Data Center Management Articles
In the newest version of the semiannual Top500 list, Linux continues to dominate as the operating system of choice for the world's most advanced supercomputers. According to the latest list, compiled by compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, more than 90% of the Top500 fastest supercomputers run some version of Linux.
Posted June 09, 2010
TeamQuest Corporation, a leader in IT Service Optimization, announced it is bringing automation one step closer to Unisys MCP users with the company's latest software offering. TeamQuest SMFII 15.100 adds the ability to track data per connection, analyze a workload set and return the tasks for each workload, and supports ClearPath MCP Release 13.0. "This software release helps you define workloads easier, quicker, and in real time," states TeamQuest software engineer manager Brenda Bonnstetter. "The immediate feedback when defining workloads will save time, provide workload definition accuracy and allow for quick updates in adjusting workloads to meet changing environments."
Posted June 09, 2010
According to a new Unisys online poll of 124 IT professionals, 62% said that their companies had plans to migrate to Windows 7 - with 36% likely moving within 6 to 12 months. In Unisys' view, IT executives need to look beyond the migration itself to consider the new management challenges and benefits Windows 7 affords them. For example, they must capitalize on the the innovative support automation features of Windows 7 not only to save money, but also to help information workers resolve service events quickly and remain productive through anywhere, anytime access to the desktop environment.
Posted June 09, 2010
UNITE held its 2010 conference in May at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel. Highlights included a talk Monday morning by Unisys CEO Ed Coleman, who spoke about Unisys' results, and the company's commitment to customers and ClearPath, and later visited the vendor floor; as well as a keynote by IDC's John F. Gantz, who addressed the consumerization of IT.
Posted June 09, 2010
Customer service is always important but never more critical than during difficult economic times, when wasting time is just not acceptable and customer satisfaction is an imperative. Atlantic Detroit Diesel-Allison sells and services a full line of Detroit Diesel, Mercedes-Benz, and MTU engines, and the automatic transmissions offered by the Allison Transmission Division of General Motors Corporation. Atlantic DDA had initiated a plan to improve its service department by improving order processing, thus driving more revenue, with additional goals of gaining operational efficiency and heightening customer satisfaction. In order to achieve these objectives, Atlantic DDA needed to make real-time information available to its teams of service representatives.
Posted June 07, 2010
Quality can be a hard thing to define. What is good and what is bad may not be easily identified and quantified. When a data mart accurately reflects data exactly as found in the source, should that be considered a quality result? If the source data is bad, is the data mart of high quality or not? If the data mart differs from the source, when is the difference an improvement of quality and when is said difference evidence of diminished quality? While it may seem self-evident that correcting the source of load data would be the "right" thing to do, in practice that direction is not necessarily self-evident. The reasons supporting this nonintuitive approach are varied. Sometimes changes to the source impact other processes that must not change, or the changes will expose problems that may provoke undesired political fallout, or it may simply be that making the proper adjustments to the source application would prove too costly to the organization. For all these reasons and more, in the world of business intelligence, the dependent data often is expected to be of higher quality than the source data. In order for that improvement to occur, data placed within the dependent mart or data warehouse must be altered from the source. Sometimes these alterations become codified within the process migrating data from the source. Other times changes are made via one-time ad hoc updates. Either way, this alteration leads to a situation in which the dependent data will no longer equate one-for-one to the source data. Superficial comparisons of this altered content will highlight the disparity that what exists for analytics is not the same as what exists for the operational system.
Posted June 07, 2010
Before we go any further, let me briefly answer the question posed in this column's title: "No Way!" OK ... with that out of the way, let's discuss the issue ... Every so often, some industry pundit gets his opinions published by declaring that "Database administrators are obsolete" or that "we no longer need DBAs." Every time I hear this, it makes me shake my head sadly as I regard just how gullible IT publications can be.
