Data Center Management Articles
At an event last week co-located in Boston and Frankfurt, company leaders from SAP AG and Sybase came together for the first time to share the strategy and joint product direction for the newly combined companies. SAP confirmed that Sybase will be run as a separate, independent unit - and that customer investments in Sybase products will be preserved and supported.
Posted August 24, 2010
IBM announced new POWER7 systems designed to manage the most demanding workloads and emerging applications, including a high-end system, which, the company says, offers greater energy efficiency than competitive systems.
Posted August 23, 2010
Symantec Corp., a provider of high availability and security solutions, announced two solutions designed to assist companies struggling with virtualizion of business critical applications and storage on the VMware platform. The two new products, ApplicationHA and VirtualStore, are the result of collaboration between Symantec and VMware.
Posted August 23, 2010
IBM announced a new storage-aware backup and recovery solution that integrates storage processor fast-replication facilities with IMS backup and recovery operations. The new tool, IBM says, enables instantaneous backups with no application downtime, reduce recovery time, and simplify disaster recovery procedures while using less CPU, I/O, and storage resources. The IMS Recovery Expert for z/OS V2.1 product is intended to make disaster recovery as simple as restarting from a power failure, while reducing the costs and complexity of backing up and recovering IMS assets.
Posted August 23, 2010
As part of its Power announcements, IBM introduced IBM Rational Power Appliance, a family of software appliances comprised of Power Express servers that are pre-loaded and pre-configured with IBM Rational software for AIX development. Available in a range of sizes and programming languages to suit specific user requirements, these systems provide customers a rapidly deployable software development environment.
Posted August 23, 2010
VMware, Inc., a provider of enterprise virtualization solutions, is shipping an updated release of its application monitoring product that includes tighter integration with its virtualization server products. The new release, SpringSource Hyperic 4.4, is integration with VMware vCenter Server, and now maintains a continually updated inventory of VMware vSphere ESXi and ESX hosts, the vendor says.
Posted August 23, 2010
Only a decade ago, Linux was still a question in the minds of CIOs, but over that relatively short period of time the open source operating system has earned its place in the data center, said Jean Staten Healy, head of cross-IBM Linux strategy, during a presentation at LinuxCon 2010 in Boston last week. While 10 years ago, the role of Linux in the enterprise data center was still unclear, today Linux in the marketplace is a force that continues to gain in strength, supporting the diverse requirements of data-intensive workloads, virtual desktop solutions, prebuilt appliances, and cloud deployments models.
Posted August 18, 2010
Canonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu, has launched a virtual appliance of IBM's DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform in private and public cloud configurations. Canonical also announced that IBM has completed validation of the full version of DB2 software on Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support Server Edition.
Posted August 18, 2010
The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has launched the Open Compliance Program, a comprehensive initiative that includes tools, training, a standard format to report software licensing information, consulting and a self-assessment checklist that will help companies comply with open source licenses, increasing adoption of open source and decreasing legal FUD present in the marketplace.
Posted August 18, 2010
Virtual Bridges, and IBM partner and developer of the VERDE suite for desktop virtualization, has announced the availability of VERDE 4.2. Introduced in less than 3 months since the release of VERDE 4, the company says that the new version's capabilities underscore the company's commitment to meet market needs through rapid innovation.
Posted August 18, 2010
Aiming to ease the barriers that the aging or people with disabilities experience in participating in internet activities, the OpenAjax Alliance (OAA) has announced it has created new open source tooling technology to help software developers make it easier these users to access and use Web 2.0-enabled business, government and consumer websites. The new tooling technology simplifies the way web applications are tested for compliance with current accessibility standards and guidelines, helping to speed up delivery of new accessible internet applications. Previously, developers had to complete their code and run various reports to determine if their application was compliant with accessibility standards. Using the new tooling technology, applications are tested dynamically, as developers build the code, providing real-time feedback on compliance.
Posted August 18, 2010
Furthering its commitment to desktop virtualization, Oracle announced the newly released Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.2. Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a complete management, hosting and access solution for virtualized desktops hosted in the data center. By enabling standardized virtual desktop images, Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure helps reduce administration overhead, lover total cost of ownership and increase security.
Posted August 18, 2010
IBM has announced new POWER7 systems designed to manage the most demanding workloads and emerging applications, including a high-end system, which, the company says, offers better energy efficiency than competitive systems.
