Data Center Management Articles
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
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
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
Cloud.com today announced CloudStack 2.2, the latest version of its open source cloud computing platform. CloudStack is an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of scalable public and private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds. Using CloudStack as the foundation, data center operators can build cloud services within their existing infrastructure to offer on-demand, elastic cloud services. CloudStack is available for immediate download from the open source cloud computing community.
Posted March 15, 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 15, 2011
Did you miss a webcast covering important information about technologies you need to learn more about? IBM offers replays on-demand of webcasts presented by IBM experts and partners.
Posted March 09, 2011
"z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0" and "z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for SLES 11 SP1" are now available from IBM.
Posted March 09, 2011
The IBM Software Product Availability tool provides you the latest information about IBM software available for the Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) versions for System z.
Posted March 09, 2011
Wall Street is adopting high speed HPC systems with low latency to create new profit centers in arbitrage trading, and is using virtualization to increase back office efficiency and cost savings of existing HPC systems, according to the conference organizers. The 2011 show and conference will feature low latency and virtualization as two strategies to increase speed and increase full operations performance of HPC systems.
Posted March 09, 2011
Following Watson's winning performance against Jeopardy! game show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, IBM hosted a keynote session about its Jeopardy! Watson project at The Linux Foundation End User Summit. But Watson wasn't the only computer system that won last month when it competed successfully on Jeopardy! The other computing system is called World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer that helps scientists solve humanitarian challenges by tapping the unused computing power of personal computers around the world. Scientists who use World Community Grid are not only set to receive Watson's $500,000 in prize money - but are already earning support worldwide because the day after the tournament's conclusion, World Community Grid saw a 700% spike in the number of people who normally volunteer their computers' spare power for the effort.
Posted March 09, 2011
Dundee is Scotland's fourth largest city, home to 145,000 people. Like all U.K. local authorities, the Dundee City Council needs to handle increasing demand for IT and e-government services, while also reducing costs in line with central government targets. When the lease on its server and storage hardware needed to be renewed, the council saw an opportunity to enhance its capabilities and increase value for money. Dundee worked with IBM to upgrade its mainframe environment with two powerful IBM System z10 servers, and introduced the IBM XIV Storage System to replace a mixed storage environment.
Posted March 09, 2011
"The Mainframe and the Cloud" and "Scaling Your Oracle E-Business Suite with IBM System z and Linux" are available for download.
Posted March 09, 2011
"z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0" and " z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for SLES 11 SP1" are two new IBM Redbooks publications available.
Posted March 09, 2011
The IBM Software Product Availability tool provides you the latest information about IBM software available for the Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) versions for System z.
Posted March 09, 2011
The High Performance Computing (HPC) Linux Financial Markets event will take place April 4 at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, NY. Wall Street is adopting high speed HPC systems with low latency to create new profit centers in arbitrage trading, and is using virtualization to increase back office efficiency and cost savings of existing HPC systems, according to the conference organizers. The 2011 show and conference will feature low latency and virtualization as two strategies to increase speed and increase full operations performance of HPC systems.
Posted March 09, 2011
Following Watson's winning performance against Jeopardy! game show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, IBM hosted a keynote session about its Jeopardy! Watson project at The Linux Foundation End User Summit. The project incorporates IBM Power 7 systems with Linux and analytics software. But Watson wasn't the only computer system that won last month when it competed successfully on Jeopardy! The other computing system is called World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer that helps scientists solve humanitarian challenges by tapping the unused computing power of personal computers around the world. Scientists who use World Community Grid are not only set to receive Watson's $500,000 in prize money - but are already earning support worldwide because the day after the tournament's conclusion, World Community Grid saw a 700% spike in the number of people who normally volunteer their computers' spare power for the effort.
Posted March 09, 2011
IBM has announced that the Dundee City Council has implemented a cost-effective IT architecture with IBM System z and IBM XIV Storage System technologies. Dundee is Scotland's fourth largest city, home to 145,000 people. Like all U.K. local authorities, the Dundee City Council needs to handle increasing demand for IT and e-government services, while also reducing costs in line with central government targets.
