Data Center Management Articles
CloudPhysics, a provider virtualized workload management software, announced a beta program for its Knowledge Base Advisor, an early warning service for IT operators that identifies operational hazards impacting VMware workloads. CloudPhysics' Knowledge Base Advisor is offered as a SaaS product.
Posted August 05, 2013
Infogix Inc., a developer of monitoring software, announced the availability of the new versions of its flagship Infogix ACR products: ACR/Detail 4.5 and ACR/Summary 4.5. The Infogix ACR suite provides an automated information controls platform for mainframe and host-based computing environments.
Posted August 05, 2013
IBM says it is accelerating its Linux on Power initiative with the new PowerLinux 7R4 server as well as new software and middleware applications geared for big data, analytics and next generation Java applications in an open cloud environment. According to IBM, the new PowerLinux 7R4 server, built on the same Power Systems platform running IBM's Watson cognitive computing solution, can provide clients the performance required for the new business-critical and data-intensive workloads increasingly being deployed in Linux environments. IBM is also expanding the portfolio of software for Power Systems with the availability of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence and EnterpriseDB database software, each optimized for Linux on Power.
Posted July 30, 2013
Oracle is advancing the role of Java for IoT (Internet of Things) with the latest releases of its Oracle Java Embedded product portfolio - Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.3 and Oracle Java ME Software Development Kit (SDK) 3.3, a complete client Java runtime and toolkit optimized for microcontrollers and other resource-constrained devices. Oracle is also introducing the Oracle Java Platform Integrator program to provide partners with the ability to customize Oracle Java ME Embedded products to reach different device types and market segments. "We see IoT as the next big wave that will hit the industry," Oracle's Peter Utzschneider, vice president of product management, explained during a recent interview.
Posted July 25, 2013
CA Technologies has expanded CA Chorus, its integrated mainframe management platform, with new capabilities for network and system management. The company also announced additional mainframe management solutions to help improve IT performance and productivity, a combination of solutions aimed at helping IT staff provide uninterrupted business services. "The growth of mobile and cloud use in the enterprise has created a dynamic data center that contracts and expands at the will of the business users - not IT," Michael Madden, general manager for Mainframe at CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted July 22, 2013
Technology performance company Compuware Corporation has made enhancements to Abend-AID, its mainframe application failure resolution solution. The latest improvements make Abend-AID easier to use. Abend-AID also includes analytics to help more rapidly resolve application failures. The new release is targeted at IT staff members unfamiliar with mainframe applications or entry-level developers who are more familiar with distributed, Java applications, Stuart Feravich, director of mainframe product management at Compuware, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Along with staff inexperience with mainframes, Feravich also is seeing less tolerance for any downtime, since many of these applications are now "very much part of the customer facing application or infrastructure in companies."
Posted July 22, 2013
IBM's second-quarter 2013 results were lower across the board, with the exception of its mainframe and enterprise software units. The computer giant reports net income of $3.2 billion for the most recent quarter, compared with $3.9 billion for the same quarter last year - a decrease of 17%. Total revenues for the second quarter of 2013 totaled $24.9 billion, down 3% from the second quarter of 2012. IBM took a $1-billion charge for what it called "workforce rebalancing" - cutbacks and layoffs across its global workforce.
Posted July 22, 2013
IBM announced it intends to acquire CSL International, a provider of virtualization management technology for IBM's zEnterprise system. CSL International is a privately held company headquartered in Herzliya Pituach, Israel. Financial terms will not be disclosed.
Posted July 22, 2013
Dell Cloud Client Computing has begun shipping desktop and application virtualization software with server-streaming capability, intended to help organizations harness the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing. The new release, version 6 of Dell Wyse WSM, adds on-demand delivery of server OS images to Dell's end-user computing portfolio.
Posted July 22, 2013
Rocket Software, Inc. is now shipping a new product that enables mainframe data to better integrate with enterprise business intelligence and analytics initiatives. The new software, Rocket z/SQL for IBM System z, provides access from any system to non-relational mainframe data without moving data off the mainframe.
