Andy Flower, president of the IOUG, spoke with 5 Minute Briefing about the IOUG's strong areas of focus in terms of overall conference content, and how the addition of the MySQL user base into the Oracle community is evolving. Citing a MySQL keynote, 75 sessions at COLLABORATE focused on MySQL, and a new MySQL Council headed by Sarah Novotny, Flower says the IOUG is making strides in giving voice to the MySQL community within the IOUG and setting a stage for positive interaction with Oracle.
Posted April 06, 2011
Oracle has announced three new integrations in support of its open and integrated technology stack. Enhancing its backup and recovery capabilities for Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance now directly connects to the Oracle Exadata InfiniBand fabric to simplify deployments and accelerate backup and recovery time by more than 50% compared to traditional NAS systems. Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure now provides integration with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with rapid iSCSI provisioning that automates desktop provisioning and accelerates virtual desktop deployments. Additionally, Oracle Secure Backup is qualified for Sun ZFS Storage Appliance backup and recovery with Oracle's scalable StorageTek tape libraries.
Posted April 06, 2011
Three new Oracle Validated Configurations are now available to speed the deployment of solutions based on Oracle Linux with Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. The three new configurations consist of Oracle Linux 5 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage 7420 appliance. The configurations also include one of the following: Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 server, an 8-socket rackmount x86 system, with QLogic FC HBAs; Oracle's Sun Fire X4470 server, a 4-socket rackmount system; or Oracle's Sun Fire X4270 M2 server, a 2-socket rackmount system.
Posted April 06, 2011
"Big data" has emerged as an often-used catch phrase over the past year to describe exponentially growing data stores, and increasingly companies are bolstering their product lines to address the challenge. But helping companies manage and derive benefit from the onslaught of mainly unstructured data has consistently been the focus for MarkLogic Corporation, whose flagship product, MarkLogic Server, is a purpose-built database for unstructured information. The company, which has roughly 240 customers in industries, including media, government and financial services, today announced Ken Bado as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors. "Unstructured data, literally and figuratively, is huge. Clearly, 80% of the data that is generated every day by all of us is unstructured. The question is: How do you deal with it?" Bado tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 05, 2011
DBAs and IT operational teams, pressured by the unabated flow of data streaming in from an ever wider range of sources, require proactive self-managing and automated systems to supplement or replace manual techniques and processes which are no longer scalable given the rate of data growth, according to the results of a new Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) study on database manageability.
Posted April 05, 2011
Red Gate has added support for eight source control systems - Vault Standard, Vault Professional, Kiln (Hg), Mercurial (Hg), Git, Perforce, CVS and Bazaar - to SQL Source Control, the company's unique tool for controlling all database elements from within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). As a result, developers are now able to bring their database development in line with their application development processes no matter what source control system they use. Previous versions provided support for Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Subversion (SVN).
Posted April 05, 2011
Digital Reasoning, a provider of solutions for complex, large-scale unstructured data analytics, announced it has been issued a U.S. patent for its distributed system of intelligent software agents for discovering the meaning in text. The invention enables the extraction of meaning from text as humans do - by analyzing concepts and entities in context. According to the company, the software learns as it runs, continually comparing new text to existing knowledge. Associated entities and synonym relationships are automatically discovered and relevant documents are identified from across extremely large corpora.
Posted April 05, 2011
Datawatch Corporation, a provider of report analytics products and services, has announced the availability of Datawatch BDS V8, the latest version of the company's enterprise report management, archive and distribution solution. Datawatch BDS is used for high-volume enterprise electronic capture, archiving, management and retrieval of reports, statements, invoices and other business documents, and is capable of managing billions of documents from the point of initiation through delivery. Combined with the Monarch report analytics solution, Datawatch BDS provides a single source from which static report-based data can be automatically transformed into timely and dynamic information and delivered to the right users across the enterprise to quickly satisfy their decision support needs.
Posted April 05, 2011
OpenTech Systems, Inc., a provider of z/OS tape data migration software and services, tape-based data center relocation/consolidation software and services, and tape-based disaster recovery software, has added several advanced data set recovery features to its DASD Backup Supervisor (DBS) product. The newly released version of DBS now fully supports the recovery of one or more individual data sets from DFDSS (logical or physical) or FDR full volume backups including VSAM data sets.
