Data Center Management Articles
PHD Virtual Technologies, a Unitrends company, has introduced two new data protection products, PHD Virtual Backup 7 for Hyper-V and ReliableDR 3.3. The latest release of PHD Virtual Backup 7 represents the company's foray into the Microsoft market, while ReliableDR 3.3 is the latest version of the company's automated recovery solution for VMware environments with mission-critical applications.
Posted January 31, 2014
LSI Corporation has announced that its Nytro flash accelerator cards have been selected as the PCIe flash acceleration technology for Oracle's Exadata X4. According to the companies, the Nytro DLC technology extends the logical flash storage capacity of Exadata beyond the system's physical flash capacity. This software feature dynamically extends the flash capacity of Exadata X4 systems with the same physical hardware and power requirements for a reduced total cost of ownership.
Posted January 22, 2014
New IOUG (Independent Oracle Users Group) research underwritten by EMC looks at the problem of mission-critical-application downtime and its impact on organizations. According to this new global survey, among respondents with at least two data centers and rapid replication solutions, 46% indicate are less than satisfied with their current strategies.
Posted January 22, 2014
In only a few months the mainframe becomes 50 years old. In a new SHARE blog post, Joe Clabby, President, Clabby Analytics, reflects on the upcoming milestone.
Posted January 21, 2014
Innovation Data Processing, a provider of mainframe tools, has rolled out FDRPASVM Version 5.4 Level 80, which is designed to enable migration of z/VM and Linux for System z volumes.
Posted January 21, 2014
Stratus Technologies, Inc., a provider of availability solutions, has launched everRun Enterprise, a solution intended to provide "mainframe-like" availability to Windows and Linux applications up. The software runs on Intel-based x86 servers without the need for specialized IT skills, Stratus says.
Posted January 21, 2014
Compuware Strobe, release 5.1, provides enhancements targeted at new or inexperienced mainframe users. The latest release of Compuware's mainframe application performance measurement and analysis solution offers a new GUI to centralize information about application performance and provides additional advice on how to resolve problems.
Posted January 21, 2014
Software-defined networking (SDN) is IT's new black, displacing cloud as the technology darling du jour. But while all the focus on the network layers is ultimately good for applications—after all, an optimized network is critical for applications today—SDN does not address challenges in the application layers that are just as key to ensuring performance, security, and availability of applications in the data center and into the cloud.
Posted January 07, 2014
New devices promise to open up ways for us to improve our mental functioning and perhaps to further revolutionize social networking and big data. A world in which Facebook "likes" are generated automatically might not be far off, and mining the big data generated from our own brains has some amazing - though sometimes creepy - implications.
Posted January 07, 2014
CA Service Desk Manager r12.9 has achieved the highest level of certification for PinkVERIFY 2011 from Pink Elephant, an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) certification and education provider. The CA service desk offering achieved PinkVERIFY certification on all 15 available ITIL processes that span the IT maturity spectrum.PinkVERIFY certification on all 15 available ITIL processes that span the IT maturity spectrum,
Posted January 06, 2014
Gigamon, has added a new feature to its Unified Visibility Fabric. According to the company, the new feature called "traffic intelligence" addresses a growing need by providing more granular filtering and forwarding so that only the most relevant traffic passes through data center management infrastructures.
Posted January 06, 2014
No Limits Software has introduced the lastest release of its data center infrastructure management solution. Version 2.6 of the vendor's RaMP toolset includes support for putting devices into maintenance mode as well as an enhanced ability to retire assets.
Posted January 06, 2014
The Open IX Association (OIX), an association that promotes better standards for data center interconnection and internet exchanges in North America, has begun the application process for OIX certification. The application process is the initial step to becoming an OIX-certified data center or internet exchange Point (IXP). According to the OIX, industry executives and engineers are eager to standardize the way they operate in order to streamline the process and provide for efficiencies across the global internet.
Posted January 06, 2014
Improving customer experience - That was the top response from IT and business leaders worldwide in a recently released Gartner survey. Customer experience is on the radar of the 64 percent of Gartner respondents investing or planning to invest in Big Data technology this year (less than 8 percent said they have deployed already).
Posted January 06, 2014
Garantia Data has announced general availability of its Memcached Cloud fail-safe caching solution for the Heroku, AppFog and AppHarbor platforms. Previously in beta with early adopters, the new add-ons will enable developers who run their applications on the platforms to enhance their caching engines with higher availability, and better performance and scalability.
Posted December 23, 2013
As it becomes a corporate sponsor of OpenStack, Oracle says it plans to integrate OpenStack capabilities into a range of products and services including Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle's ZS3 Series, Axiom Storage Systems and StorageTek Tape Systems, Oracle Compute Cloud Service and Oracle Storage Cloud Service.
Posted December 18, 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 17, 2013
A technique for gaining new insights by combining big data from distributed cloud services with data stored on local IT systems has been patented by IBM inventors. The new approach provides a method for developing enterprise applications that more seamlessly combine locally-stored data from business process across an enterprise with cloud-based big data.
Posted December 09, 2013
SOA Software, an API and SOA management tools provider, has undergone a series of audits by an independent Quality Security Assessor (QSA) to ensure that it met best practices and security controls needed to keep sensitive data secure during transit, processing and storage. As a result, SOA Software is now an 'Approved Service Provider' for major credit card brands.
Posted December 09, 2013
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
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