Posted July 22, 2013
WSO2, an enterprise middleware provider, says it has launched a platform built to enable the development of an enterprise app store for delivery of application programming interfaces (APIs). The new product, WSO2 App Factory, is designed to provide cloud delivery through a shared, self-service, multi-tenant and elastic enterprise DevOps platform. The goal is for teams to be able to collaboratively create, develop and deploy enterprise applications into cloud environments, without the necessity of server provisioning. The platform also includes lifecycle management and governance to ensure compliance with IT, corporate and government policies
Posted July 22, 2013
Riverbed Technology, an application performance vendor, announced a new release of its Riverbed Granite product family - including software and appliances - engineered to support enterprise-class server and data consolidation. New features are intended to enable IT managers to consolidate larger branch offices and data-intensive applications that previously were difficult or impossible to consolidate, the vendor says. Granite is intended to enable the removal of servers and data from branch offices so they can be positioned in a centralized data center.
Posted July 22, 2013
TIBCO Software Inc., an enterprise middleware provider, announced expansion of its partner ecosystem for the App Marketplace within tibbr, the vendor's enterprise social network. The tibbr platform was formed under the aegis of TIBCO to bring together all the key elements of enterprise collaboration - people, applications and content.
Posted July 22, 2013
Electric cars are increasingly being seen on the world's roadways, bolstered by new technologies that enhance performance and battery life. Now, it's being reported that Nissan, maker of the "Leaf" electric car, is employing its mainframe systems to serve as the back end to the vehicle's online portal. The portal provides metrics and support for a range of in-car functions, such as battery status, recharging station locations, navigation functions, and in-car cooling or heating.
Posted July 22, 2013
Terracotta, provider of in-memory technologies for enterprise big data, unveiled new versions of BigMemory 4, its flagship product for managing big, fast data, and Web Sessions 4, its solution for distributed in-memory session management. Together, the company says the new offerings enable faster, more reliable access to session data in large-scale, high-traffic web applications. According to Terracotta, BigMemory 4 offers 60% faster data access than previous versions at terabyte scale and beyond, and delivers enterprise-grade levels of reliability and flexibility that were formerly available only in traditional, disk-based data management systems.
Posted July 09, 2013
IBM says that it has completed the acquisition of SoftLayer Technologies Inc., a privately held cloud computing infrastructure company based in Dallas, Texas, for an undisclosed sum. The initial acquisition agreement was announced on June 4th, and is the basis of IBM's new cloud services division, which combines SoftLayer with IBM SmartCloud.
Posted July 08, 2013
SOA Software, a provider of application programming interface (API) management tools, announced a new product set that manages the lifecycle of IBM DataPower-based APIs, and extends the capabilities of the SOA Software Integrated Governance Solution for IBM DataPower.
Posted July 08, 2013
Compuware Corporation, a technology performance tools provider, announced a new solution set that supports application-aware network performance monitoring and user experience management, intended to provide insights into the correlation between network and application performance, and how the network contributes to user experience.
Posted July 08, 2013
IBM is shipping a new version of its DB2 database software that includes a new feature called "BLU Acceleration," designed to make it simpler, more economical and faster to analyze massive amounts of data. The new IBM DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration aims for analytics "at the speed of thought" with a range of made-in-IBM-Labs advances to significantly speed analytic workloads for databases and data warehouses.
Posted July 08, 2013
SanDisk Corporation, a provider of flash memory storage solutions, says its investment arm, SanDisk Ventures, is now backing Panzura, a provider of flash-based network attached storage (NAS) solutions for enterprises. Panzura's scalable offering uses flash memory to store data off-premise in the cloud, reducing customer system, support, administration, power and cooling costs.
Posted July 08, 2013
BluePhoenix, the legacy application lifecycle company, announced the general availability of its solution set intended to support a range of mainframe management and migration activities, including mainframe data migration for COBOL, Adabas, COOL GEN, mainframe migration, and mainframe rehosting. The vendor's ATLAS Platform is designed to enable more cost-effective deployment of mainframe applications in distributed environments.