Posted April 04, 2011
Phoenix Software International has released zHISR, a new product that uses data created by z/OS Hardware Instrumentation Services (HIS) on IBM System z10 or zEnterprise mainframe processors to produce hotspot analysis reports, which can be used to help tune applications by locating the specific sections of code that are the biggest CPU consumers. zHISR helps users pinpoint problem spots and make targeted improvements, Amy Gilbert, marketing manager at Phoenix, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Phoenix plans to market the new product to software developers, performance analysts, and system programmers.
Posted April 04, 2011
HiT Software, Inc., a BackOffice Associates, LLC Company and provider of data management products, announced the release of HiT ODBC/DB2 v6.2 and HiT OLE DB/DB2 v4.2, the newest versions of its high-performance connectivity products specifically for application access to IBM DB2 for z/OS and IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, Windows (LUW) databases.
Posted April 04, 2011
Clerity Solutions, a provider of mainframe migration, modernization and optimization solutions, announced the 8th generation of its mainframe rehosting reference architecture, designed to reduce the costs and complexities of mainframe migration and modernization initiatives. This updated framework supports the newest third-party infrastructure products and utilities required for smooth transitions from legacy mainframe systems to flexible open systems environments.
Posted April 04, 2011
Networking giant Cisco announced it is now offering end-to-end data center convergence from server to storage by delivering new director-class, multi-hop Fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE) capability for the Nexus 7000 and MDS 9500 platforms, joining the FCoE capability available on the Nexus 5000.
Posted April 04, 2011
UC4, an IT automation provider, announced a new line of IT automation tools that supports a range of environments across enterprises. The company simultaneously announced it is shipping ONE Automation, a new solution for cross-platform automation, along with UC4 Automation Platform version 9, designed to provide end-to-end enterprise automation.
Posted April 04, 2011
DBAs and IT operational teams, pressured by the unabated flow of data streaming in from an ever wider range of sources, require proactive self-managing and automated systems to supplement or replace manual techniques and processes which are no longer scalable given the rate of data growth, according to the results of a new Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) study on database manageability. With input from 445 member respondents from within the IOUG community, the survey finds that forward-looking companies, led by Oracle technologists and DBAs, are meeting their growing data management challenges by employing more advanced database management policies. This survey was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with Oracle Corporation. Among the key findings are that more than one-third of respondents indicate their companies' data stores are increasing at a rate greater than 20% a year, and, the survey finds, this growth is a main contributor to many of the difficulties DBAs currently face.
Posted March 31, 2011
Oracle has announced a new world record non-clustered TPC-H 3TB benchmark result demonstrating the scalability of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle's SPARC Enterprise M9000 server. "This result demonstrates the outstanding performance and scalability of the SPARC Enterprise M9000 platform," states Juan Loaiza, senior vice president, Systems Technology, Oracle. "Overall, Oracle has delivered a remarkable portfolio of benchmark results showcasing our continued efforts to create an industry standard for performance, scalability and price/performance."
Posted March 31, 2011
Tokutek has announced TokuDB v5.0, which adds hot indexing and hot column addition/deletion as well as full MVCC (multiversion concurrency control) support. TokuDB, the company's flagship product, is a scalable MySQL Storage Engine. According to the company, with the new release, customers can now speed the time to build targeted queries or revise their data model, in order to perform near real-time analysis on live production data and take advantage of dynamic business opportunities.
Posted March 31, 2011
Continuent, Inc., a provider of replication and clustering solutions for open source databases, has announced the next version of Tungsten Enterprise, a replication and data management solution for MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Posted March 31, 2011
UC4, an IT automation provider, has announced a new line of IT automation tools that supports a range of environments across enterprises. The company simultaneously announced it is shipping ONE Automation, a new solution for cross-platform automation, along with UC4 Automation Platform version 9, designed to provide end-to-end enterprise automation.
Posted March 29, 2011
10gen, a company that develops and supports MongoDB, has announced version 1.8 of the scalable data store.The latest version of MongoDB adds several new features, including journaling that allows for fast recovery in the case of a crash, support for covered and sparse indexes, and incremental map/reduce. In addition to these new features, 10gen says it continued to invest in MongoDB's performance and scale-out capabilities, with improvements to replication and sharding in this newest release.
Posted March 29, 2011
Continuent, Inc., a provider of replication and clustering solutions for open source databases, announced the next version of Tungsten Enterprise, a replication and data management solution for MySQL and PostgreSQL. This latest version of Tungsten Enterprise includes a number of features to improve the management, performance, flexibility and reliability of Tungsten clusters. The new release also includes architectural changes to Tungsten Replicator, as well as connectivity improvements, upgrades to MySQL binlog parsing, and PostgreSQL replication.
