Data Center Management Articles
Vision Solutions, a provider of information availability software and services, announced the release of Double-Take 6.0, a solution for application and data protection in virtual, cloud and physical computing environments. Double-Take 6.0 provides affordable real-time asynchronous data replication, enabling rapid recovery from system outages. "Among the driving forces in today's marketplace beyond the need for business continuity and disaster recovery is operational excellence," Doug Piper, vice president of product strategy for Vision, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 11, 2012
Quest Software unveiled NetVault Extended Architecture (XA), a platform unifying its data protection technologies, and enabling organizations to align backup and recovery directly to their service continuity needs. "The changing requirements of the modern business are forcing IT to shift from an infrastructure-centric view of backup and recovery to a services-centric view," says Walter Angerer, senior vice president and general manager of data protection for Quest Software.
Posted June 11, 2012
IBM stepped up its smarter computing initiative with a broad range of performance and efficiency enhancements to its storage and technical computing systems - the engines of big data. As part of its ongoing smarter computing effort, IBM has announced a new strategic approach to designing and managing storage infrastructures with greater automation and intelligence, as well as performance enhancements to several key storage systems and the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center suite. IBM also announced its first offerings that incorporate software from IBM's acquisition of Platform Computing earlier this year. "Enterprises are dealing with data that is increasing exponentially in both size and complexity," said Rod Adkins, senior vice president of IBM Systems & Technology Group. The enhanced systems and storage solutions have the performance, efficiency, and intelligence to handle this big data, he added.
Posted June 11, 2012
Ericom Software, a provider of application access and virtualization solutions, is offering a beta version of AccessNow for Citrix, now part of Ericom's HTML5 RDP client product family. The solution is intended to enable Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop to deliver Windows applications and desktops to any HTML5-compatible browser on any smartphone device, as well as Windows PCs, Linux, and Mac. "This solution fills several gaps in the Citrix environment," Eran Heyman, CEO of Ericom, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 29, 2012
EMC has released the new EMC VMAX Family of enterprise storage arrays, a lineup that offers a range of solutions for organizations of all sizes. The EMC VMAX Family consists of the VMAX 10K, VMAX 20K and the newest member of the family, the VMAX 40K. The VMAX enterprise storage arrays are built upon EMC's Virtual Matrix Architecture, first introduced in April 2009.
Posted May 29, 2012
CA Technologies announced a new version of its IT automation solution that orchestrates IT operational processes across physical, virtual and cloud environments. CA Process Automation 4 is designed with a new user interface, improved integration capabilities, and support for dynamic forms. By making process flows more robust, easier to author and quicker to deploy, CA claims its updated IT automation toolset has enabled customers to improve service delivery, improve the speed for provisioning infrastructure, and reduce the time to spent on application release tasks. "At the end of the day it boils down to one thing: IT can't keep throwing more and more staff at its challenges," Steve DuBravac, senior product marketing manager for CA, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 29, 2012
AccelOps, Inc., a provider of integrated security information and event management (SIEM), and performance and availability monitoring for on-premise and cloud-based data centers, announced that it has added 150 customers and raised $15 million in new funding with USVP, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, leading the round.
Posted May 29, 2012
Compuware Corporation has rolled out a major new release of its integrated application performance management (APM) solution. The Compuware APM Spring 2012 Platform Release includes innovations in four key areas across its dynaTrace and Gomez product brands that help customers optimize the performance and value of their business-critical applications. Compuware's Spring 2012 Release addresses the increasing complexity at the edge; the need for converged network and application performance insight; enterprise APM for cloud and big data applications; and faster time to value.
Posted May 29, 2012
Virtualization is relatively new - but not for the IBM mainframe. In a new blog post, Gregory Lotko, vice president & business line executive, System z IBM Systems & Technology Group, reflects on the heritage and features of the IBM mainframe, including a refrigerator-size, energy-efficient footprint and ability to consolidate large numbers of servers into one: Here at IBM, we often smile when we hear some new buzzword around virtualization. The IBM mainframe has a long history of virtualization. We were doing it before there was a name for it.
Posted May 24, 2012
Red Hat, Inc. and IBM jointly announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with the KVM hypervisor on IBM Systems has been awarded Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+). The Common Criteria is an internationally recognized set of standards used by the federal government and other organizations to assess the security and assurance of technology products. This security certification is the first of its kind for an open source virtualization solution.
Posted May 24, 2012
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) has published a new white paper on the attributes of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that make it a compelling and cost-effective alternative to proprietary virtualization technologies for enterprise-class deployments.
Posted May 24, 2012
What is PowerLinux? In his latest blog post, Scott Handy, vice president, PowerLinux Strategy and Business Development, IBM, writes about the benefits of combining Linux and Power - including strong support for virtualization, performance, scalability, flexibility, support for clouds, efficiency, reliability, security and availability: When we talk about PowerLinux, what we mean is industry-standard Linux available on IBM Power Systems servers.