Posted June 07, 2010
In only a few years' time, the world of data management has been altered dramatically, and this is a change that is still running its course. No longer are databases run in back rooms by administrators worrying about rows and columns. Now, actionable information is sought by decision makers at all levels of the enterprise, and the custodians of this data need to work closely with the business.That's because, in the wake of the recent financial crisis and economic downturn, there's a push from both high-level corporate management and regulators to achieve greater understanding and greater transparency across the enterprise, Jeanne Harris, executive research fellow and a senior executive at the Accenture Institute for High Performance, and co-author, along with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics and Analytics at Work, tells DBTA. "In many ways, I think the ultimate result of the financial crisis is that executives realized they cannot delegate analytics to subordinates; they can't view it as technology or math that doesn't really affect them."
Posted June 07, 2010
In the midst of turbulent times, many successful businesses learned an important lesson: The closer IT works with the business, the better an organization can weather the storms that blow in. Thus, many savvy companies understand that the managers and professionals who oversee information technology and applications need to be well incentivized to stay on. At the same time, these professionals understand the need to develop expertise in business management and communications. Many companies are looking to information technology to provide an additional competitive edge, and see their Oracle enterprise systems as the cornerstone of this strategy. As a result, a survey finds that Oracle enterprise application managers and professionals appear to have weathered the economic storm. The survey, conducted among 334 members of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) by Unisphere Research, and sponsored by Motion International, finds an increase in the number of Oracle technology professionals who are near or surpassing the $100,000 mark in their base salaries.
Posted June 07, 2010
CAST, a provider of software analysis and measurement solutions, has announced the release of its automated analysis and measurement software for Siebel, PeopleSoft and SAP, which, the company says, addresses the growing need for consistent and objective measurement of these ERP platforms in order to eliminate costly customization errors in critical business applications.
Posted June 02, 2010
Bradmark Technologies, Inc., a provider of application solutions for database management, announced that its flagship product, SurveillanceDB, has been selected by Facets users, including Blue Care Network of Michigan, Kansas City, Wellpoint and others as their monitoring solution to ensure overall system efficiency by reducing the time to identify and resolve database issues and track departmental usage. Facets is TriZetto's enterprisewide software solution for health plan administration. The state-of-the-art platform, with integrated applications, automates processes across an entire enterprise and drives greater cost-efficiencies. Facets also helps organizations support the consumer-directed products demanded by today's retail healthcare market and deliver advanced care management capabilities.
Posted June 01, 2010
Addressing the increasing pressure on the budgets of organizations that rely on the mainframe, BMC Software introduced new mainframe cost optimization capabilities to help organizations better manage their mainframe investments. "We are working with our customers to try to reduce the cost of the mainframe. That is what our customers tell us they need help with," Jay Lipovich, director of product management at BMC Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted June 01, 2010
To help organizations benefit from the data explosion, IBM has unveiled a new portfolio of services and solutions open source technology designed for analysis of large volumes of data. IBM InfoSphere BigInsights is powered by Apache Hadoop, and is designed to help organizations analyze and visualize petabyte-sized quantities of data.
Posted June 01, 2010
Terracotta, a provider of Java infrastructure software, announced the availability of Ehcache 2.1, an upgrade to its distributed caching solution. New features include expanded support for IBM WebSphere, intended to help WebSphere users can take advantage of all the features of Ehcache.
Posted June 01, 2010
IBM and AT&T announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Sterling Commerce from AT&T for approximately $1.4 billion in cash. The acquisition of the Dublin, OH-based company will expand IBM's ability to help organizations create more intelligent and dynamic business networks by simplifying and automating the way they connect and communicate with customers, partners and suppliers both on-premise or through cloud computing delivery models.
Posted June 01, 2010
At CA World, CA Technologies launched three new and two enhanced products in its virtualization management portfolio. The three new products are designed to deliver robust virtualization management capabilities for virtualization-focused administrators. The company also announced enhancements to two existing products to offer more advanced capabilities for integrating specialized virtualization management into the end-to-end management of hybrid physical and virtual systems, networks, storage and applications.