Posted August 18, 2010
As part of its Power announcements yesterday, IBM introduced IBM Rational Power Appliance, a family of software appliances comprised of Power Express servers that are pre-loaded and pre-configured with IBM Rational software for AIX development. Available in a range of sizes and programming languages to suit specific user requirements, these ready-to-use systems provide customers a fully-enabled software development environment that can be put to use in a matter of hours.
Posted August 18, 2010
VMware, Inc., a provider of enterprise virtualization solutions, is shipping an updated release of its application monitoring product that includes tighter integration with its virtualization server products. The new release, SpringSource Hyperic 4.4, is integration with VMware vCenter Server, and now maintains a continually updated inventory of VMware vSphere ESXi and ESX hosts, the vendor says.
Posted August 18, 2010
Novell has announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will offer hourly based pricing and support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) of all sizes will have the ability to run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and 11 on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) paying only for the hours they use. The new offerings will be available in all instance sizes and in every AWS region around the world. In addition, Novell will provide a maintenance service on AWS so customers can keep their SLES instances up-to-date with Novell's most current security patches, bug fixes and new features.
Posted August 18, 2010
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 August 18, 2010
The Linux Journal is conducting a survey of Linux and open source favorites, and IBM has been nominated for the best Linux Server Vendor. Please consider going to the Linux Journal website to cast your vote for your Linux favorites; don't forget to vote for Best Linux Server Vendor!
Posted August 18, 2010
Most organizations today use various electronic forms of collaboration such as electronic documents, email and instant messaging to connect people across the organization. But, as trends go, there are new challenges associated with managing the environments and electronic content with the technologies used today. Organizations need to address these challenges by implementing cost-effective solutions to find information and share ideas rapidly and beyond traditional organizational boundaries.
Posted August 18, 2010
Aiming to ease the barriers that the aging or people with disabilities experience in participating in internet activities, the OpenAjax Alliance (OAA) has announced it has created new open source tooling technology to help software developers make it easier these users to access and use Web 2.0-enabled business, government and consumer websites. The new tooling technology simplifies the way web applications are tested for compliance with current accessibility standards and guidelines, helping to speed up delivery of new accessible internet applications. Previously, developers had to complete their code and run various reports to determine if their application was compliant with accessibility standards. Using the new tooling technology, applications are tested dynamically, as developers build the code, providing real-time feedback on compliance.
Posted August 18, 2010
Since the first Beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was released in April, Red Hat internal testing groups, customers, partners, and community members have been busy testing and providing feedback on the product.
Posted August 11, 2010
Are you ready to learn how Red Hat unlocks the value of your IT ecosystem?
Posted August 11, 2010
Register now to learn about managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux in an increasingly virtual world at the September 14th webinar.
Posted August 11, 2010
Are you currently evaluating the business benefits of running virtualization in a distributed versus mainframe environment?
Posted August 11, 2010
This webcast hosted by Novell and IBM discusses the highly scalable, superior IT optimization and workload consolidation that System z delivers to a virtualized environment.
Posted August 11, 2010
New Aberdeen reports on best practices for decreasing cost and improving processing power on the mainframe are available now.
Posted August 11, 2010
The Oracle/Sun/Solaris merger has many people thinking about their data center infrastructure and new options as they look ahead. Understanding some of the key technical considerations when looking to migrate your applications can help you better understand the issues and reduce the risk.
Posted August 11, 2010
Increasing demands for server consolidation utilizing less space and money continues to be a key driver when implementing and deploying new hardware. The key: do even more with less. When running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the new IBM System zEnterprise with z/VM, your business can continue to deliver unique business value in the areas of virtualization, operational flexibility, scalability, workload management, efficiency, business continuance, reliability and security.
Posted August 11, 2010
Most organizations today use various electronic forms of collaboration such as electronic documents, email and instant messaging to connect people across the organization. But, as trends go, there are new challenges associated with managing the environments and electronic content with the technologies used today. Organizations need to address these challenges by implementing cost-effective solutions to find information and share ideas rapidly and beyond traditional organizational boundaries.
Posted August 11, 2010
Novell has released SUSE Gallery, a new online showcase for registered SUSE Studio users to publish their appliances and cloud-based applications. With SUSE Gallery, end users can browse published appliances for the solution to their particular commercial or personal need, and then download the appliance free of charge.