Posted May 24, 2012
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), which marked its first anniversary on May 17, sponsored a panel discussion at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2012 in San Francisco. The discussion was titled "Virtualization for the 99%: Is KVM Set to Occupy the Data Center?"
Posted May 24, 2012
IBM is the premier sponsor at Red Hat Summit this year. A leading open source technology event, the Red Hat Summit will be held June 26-29 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Robert LeBlanc, IBM senior vice president, will be a keynote speaker, immediately following Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, on opening night of the conference. In addition, IBM executives will present seven sessions at the event focused on Cloud Computing, KVM, IBM PureSystems, System x, PowerLinux, System z and Information Management
Posted May 24, 2012
Join SUSE and IBM for a North American road show, Linux Days, in which SUSE technical experts will present and demonstrate the latest open source technologies from SUSE that benefit a data center. IBM, a premier sponsor of this event, will also participate in the events, showcasing System z, System x and Power solutions. The road show starts this week and continues through the end of June.
Posted May 24, 2012
More than 50% of all software purchased within 5 years will be open source, writes Libby Clark in a blog featured on The Linux Foundation website highlighting the results of a new survey. According to Clark, this year's Linux Foundation survey, "Future of Open Source Survey," which included responses from 740 companies, signals a tipping point in terms of open source technology adoption in the enterprise and non-technical industries, including automotive, healthcare, and finance. In the auto industry, Clark points out, 59% of respondents to The Linux Foundation survey use open source software now, and 35% say they are evaluating it.
Posted May 24, 2012
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), a Linux organization, has announced revisions to its LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 certification exam objectives and subsequent exam question updates. The LPI provides a global framework, industry leadership and other services to enhance, develop and further lifelong professional careers in Linux and open source technologies.
Posted May 24, 2012
Google has announced that Google BigQuery, a web service that lets users do interactive analysis of massive data sets, is now available to the public. Billed as enabling customers to "analyze terabytes of data with just a click of a button," the company says the data is secured, replicated across data centers, and can be easily exported.
Posted May 23, 2012
Oracle has introduced new desktop virtualization software, including new releases of three products. The new product versions are Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.4, Sun Ray Software 5.3 and Oracle Virtual Desktop Client 3.1.The desktop virtualization solutions enable organizations to provision access for employees to personal desktop computing environments, enterprise applications, and data without being tied to a particular physical client device. The benefits of this approach include user mobility, data security, and enhanced centralized administration - key issues for organizations involved in the public sector, healthcare field, financial sector, and call center operations, where centralized control is important for compliance and security reasons, Monika Kumar, senior director, product marketing at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 23, 2012
Unstructured data is on the rise, and ready to engulf current data management systems, a new survey shows. In addition, many corporate managers do not understand the challenge that is looming, and are failing to recognize the significance of unstructured data assets to the business. These are the findings of a newly released survey of 264 data managers and professionals who are subscribers to Database Trends and Applications. The survey was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with MarkLogic earlier this year.
Posted May 23, 2012
Embarcadero Technologies has introduced a new version of its database management and development platform, DB Power Studio XE3, which offers enhancements to further improve the performance and availability of databases. The new release offers increased coverage across database platforms by delivering multiple feature enhancements for each product in the suite, including DB Artisan, Rapid SQL, and DB Optimizer, as well as direct access to Embarcadero's support team. In addition, DBArtisan and Rapid SQL also introduce support for Sybase IQ, which is initially available as a technical preview, Scott Walz, senior director of product management at Embarcardero, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 22, 2012
SAP AG has announced a range of innovations. The announcements put heavy emphasis on SAP HANA, and focus on three main areas, David Jonker, director of product marketing - Data Management & Analytics, SAP, tells 5 Minute Briefing. One is working with customers to accelerate their existing investment in the SAP landscape, a second emphasis is big data and analytics, and the third is around sparking new innovation by working with customers, partners and startups to leverage real-time analytics to rethink how business gets done.
Posted May 22, 2012
Today, at Informatica World in Las Vegas, Informatica, a provider of data integration software, unveiled Informatica 9.5. This new release addresses the big data challenges customers are facing as a result of the explosion of data volumes in the enterprise, fueled by social media, cloud computing, and mobile computing data, Ivan Chong, executive vice president and general manager of Data Quality product division at Informatica, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Describing it as a major release of the Informatica Platform, Chong says Informatica 9.5 includes a wide range of new features to help customers extract more value from their big data assets.