Posted March 09, 2011
When computers first started to infringe on everyday life, science fiction authors and society in general had high expectations for "intelligent" systems. Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" series from the 1940s portrayed robots with completely human intelligence and personality, and, in the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," the onboard computer HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) had a sufficiently human personality to suffer a paranoid break and attempt to murder the crew!
Posted March 09, 2011
The recent public release of thousands of leaked U.S. State Department cables by WikiLeaks continues to shake up governments across the world. The information captured and sent out to the wild is not only an embarrassment to U.S. government officials whose candid assessments of foreign leaders were exposed but also to the fact that that the organization with the tightest and most comprehensive data security technologies, protocols, and policies in the world unknowingly fell victim to a massive data breach. Can private corporations or smaller government agencies with less-stringent security protocols and standards expect to do any better? Securing data is tough enough, and now, with the increase of initiatives such as virtualization and cloud computing, the odds of loss of control and proliferation of sensitive data become even greater.
Posted March 09, 2011
Unisys has announced that its French subsidiary has signed a multi-year contract to provide end-user IT support services for 60,000 employees of Air France and its subsidiaries at multiple locations throughout France. Under the terms of the contract, Unisys will handle IT equipment procurement and software distribution for those employees. Unisys will also provide a range of hardware installation, maintenance and support services for 23,000 devices distributed across 10 airports and other locations in France.
Posted March 09, 2011
Unisys has announced that its New Zealand subsidiary has been selected to provide Unisys Stealth Solution data protection technology to car rental company Hertz New Zealand to help secure and protect Hertz customers' credit card data against fraud. The Unisys Stealth Solution uses data encryption and bit-splitting technology to secure data. Using the Stealth Solution, organizations can define communities of interest - specific groups of users - and segregate access to data on a shared network or storage system so that one community of interest cannot access another's data.
Posted March 09, 2011
UNITE, the volunteer-based organization of Unisys users from around the world, has announced that the agenda for the 2011 Annual UNITE Technology Conference and Exhibition is now available on the UNITE website. The event will be held May 22-25, 2011, at the Hyatt Regency Orange County in Garden Grove, California. The theme for this year's conference is "Innovation - Solving Today's Business Problems with Solutions That Keep the World Moving." As in previous years, conference tracks will include BIS, OS 2200, MCP, and EAE.
Posted March 09, 2011
Unisys has announced the Application Modernization Platform as a Service (AMPS) offering, a subscription-based service to help federal government agencies reduce the cost, complexity, risk and time of modernizing their legacy software applications. The platform, managed and monitored by Unisys, can be implemented via a cloud infrastructure or hosted onsite, enabling federal organizations to shorten the time associated with typical enterprise platform integration and procurement.
Posted March 09, 2011
Precise, a provider of transaction performance management software, has announced the availability of Precise 9.0. "The focus of this release is real-time transaction performance management for cloud applications and especially Java applications running on the cloud," Precise executive vice president Zohar Gilad tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The old problems that prevent applications from scaling don't go away, and a new virtualization layer actually makes it a lot more difficult to find the origin of a problem once it happens," says Gilad. Additionally, he notes, "The cloud model is heavily dependent upon shared services which is a good thing, but the flip side of that is that you have a lot more possibilities for application contention on resources."
Posted March 08, 2011
A member of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) since 1992, Mark C. Clark recently took over as president of the organization. Recently, 5 Minute Briefing chatted with Clark about what's in store for members at the annual Oracle users conference COLLABORATE as well as for the year ahead. Helping members prepare for an upgrade to Oracle Applications Release 12, providing additional smaller, more targeted regional events, and a continued emphasis on a return to the basics with networking and education are at the top of his to-do list for 2011.