Posted July 08, 2013
AIMS Innovation is launching a new technology in the U.S. market tailored for system integrators working with Microsoft BizTalk. "We help IT operations turn from a reactive mode to a proactive mode and really reduce a lot of the time that is spent monitoring, maintaining and supporting their system integration," Ivar Sagemo, CEO of AIMS Innovation, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted July 08, 2013
Dell Software has introduced the latest version of the Dell KACE K1000 Management Appliance, which now includes integrated software asset management to boost software license compliance, while helping lower IT costs. The K1000 adds automated software asset identification, tracking and optimization to its capabilities for managing the deployment, operation and retirement of software assets. The need for the appliance is being fueled by a range of factors, including the influx of new technologies such as cloud computing, virtualization, and BYOD, which are adding complexity in terms of systems management, Lisa Richardson, senior product marketing manager for Endpoint Systems Management, Dell Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted July 08, 2013
Introducing capabilities for deploying and managing business applications in an enterprise private cloud, such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), enhanced business application management, and integrated hardware-software management for Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3 is now available for download. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c R3 also fully supports Oracle Database12c, including new multi-tenant capabilities.
Posted July 03, 2013
The objective of "old school" capacity management was to ensure that each server had enough capacity to avoid performance issues, and typically focused on trend-and-threshold techniques to accomplish this. But the rapid adoption of the cloud, and now OpenStack, means that supply and demand is much more fluid, and this form of capacity management is now obsolete. Unfortunately, many are ignoring this new reality and continuing to rely on what have quickly become the bad habits of capacity management. These old school methods and measures not only perpetuate an antiquated thought process, but they also lead to, among other problems, low utilization and density. In a world of tightening IT budgets these are problems that can't be ignored.
Posted June 27, 2013
IBM recently laid out a set of new initiatives to further support and speed up the adoption of the Linux operating system across the enterprise. These include two new Power Systems Linux Centers, as well as plans to extend support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology to its Power Systems portfolio of server products.
Posted June 27, 2013
AIMS Innovation is launching a new technology in the U.S. market tailored for system integrators working with Microsoft BizTalk. "We help IT operations turn from a reactive mode to a proactive mode and really reduce a lot of the time that is spent monitoring, maintaining and supporting their system integration," Ivar Sagemo, CEO of AIMS Innovation, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 25, 2013
Fusion-io has introduced an upgrade of its ioTurbine software that improves performance, control and choice to enhance the value of virtualization investments. The new release of Fusion ioTurbine delivers virtualization-aware caching, dynamic reallocation of cache memory during live migration of virtual machines in VMware vMotion, and unified management of caching across virtual and physical environments.
Posted June 24, 2013
Backup and recovery solution provider Sepaton has introduced the S2100-ES3 series 2925 backup appliance with new version 7.1 software. The data protection platform adds support of Gresham Enterprise DistribuTape (EDT) version 10.0 to allow IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) users to automate key TSM virtual tape implementation processes; and extends support for KMIP-compliant enterprise key managers with qualification of SafeNet KeySecure version 6.3 EKM. The appliance also gives administrators the flexibility to backup and deduplicate data using Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage (OST) over Fibre Channel in addition to the existing IP connectivity.
Posted June 24, 2013
Parasoft announced the release of a service virtualization solution intended to help development and QA teams access the complete, realistic test environments needed to develop or test an application. The vendor's Service Virtualization solution can be applied to agile and parallel development, performance testing, mobile testing, and end-to-end functional testing.
Posted June 24, 2013
Compuware Corporation, a technology performance tools company, is shipping a new solution set intended to expose how IT infrastructure conditions impede the performance of business applications. The new package, called PureStack Technology, combines with Compuware's dynaTrace PurePath Technology to directly correlate guest and host infrastructure health to individual application transactions and affected end users in real time.
Posted June 24, 2013
IBM has rolled out enhancements across its systems portfolio designed to help organizations adopt cloud computing as they build toward Software Defined Environments (SDE). Enhancements to IBM's Smarter Storage line of Flash, disk and tape systems are designed to give companies faster access to business information and Big Data insights. In addition, new High Performance Computing solutions bring HPC capabilities to mainstream servers.
Posted June 24, 2013
Intel Corporation announced a solid-state drive (SSD) product designed for read-intensive applications such as Web hosting, cloud computing and data center virtualization. The Intel Solid-State Drive DC S3500 Series is designed to replace traditional hard disk drives, the vendor says.
Posted June 24, 2013
SanDisk Corporation, a provider of flash memory storage solutions, has upgraded its enterprise software portfolio with a new version of its FlashSoft software for Windows Server and Linux operating systems. FlashSoft 3.2 server-side solid state caching software complements and enhances the performance of existing applications, and server and storage systems.