Posted May 15, 2012
Software AG has launched Data Masking for Adabas, a solution created to enable Adabas customers to design and test applications using actual production data that has been altered to ensure the privacy and security of the data itself. "By being able to mask this data they will be able to comply with data protection regulations such as HIPAA and the EU Data Protection Directive and others that basically say you can't put sensitive data out there for people to work with, even in non-production environments," Bruce Beaman, senior director, product marketing, at Software AG, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 14, 2012
At IBM's recent Impact conference in Las Vegas, the company announced new business integration software capabilities designed to help organizations incorporate the collaborative and intelligent capabilities of social media, mobile computing and cloud computing into enterprise applications. The cornerstone of enabling enterprises to embrace these critical technologies is the new version of IBM WebSphere Application Server (v8.5). The latest release now provides companies with support for embedded deployments and, is ready for cloud with built-in virtualization. IBM released two editions - a new developer friendly light-weight web app server for mobile and embedded environments called WAS v8.5-Liberty Profile, and WAS Network Deployment (ND) for traditional enterprise settings.
Posted May 14, 2012
BMC Software, a provider of business service management solutions, announced that its cloud-based offerings have seen record sales. More than 300 enterprises have adopted its cloud-based IT service management solutions. This includes the BMC Remedyforce Service Desk solution, which has doubled its customer base in less than 6 months.
Posted May 14, 2012
IBM and Red Hat, Inc. announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with the KVM hypervisor on IBM Systems has been awarded Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+). The Common Criteria is an internationally recognized set of standards used by the federal government and other organizations to assess the security and assurance of technology products. This security certification is the first of its kind for an open source virtualization solution.
Posted May 14, 2012
Cisco announced its intent to acquire privately held Truviso, Inc. Based in Foster City, Calif., Truviso provides scalable, real-time network data analysis and reporting software. The companies' combined solutions will provide more rapid access and visibility into network use and services, Cisco says.
Posted May 14, 2012
Big data has become a big topic for 2012. It's not only the size, but also the complexity of formats and speed of delivery of data that is starting to exceed the capabilities of traditional data management technologies, requiring the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone. In recent years, the democratization of analytics and business intelligence (BI) solutions has become a major driving force for data warehousing, resulting in the use of self-service data marts. One major implication of big data is that in the future, users will not be able to put all useful information into a single data warehouse. Logical data warehouses bringing together information from multiple sources as needed is replacing the single data warehouse model. Combined with the fact that enterprise IT departments are continually moving towards distributed computing environments, the need for IT process automation to automate and execute the integration and movement of data between these disparate sources is more important than ever.
Posted May 09, 2012
CA Technologies is kicking off May Mainframe Madness 2012 (MMM 2012), this week. The event is a free, virtual trade show intended to deliver educational presentations to customers around the globe throughout the month. The fourth-annual event leverages cloud and social media technologies, and is delivered as a SaaS cloud offering. "Our virtual event encourages participation in a wide range of sessions and discussions designed to further mainframe expertise," explains Dayton Semerjian, general manager, Mainframe, CA Technologies.
Posted May 03, 2012
Scott Handy, vice president, STG Strategy and Business Development, PowerLinux, IBM, lays out the value proposition for IBM PowerLinux solutions in his new blog post: On April 24, IBM announced IBM PowerLinux solutions, built on a new Linux-only family of servers. These two-socket servers - one rack-mount and one compute node - run industry standard Linux, and have been tuned to run key emerging workloads like big data and open source network infrastructure. With these new offerings, IBM is taking Power's well-known strengths in scalability, flexibility, and security and making them available to customers that might not previously have thought of Power as an option. Now, quite simply, IBM is taking pricing off the table.
Posted April 30, 2012
IBM introduced a series of new Linux-based systems and solutions intended to help companies exploit the cost efficiency of Linux and virtualization for business-critical workloads. The new offerings, dubbed IBM PowerLinux Systems and Solutions, offer integration of new Linux-specific POWER7 processor-based hardware with Linux software from Red Hat and SUSE for analyzing big data, managing industry-specific applications and delivering open source infrastructure services.
Posted April 30, 2012
FalconStor Software, a provider of disk-based data protection, released the latest version of its virtual tape library (VTL) offering, which includes an expanded set of deduplication methods and improved performance. FalconStor VTL 7.5 is intended to provide customers the flexibility to optimize backup for speed and efficiency by tailoring deduplication processes to the needs of their environment while delivering twice the deduplication rate of any competing solution.
Posted April 30, 2012
STORServer, a provider of data backup solutions for the mid-market, announced four major product upgrades to its line of data backup appliances. The company has introduced a new BA Series Backup Appliance; updated the Enterprise Backup Appliance (EBA) line; enhanced pricing on Instant Restore (IR) Appliances; and is offering stand-alone sales of STORServer Console (SSC). As a result, the company, which sells exclusively through a reseller channel, says it now offers a backup appliance for every budget and environment.
Posted April 30, 2012
Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI) unveiled the latest version of its IT automation software, which includes capabilities to join both reactive and predictive forms of resource management to optimize Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Version 9.0 of ASCI's ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Job Scheduling Software is expected to ship in June.
Posted April 30, 2012