Posted March 08, 2011
Are today's IT college graduates entering the workforce with the right sets of skills that companies now so critically need? Or is additional training required? In a new survey of 376 employers, a majority report they depend on the educational sector - universities and colleges - to provide specific IT skills, such as enterprise programming languages, as well as business skills such as problem-solving andcommunications. However, few companies are entirely satisfied with the readiness of graduates coming out of campuses. These are the results of a new survey fielded among SHARE members, as well as subscribers to Database Trends and Applications. The survey, sponsored by IBM and conducted in January 2011 by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., included the perspectives of IT managers and professionals in organizations with highly diverse IT infrastructures.
Posted March 07, 2011
Novell has announced the availability of SUSE Manager, a solution for managing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux across physical, virtual and cloud environments. SUSE Manager is intended to reduce the total cost of ownership of Linux deployments, even as they become larger and more sophisticated. According to Novell, SUSE Manager also simplifies migrations from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Posted March 07, 2011
HP has announced enhancements to the HP TippingPoint Reputation Digital Vaccine (RepDV) service that protects enterprises from the latest security risks by providing greater visibility into malicious activity on corporate networks. HP TippingPoint launched the Rep DV service last June to deliver current lists of malicious or suspicious websites to customer-deployed TippingPoint IPS solutions and automatically block traffic to and from these sites. The list is updated every 2 hours and is powered by HP's Digital Vaccine Labs (DVLabs), a security research and development organization.
Posted March 07, 2011
AES, a virtualization infrastructure provider, announced a new solution that provides virtual network performance monitoring for Linux on System z, in real time, as well as alerting capabilities that can be integrated with other system management software. The new offering, CleverView for TCP/IP on Linux, offers a focal point for the health of all Linux nodes and application performance monitoring, as well as intelligent diagnostic capabilities for specific IP-addressable resources, such as devices, links, routes, connections, and nodes, within the virtualized environment.
Posted March 07, 2011
Software AG launched a complementary collection of products and services designed specifically to align business and IT concerns. The vendor's process-driven IT modernization solution - which leverages the webMethods SOA registry and ARIS business process management suite - is intended to be a holistic, process-centric solution that adds a new process intelligence framework and best practices as well as specific targeted services.
Posted March 07, 2011
Oracle has announced that performance testing with Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management running on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine has delivered outstanding results for calculating profitability measures at extreme speed. Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management running on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine computed profitability for 172 allocation rules across 250 million accounts and more than 1 billion transactions in only 4 hours and 45 minutes.
Posted March 02, 2011
LogLogic, an IT data management company supporting log management and SIEM (security information and event management), has announced the release of LogLogic Database Security Manager 4.1. LogLogic Database Security Manager is used by enterprises to ensure the security of their database deployments, while also allowing for the remote monitoring of activity without the need for built-in database auditing features. Database Security Manager includes a rule-base and management dashboard, and is part of LogLogic's Universal Collection Framework providing the ability to get any IT data, regardless of format or location.
Posted March 02, 2011
Luminex Software, Inc., a developer and provider of disk-based mainframe virtual tape products and technologies, announced at the SHARE IBM User Group conference in Anaheim, an enhanced version of its Channel Gateway mainframe virtual tape product that the company says outperforms other industry solutions by 2x to 5x or more. The new Channel Gateway "X" version provides near link-speed virtual tape performance, allowing data centers to meet their maximum mainframe host tape I/O capabilities using disk-based storage.
Posted March 01, 2011
Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc., has announced its partnership with Commercialbank of Qatar, the largest private sector bank in Qatar, for the launch of a comprehensive mobile banking and mobile payments service for its retail customers.
Posted February 23, 2011
Revelation Software has announced the availability of the latest release of OpenInsight Development Suite (OI), version 9.2.1, which features OpenInsight for Web v.1.1. (O4W), a new version of the web 2.0 development toolkit that enables OpenInsight and MultiValue developers to rapidly create browser based forms, reports, menus, dashboards and programs.