Posted June 24, 2013
TIBCO Software Inc., a provider of application integration and SOA infrastructure solutions, announced the latest version of its flagship low-latency messaging platform, which adds in-memory technology to bring new levels of reliability to persistent messaging. The new solution, TIBCO FTL 3.1, is intended to provide a messaging platform that delivers high-speed performance to data management.
Posted June 24, 2013
The result of collaboration between hundreds of engineers from more than 30 companies within the Java Community Process (JCP) and the GlassFish Community, the new Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) as well as the Java EE 7 Software Development Kit (SDK) was announced by Oracle and JCP members at a launch webcast. The new release has three main themes, said Cameron Purdy, vice president for development at Oracle. They are support for building HTML5 applications, enhancements for greater developer productivity, and new features that address enterprise requirements.
Posted June 19, 2013
These are heady times for data products vendors and their enterprise customers. When business leaders talk about success these days, they often are alluding to a new-found appreciation for their data environments. It can even be said that the tech vendors that are making the biggest difference in today's business world are no longer software companies at all; rather, they are "data" companies, with all that implies. Enterprises are reaching out to vendors for help in navigating through the fast-moving, and often unforgiving, digital realm. The data vendors that are leading their respective markets are those that know how to provide the tools, techniques, and hand-holding needed to manage and sift through gigabytes', terabytes', and petabytes' worth of data to extract tiny but valuable nuggets of information to guide business leaders as to what they should do next.
Posted June 19, 2013
Mobile devices—including employee-owned and corporate-provided smartphones and tablets—are rapidly becoming a primary point of access to more than just email and texting. However, the proliferation of mobile application users also presents new challenges to IT departments, as the users demand access to business-critical data and processes, creating security, management, and development challenges
Posted June 13, 2013
At the recent Oracle users conference COLLABORATE 13, IOUG hosted an evening hands-on lab for attendees. The turnout was great—even after a full day of conference sessions. What topic drew such a dedicated crowd? Two words: Performance Tuning.
Posted June 13, 2013
There is an emerging field of companies looking to take on the challenges presented by the roiling tide of big data. While their visions vary, each has identified a market need that it believes its technology uniquely addresses. Here, DBTA highlights the approaches of 10 companies we think are worth watching.
Posted June 13, 2013
Dell and Oracle have announced an expanded worldwide alliance, through which the two companies will introduce a new x86 infrastructure offering that combines Dell's hardware with Oracle's software. As part of the agreement, Oracle has named Dell a preferred x86 partner, and Dell has named Oracle a preferred enterprise infrastructure partner, including Oracle Linux. The expanded partnership represents an extension of Oracle's engineered systems strategy, said Oracle president Mark Hurd.
Posted June 12, 2013
Progress Software Corporation announced a new platform for building and managing applications on any cloud, mobile or social platform. The new software, Progress Pacific, is the foundation of a major PaaS (platform-as-a-service) transformation Progress previously announced. As part of this new platform, which will ship in the third quarter of 2013, Progress acquired Rollbase, Inc., a privately held independent software vendor, which provides point-and-click, drag-and-drop application-building tools in a standard browser.
Posted June 10, 2013
IBM announced new software, training and resources to help organizations create, test and deliver mobile and cloud applications aimed at enabling organizations' DevOps capabilities. The new initiatives expand the development capabilities of IBM's SmartCloud and IBM MobileFirst offerings. "We are getting a very clear message from our clients. The business and technical pressures they are facing to innovate, stay ahead of their competition and deliver better quality products to their clients is immense," Eric Naiburg, program director for ALM, DevOps and Agile Solutions, IBM, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 10, 2013
To address the increasing power requirements of mission-critical facilities, GE recently introduced its new TLE Series uninterruptible power supply (UPS) global platform. The TLE Series transformer-less, three-phase UPS applies GE's technology to provide facilities with operating efficiencies. The cost of power is a very big concern for data centers, Harry Handlin, director of Critical Power Applications for GE, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 10, 2013
Brandon Systems, a mainframe modernization tools vendor, recently acquired Jolly Giant Software Inc., a developer of terminal emulation software. This acquisition complements WIRE (Web Interface Rules Engine), Brandon's existing mainframe modernization product. Jolly Giant's flagship product, the QWS3270 PLUS emulator, will increase the breadth of Brandon's software line, Seth Hemley, president of Brandon Systems, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 10, 2013