Posted March 29, 2011
InterSystems Corporation, which develops and markets advanced integration, database and business intelligence technologies, has announced the winners of its 2011 Innovator Awards, which recognize those who use InterSystems technologies in new ways to create innovative applications and integration solutions. Winners were recognized at the InterSystems Global Summit 2011 conference.
Posted March 29, 2011
SAP AG and IBM have announced the first official performance results of SAP In-Memory Appliance (SAP HANA), finding that the software easily handles 10,000 queries per hour against 1.3 terabytes of data, returning results within seconds. According to the companies, the test scenarios were directly based on the query workload requirements typical in SAP customers' enterprise resource planning (ERP) reporting requirements. They accessed the data found in the sales delivery database tables for the SAP ERP application. The test was part of a joint project between the two companies to deliver real-time analytics by optimizing software and hardware, based on SAP In-Memory Computing technology and IBM's industry-leading 3850 series servers.
Posted March 23, 2011
Embarcadero is now equipping Sybase ASE developers and DBAs with a toolset to simplify their development, database administration and performance tuning tasks. The new DB PowerStudio for Sybase ASE combines several of Embarcadero's most popular database tools into an aggressively priced suite. The toolset helps Sybase ASE professionals boost productivity by eliminating time-consuming development and administration tasks, while also improving the performance and availability of their databases. "Any Sybase ASE professional will tell you that, with the right tools at their fingertips, they can do their jobs with increased efficiency and accuracy and help IT exceed their service levels," says Scott Walz, senior director of product management for Embarcadero.
Posted March 23, 2011
Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc., has announced that its hosted analytics solution, Sybase Operator Analytics 365, an advanced reporting, monitoring and mobile data analytics service, has been deployed to more than 50 operators worldwide and it anticipates working with more than 90 operators by the end of April 2011. Sybase Operator Analytics 365 is backed by Sybase's column-based analytics server, Sybase IQ, enabling extreme performance with the ability to return results on billions of records in just seconds to enable operators to quickly make mission-critical decisions.
Posted March 23, 2011
Queplix Corp., a provider of data virtualization solutions, has announced two new product families to bring the benefits of data virtualization to ETL (extract, transform and load). According to Queplix, the VirtualETL and CloudETL families simplify the ETL process, enabling users to configure Queplix's Application Software Blades, providing easy connections to target applications and reducing the time required to integrate applications.
Posted March 23, 2011
McAfee has announced its intention to acquire Sentrigo, a privately owned provider of database security and compliance, assessment, monitoring and intrusion prevention solutions. In addition, McAfee also announced a comprehensive database security solution to protect business-critical databases without impacting performance and availability. "Every organization stores their most sensitive information in databases, either directly or through their key business applications," states Nathan Shuchami, CEO of Sentrigo. "The regular stream of public breach announcements is evidence that we must all do much more to protect mission critical database environments, and Sentrigo has been working for more than 4 years to develop a suite of products to best secure these assets. As part of McAfee, Sentrigo will be in a position to deliver these best-of-breed solutions to address a much broader range of customer's database security and compliance challenges."
Posted March 23, 2011
Rocket Software has released the U2 Web Development Environment (U2 WebDE). It is limited to use with the personal editions of UniData and UniVerse, but will allow customers and consultants the opportunity to try out this product free of charge, notes Susie Siegesmund, vice president and general manager, U2 Brand, Rocket Software.
Posted March 23, 2011
Wynne Systems, Inc., an international provider of enterprise software for the equipment and rental industries, has announced a partnership with Entrinsik, Inc. to integrate Entrinsik's Informer web-based reporting software into its Wynne Systems product suite.
Posted March 23, 2011
BlueFinity's mv.NET is a tool kit that allows developers to use industry-standard technology to enhance existing MultiValue applications by integrating with Microsoft .NET technologies, explains Bob Markowitz, sales executive at BlueFinity International. While giving MultiValue developers the use of industry-standard technology to present existing MultiValue applications as modern solutions, it also separates the MultiValue knowledge requirement from the Microsoft technology requirement. "In order for the MultiValue platform to thrive, we must allow the major software developer communities around the world to be able to access and utilize the platform in ways which they find familiar and comfortable," Markowitz says.
Posted March 23, 2011
Data continues growing rapidly, flowing into enterprises from traditional sources as well as new pipelines fueled by web and social media. Often presented in a range of formats and structures, this data onslaught phenomenon has come to be known as "big data." Companies, educational institutions, and government agencies are striving to meet the management challenge of this data deluge as well as mine this wealth of information for business advantage. In this special section, DBTA asks key vendors to explain their strategies for enabling customers to better handle ever-increasing data stores.