Posted August 11, 2010
EnterpriseDB has announced the immediate availability of the latest version of its flagship Postgres Plus Advanced Server database. EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.4, which is built on the open source object relational Postgres database, is now fully compatible with all the features and functionality found in the most recent community distribution. The new release provides increased core functionality for the database as a whole, increased Oracle compatibility, increased manageability, and increased security, according to Robin Schumacher, EnterpriseDB's director of product strategy.
Posted August 11, 2010
EnterpriseDB has announced the immediate availability of the latest version of its flagship Postgres Plus Advanced Server database. EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.4, which is built on the open source object relational Postgres database, is now fully compatible with all the features and functionality found in the most recent community distribution. The new release provides increased core functionality for the database as a whole, increased Oracle compatibility, increased manageability, and increased security, according to Robin Schumacher, EnterpriseDB's director of product strategy.
Posted August 11, 2010
IBM announced the zEnterprise mainframe server and a new systems design that allows workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system. "The new mainframe is the fastest enterprise server in the world and represents a giant leap forward in performance," says Tom Rosamilia, general manager for IBM Power and z Systems. "This new dimension in enterprise computing - extending mainframe governance to POWER7 and System x blades integrated into the zEnterprise System architecture - was developed over the past three years with direct involvement from a team of IBM's 30 top customers, which provided direct input at every stage of the development process."
Posted August 11, 2010
IBM announced the zEnterprise mainframe server and a new systems design that allows workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system. "The new mainframe is the fastest enterprise server in the world and represents a giant leap forward in performance," says Tom Rosamilia, general manager for IBM Power and z Systems. "This new dimension in enterprise computing - extending mainframe governance to POWER7 and System x blades integrated into the zEnterprise System architecture - was developed over the past three years with direct involvement from a team of IBM's 30 top customers, which provided direct input at every stage of the development process."
Posted August 11, 2010
Today, at Sybase TechWave 2010 in Washington, D.C., Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, announced a new version of Sybase Replication Server, Sybase's database replication product, which supports change data capture, data distribution and synchronization of data across heterogeneous database environments for real-time analytics, reporting, distributed operations and disaster recovery.
Posted August 10, 2010
Today, Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, also announced a new HP-Sybase BI (business intelligence) reference architecture that leverages the HP Converged Infrastructure. The joint solution optimizes query response and data loads with reduced overhead, storage costs and maintenance requirements. Featuring Sybase IQ 15 running on HP ProLiant DL785 servers, Sybase says the solution will help organizations looking for high performance, scalability and energy efficiency at a lower TCO than other analytics server offerings.
Posted August 10, 2010
IBM today announced the acquisition of Datacap Inc., a privately-held company based in Tarrytown, N.Y. Datacap is a provider of software that enables organizations to improve the way they capture, manage and automate the flow of business information to improve business processes, reduce paper costs or manual errors and meet compliance mandates. "We've chosen to make Datacap's approach the foundation of IBM's document capture strategy. Datacap's approach to image capture, using sophisticated business rules management, sets it above the rest in the industry and provides the most complementary capabilities for IBM," states Ron Ercanbrack, vice president of Enterprise Content Management for IBM.
Posted August 10, 2010
IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Storwize, a privately held company based in Marlborough, Mass. Storwize provides real-time data compression technology to help clients reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80%, improving efficiency and lowering the cost of making data available for analytics and other applications. With Storwize, IBM says, it is acquiring storage technology that is unique in the industry due to its ability to compress primary data, or data that clients are actively using, of multiple types - from files to virtualization images to databases - in real-time while maintaining performance. "This is in contrast to what we see our competitors doing, which is primarily focusing on compressing data that is inactive, or data at rest - backup data, as an example," explained Doug Balog, vice president of IBM Storage, during a conference call announcing the planned acquisition.
Posted August 10, 2010
First elected to Oracle Applications Users Group board of directors in 2009, David Ferguson became president of the OAUG this year. He talks with DBTA this month about how the users group is getting "back to basics" with educational sessions and networking opportunities as well as the new approaches it is taking to meet its members' evolving needs.
Posted August 10, 2010
Earlier this year, Andy Flower took over as president of the Independent Oracle Users Group from Ian Abramson. With Oracle OpenWorld right around the corner, Flower talks with DBTA about how the IOUG is changing to best meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the expanding Oracle ecosystem, despite what continues to be a difficult economy. For the IOUG, it is "the year of the member" and it all starts with the database, he says.