Posted February 23, 2011
The SHARE conference convenes on February 27th in Anaheim, with an agenda packed with industry initiatives and knowledge-sharing on the latest best practices and technology trends. In this Q&A, SHARE president Janet Sun provides her vision for the IBM users group in the coming years. "We see the mainframe as the center of the enterprise IT universe. If you don't think so, try unplugging it," says Sun. "Our organization focuses on enterprise IT, and that includes the mainframe. Today's SHARE membership continues to strive to leverage advances in information technology, and SHARE is a great place to do that."
Posted February 23, 2011
FalconStor Software, a provider of data protection solutions, is now offering a disaster recovery (DR) automation tool as part of its FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) product line.
Posted February 22, 2011
AES, an infrastructure support provider, is now shipping a toolset supporting IBM's zEnterprise System, as well as providing analysis of network traffic performance for multi-architecture environments, including z/OS, Linux on System z, z/VM, z/VSE, AIX, OSA Express and Windows.
Posted February 22, 2011
IBM announced workload-optimized systems to help companies manage a range of more demanding data center workloads. The new systems include a new offering for the zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX); IBM Storwize Rapid Application Storage (RAS) solution; and System x products. The offerings span IBM's systems portfolio.
Posted February 22, 2011
CorreLog, Inc., a provider of log management and security solutions, says it has begun shipping a z/OS agent that helps organizations correlate mainframe security events with security events from Windows, Linux, UNIX, routers, firewalls, and and instantly notify the appropriate personnel in the event of a security threat or breach. The new product, CorreLog Agent for z/OS, works with the CorreLog Security Correlation Server, to enable organizations to monitor enterprise IT security, including mainframes, from a central viewpoint, says George Faucher, president of CorreLog. "For many customers, an IBM mainframe is their most strategic box. However, until now, they had no way of viewing it as part of their enterprise security picture."
Posted February 22, 2011
A new toolset designed to streamline common and complex tasks associated with developing, administering and optimizing Oracle databases, has been announced by Embarcadero. The new toolset, called DB PowerStudio for Oracle, combines several of Embarcadero's most popular database tools into a suite that is intended to make it easier for Oracle developers and DBAs to shorten database development and administration times, and to improve the performance and availability of their databases. The toolset is available in a Developer Edition and a DBA Edition. The new release follows the introduction of a similar toolset by Embarcadero for SQL Server DBAs and developers.
Posted February 22, 2011
Talend, an open source integration tools vendor, has announced the release of Talend Integration Factory, a production-ready distribution of the popular open source enterprise service bus (ESB) from the Apache Camel project. This announcement follows the December 2010 introduction of Talend Service Factory, a repackaged distribution of Apache CXF, optimized for the enterprise. The product initiatives leverage tools from SOPERA, which Talend acquired in November.
Posted February 22, 2011
Idera, a provider of Microsoft SQL Server management and administration tools, has announced the latest version of its SQL Server backup and recovery solution, SQL safe 6.5. According to Idera, SQL safe reduces database backup time by up to 50% over native SQL backups, reduces backup disk space requirements by up to 95%, and enables complete "hands-free" automated backup of an organization's SQL Server infrastructure while ensuring compliance with backup and recovery policies.
Posted February 22, 2011
SHARE convenes on February 27th in Anaheim, with an agenda packed with industry initiatives and knowledge-sharing on the latest best practices and technology trends. In this exclusive Q&A, SHARE president Janet Sun provides her vision for SHARE in the coming years.
Posted February 22, 2011
IBM representatives will be at the High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets event to highlight the benefits of IBM systems and Linux in High Performance Computing. The show and conference will be take place April 4 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, NY, and IBM is a gold sponsor of the event.
Posted February 09, 2011
Did you miss a webcast covering important information about technologies you need to learn more about? IBM offers replays on-demand of webcasts presented by IBM experts and partners.
Posted February 09, 2011