Posted March 23, 2011
Data and Information Modeling will be key topics at the upcoming Enterprise Data World. The educational program will feature an entire data modeling track as well as topics related to master data management, data quality, data profiling, facilitation, and dimensional modeling. The conference will take place April 3-7, 2011 at the Chicago Sheraton Hotel and Towers.
Posted March 22, 2011
Predixion Software has launched the Predixion Partner Network, a new practice dedicated to working with business intelligence-focused consulting partners to deliver low-cost, self-service predictive analytics solutions utilizing the Microsoft business intelligence platform. Predixion Software develops and markets collaborative predictive analytics solutions in the public and private cloud that are integrated with Microsoft Corp.'s BI platform.
Posted March 22, 2011
CA Technologies and Unisys Corporation have announced that they have extended their alliance to offer joint solutions that accelerate customers' path from virtualization to the cloud. The solutions will combine CA Technologies' virtualization management, service automation, and service management products with Unisys' virtualization and cloud advisory, planning, design and implementation services. The first solution, available now in North America, is designed to help organizations overcome "virtual stall" - the complications that can arise from enterprise virtualization projects. According to the vendors, this is a challenge for enterprises - both in their existing data centers and as they evolve their infrastructure toward cloud computing.
Posted March 22, 2011
Oracle has announced that an update to MySQL 5.5 Enterprise Edition is now available. New in this release is the addition of MySQL Enterprise Backup and MySQL Workbench along with enhancements in MySQL Enterprise Monitor. Recent integration with MyOracle Support allows MySQL customers to access the same support infrastructure used for Oracle Database customers to enable joint MySQL and Oracle customers to experience faster problem resolution by using a common technical support interface.
Posted March 22, 2011
Embarcadero has introduced DB PowerStudio for DB2 to provide DB2 developers and DBAs with a toolset that brings greater functionality and efficiency to their development, database administration and performance tuning tasks. According to Embarcadero, the new DB PowerStudio for DB2 combines several essential database tools into an aggressively priced suite that extends beyond the capabilities of IBM's database utilities. Following recent introductions of similar toolsets aimed at Oracle, SQL Server and Sybase ASE users, DB PowerStudio for DB2 meets the needs of both DB2 database developers and administrators, helping both improve the performance and availability of their databases.
Posted March 21, 2011
Revolution Analytics, a commercial provider of software and services based on the open source R project for statistical computing, and IBM Netezza announced they are teaming up to integrate Revolution R Enterprise and the IBM Netezza TwinFin Data Warehouse Appliance. According to the vendors, this will enable customers to directly leverage the capabilities of the open source R statistics language as they run high-performance predictive analytics from within data warehouse platforms.
Posted March 21, 2011
Cloud.com announced the latest version of an open source cloud computing platform intended to help manage highly-scalable public and private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds. The new release, CloudStack 2.2, is a foundation designed to enable data center operators to build on-demand, elastic cloud services within their existing IT infrastructures.
Posted March 21, 2011
CiRBA Inc. says it is shipping a new release of its data center intelligence software, designed to provide IT organizations with "fully-loaded utilization," a new metric for measuring the infrastructure efficiency. CiRBA Version 6.1's fully-loaded utilization feature provides a precise and simultaneous measurement of server infrastructure requirements that factors in utilization patterns, technical constraints and business and operational policies. Leveraging this measure, organizations can identify exactly how much infrastructure is required to safely service workloads, allowing excess capacity to be accurately measured and reclaimed for other purposes, according to the vendor. According to Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, data centers can face challenges in understanding how efficiently and how well utilized their IT and virtualized environments are running. This is because they tend to rely solely on traditional measurements such as CPU utilization, I/O rates and other measurements. But these can be misleading, he says.
Posted March 21, 2011
On the heels of the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge, in which the IBM Watson system demonstrated the capability to understand natural language, IBM launched a global skills initiative to educate clients, business partners, and college students on how to use IBM business analytics and information management software, and many of the underlying technologies of the Watson computing system, to capture information from new sources and use it to create business opportunities.
Posted March 21, 2011
IBM has announced new software and the creation a new consulting practice dedicated to the emerging category of "Smarter Commerce," focused on helping companies adapt to rising customer demands in today's digitally transformed marketplace. The new software and services offerings, supported by global sales and marketing resources, will address the spectrum of enterprise commerce activities - new ways to buy, sell and secure greater customer loyalty in the era of mobile and social networks. "It's a buyer's world now," says Craig Hayman, general manager of IBM Industry Solutions. "Businesses require a tighter and highly responsive network of suppliers and partners to ensure they deliver the right product or service at the right price, time and place. The key to business success in this unfolding environment is predicting trends and automating market responses in advance to eliminate the gaps between buy and sell, supply and demand."