Posted August 10, 2010
Many see 2010 shaping up as a boom year for cloud computing, with cloud adopters capable of realizing significant reductions in administrative IT costs compared to non-adopters. However, it's not enough to simply develop and implement a cloud strategy. Rather, enterprises must take into account the performance of their cloud-based assets and the impact of the cloud on their end users' and customers' experiences. After all, the apparent cost and elasticity advantages of the cloud won't yield any business benefit if the direct consequence is a poor end user experience. For this reason, businesses considering the cloud must do the due diligence and insist on performance guarantees from cloud service providers that map directly to business objectives - or risk impacting revenue, brand image and customer satisfaction.
Posted August 10, 2010
What is the most difficult thing about acquiring enterprise software? If you are like most IT technicians, your first inclination was probably something related to cost justification. Let's face it, enterprise software typically is very expensive ... and eventually, something will need to bring costs more in line with value.
Posted August 10, 2010
CA Technologies today announced a new release of CA XCOM Data Transport for z/OS (CA XCOM), designed to help customers control costs and improve operational efficiency while securely transferring high volumes of critical data. The latest improvements are engineered to help prevent problems, speed data transport, and provide significant productivity gains in installation, deployment and maintenance.
Posted August 09, 2010
CA Technologies announced new identity and access management (IAM) solutions intended to enhance security, ease compliance efforts, and automate IT processes within cloud computing environments. The company released a new version of CA Identity Manager, which extends identity management to cloud applications, as well as leverage CA SiteMinder portfolio to control access to its SaaS applications.
Posted August 09, 2010
Bus-Tech, Inc., a supplier of data center connectivity products, announced enhancements to its virtual tape library (VTL) solution for small to medium mainframe environments. The company unveiled Mainframe Data Library (MDL) model 100S, part of a modular, scalable family of VTL controllers for IBM, IBM compatible and Fujitsu mainframes. The MDL-100S offers self-contained storage and multiple data protection options. With the release of the MDL-100S, storage capacity has been doubled to 9 TB of usable RAID storage.
Posted August 09, 2010
IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Storwize, a privately held provider of real-time data compression technology. Storwize, based in Marlborough, Mass., builds solutions intended to help clients reduce physical storage requirements, improve efficiency and lower the cost of making data available for analytics and other applications.
Posted August 09, 2010
Terracotta, a provider of enterprise scalability solutions, says it is shipping a new release of its distributed caching solution that enables customers to store over a terabyte of data and hundreds of millions of entries in a single cache. The new product, Ehcache 2.2, also features a new management console intended to simplify application scale and enhance visibility and control for developers and operators. Terracotta claims these new capabilities can be turned on with two lines of configuration.
Posted August 09, 2010
HP announced its Flexible Data Center (HP Flexible DC), a prefabricated, modular framework built to replace traditional data center designs with a more agile solution that can be expanded as needed while conserving resources.HP Flexible DC is based on a "butterfly" design featuring four prefabricated quadrants, or modules, that stem off a central administrative section. The offering uses industrial components to improve cost efficiencies as well as a streamlined building process with a variety of options for power and cooling distribution."HP can help clients innovate the way they build and operate a greenfield data center for greater savings over its life span," says Kfir Godrich, chief technology officer of technology services at HP. Likely adopters of the offering include financial service providers, government entities, and cloud and co-location hosts, Godrich adds.In addition, HP says it is offering specific configurations designed to optimize the use of power and cooling resources to lower energy and water use. The data center will employ air-cooled, rather than water-cooled, mechanical systems, to potentially save clients power and potentially millions of gallons of water annually.For more details, go here.
Posted August 09, 2010
SOA Software, a provider of service governance solutions, announced the availability of comprehensive SOA federation capabilities in its Repository Manager product. These capabilities help customers share software development asset information within and outside the enterprise, govern how this information is shared, and integrate this information throughout the organization's heterogeneous software development ecosystem.
Posted August 09, 2010
Unisys recently reported second-quarter 2010 net income of $120.2 million, compared with net income of $38.1 million in the year-ago quarter. "This was another solid quarter for the company as we continued to make progress in enhancing our profitability and reshaping our business model at Unisys. By staying focused on our business priorities we delivered our fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year improved profitability," said Ed Coleman, Unisys chairman and CEO, during the company's Q2 earnings conference call late last month.
Posted August 08, 2010