Posted March 21, 2011
Despite highly publicized data breaches, ranging from the loss of personally identifiable information such as credit card and Social Security numbers at major corporations to the WikiLeaks scandal involving sensitive U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. State Department information, and the "alphabet soup" of compliance regulations, data around the globe remains at grave risk, according to John Ottman, president and CEO of Application Security, Inc., who has written "Save the Database, Save the World" to focus attention on the problem and present steps to its solution. While super secure networks are important, that alone is far from enough and a layered data security strategy with a commitment to "protecting data where it lives - in the database" must be pursued to avoid risks posed by outside hackers as well as authorized users, says Ottman. A stronger government hand may be needed as well to defend "the critical infrastructure that operates in the private sector," he suggests.
Posted March 17, 2011
OpenSpan, Inc., a provider of user process management software, announced it has released support for Oracle Complex Event Processing (CEP), a solution for building applications to filter, correlate and process events in real time so that downstream applications, service-oriented architectures and event-driven architectures are driven by real-time intelligence. The new support enables OpenSpan and Oracle CEP to be used together to monitor user activity to detect and prevent fraud and compliance risks or identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
Posted March 16, 2011
Furthering its support for Java-based mobile development, Oracle has announced Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Mobile Client, an extension of the Oracle Application Development Framework. A component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle ADF Mobile Client allows developers to extend their existing skills into mobile devices. It simplifies application creation and deployment using a single, standard Java user interface (UI) framework and tooling for all supported devices. Developers can build once and deploy to multiple devices - and as support for new devices is added in Oracle ADF Mobile Client, applications can be deployed to the new platforms without redevelopment. "It is all about linking the enterprise and mobile devices," Duncan Mills, senior director of product management for Oracle Fusion, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The approach takes Oracle's existing philosophy of "a single set of development skills, broadening the envelope to include native mobile applications which can run online and offline, and then managing all of the tricky data synchronization tasks on top of that."
Posted March 16, 2011
ScaleBase is seeking 50 additional customers to participate in an expanded private beta program for the ScaleBase Database Load Balancer, which enables multiple database servers to work like a single database. The ScaleBase private beta was first announced on January 1, and since then dozens of customers have registered for the program. The company is now seeking additional users of MySQL on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS who would like to try the technology.
Posted March 16, 2011
Oracle has announced that an update to MySQL 5.5 Enterprise Edition is now available. New in this release is the addition of MySQL Enterprise Backup and MySQL Workbench along with enhancements in MySQL Enterprise Monitor. In addition, recent integration with MyOracle Support allows MySQL customers to access the same support infrastructure used for Oracle Database customers to enable joint MySQL and Oracle customers to experience faster problem resolution by using a common technical support interface.
Posted March 16, 2011
Fuzzy Logix, LLC, a provider of advanced analytical solutions, has announced the availability of in-database analytics working with IBM Informix database software to serve the large base of customers who are seeking to use easily accessible analytics to gain competitive advantage. The product, DB Lytix, is a rich, in-database analytics library built during more than eleven years of extensive research on advanced analytical methods. It contains functions for mathematical and statistical analysis, data mining, and Monte Carlo simulations. With the library now ported to IBM Informix, DB Lytix can leverage the high performance of Informix to bring gains in processing speed to analytic solutions.
Posted March 15, 2011
Red Gate Software has added the ability to source control data to SQL Source Control, providing a complete tool for source controlling all database elements from within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). SQL Source Control connects users' existing source control systems - either Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Subversion (SVN) - to SQL Server. In addition to providing source control for both static data and database schema, SQL Source Control 2.0 supports a shared model that allows development team members to see each other's database changes in real time. This complements the dedicated model introduced in V1.0 last summer.
Posted March 15, 2011
ExtraHop Networks, a provider of network and application performance management solutions, announced it now supports IBM's DB2 database. The addition of DB2 rounds out ExtraHop's support for the top three providers, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. ExtraHop customers now will be able to monitor database transactions in real time without having to run invasive tools such as SQL profilers and agents, which tend to degrade performance. With the addition of DB2, the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system now "covers just about every major relational database that we've encountered within an enterprise IT environment," Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted March 15, 2011