Posted June 01, 2010
Sybase has unveiled the Sybase Mobility Platform, a framework of best-in-class mobility servers, mobile applications and mobile services to empower enterprises to transform the way they connect with their customers and enable their employees. With mobility driving significant evolution in the enterprise and the IT industry at large, Sybase leverages its proven expertise, leading solutions and strong partner ecosystem to help enterprises better communicate, work and transact, globally on a fully integrated mobility platform
Posted May 26, 2010
IBM has opened a Center of Innovation for Linux and Open Standards in the capital city of the Republic of Kazakhstan, with the goal of driving the development and adoption of open standards and open source technologies among the businesses and government organizations of Kazakhstan. Opened under a comprehensive Memorandum of Understanding, signed by IBM and the Kazakhstan Ministry of Information & Communications, the agreement covers several areas of cooperation. The IBM Center of Innovation for Linux and Open Standards will help local software developers increase their Linux and open standards expertise and better connect them to the worldwide Linux community. As part of this process, IBM will develop new ways to apply information technologies to improve business life in Kazakhstan.
Posted May 26, 2010
At BrainShare in Amsterdam last week, Novell launched SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which delivers enhanced virtualization capabilities, advances in high availability clustering, and more flexible maintenance and support options. As a result, customers can take advantage of the latest open source technologies to run their mission-critical services cost effectively on any platform - physical, virtual or cloud.
Posted May 26, 2010
In his recent Computerworld blog post, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols highlights the five best features of the latest Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration. Fedora 13 is a strong release, and because it is more user-friendly than past releases, Fedora is no longer just for Linux experts, he
Posted May 26, 2010
IBM has opened a Center of Innovation for Linux and Open Standards in the capital city of the Republic of Kazakhstan, with the goal of driving the development and adoption of open standards and open source technologies among the businesses and government organizations of Kazakhstan. Opened under a comprehensive Memorandum of Understanding, signed by IBM and the Kazakhstan Ministry of Information & Communications, the agreement covers several areas of cooperation. The IBM Center of Innovation for Linux and Open Standards will help local software developers increase their Linux and open standards expertise and better connect them to the worldwide Linux community. As part of this process, IBM will develop new ways to apply information technologies to improve business life in Kazakhstan.
Posted May 26, 2010
At BrainShare in Amsterdam last week, Novell launched SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which delivers enhanced virtualization capabilities, advances in high availability clustering, and more flexible maintenance and support options. As a result, customers can take advantage of the latest open source technologies to run their mission-critical services cost effectively on any platform - physical, virtual or cloud.
Posted May 26, 2010
In his recent Computerworld blog post, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols highlights the five best features of the latest Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration. Fedora 13 is a strong release, and because it is more user-friendly than past releases, Fedora is no longer just for Linux experts, he writes.
Posted May 26, 2010
IBM announced on Monday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Sterling Commerce from AT&T for approximately $1.4 billion in cash. The acquisition of the Dublin, Ohio-based company will expand IBM's ability to help organizations create more intelligent and dynamic business networks by simplifying and automating the way they connect and communicate with customers, partners and suppliers both on-premise or through cloud computing delivery models. IBM and AT&T expect the transaction to close in the second half of 2010, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
Posted May 25, 2010
The Pillar Axiom's unified storage architecture allows users to consolidate SAN and NAS from a single storage pool within a single system, and its ability to be provisioned in a similar way as virtualized severs make it suitable for any virtualized environment. The unified storage system can be automatically and dynamically optimized for server virtualization environments. Additionally, the Pillar Axiom storage system allows administrators to provision storage uniquely tuned to the application need and priority, running on virtual servers. Storage can be provisioned in both a "thin" and "physical" context.
Posted May 20, 2010
CA has introduced new capabilities in its mainframe management product portfolio. These new offerings represent the second round of deliverables for CA's "Mainframe 2.0" initiative, announced in November 2008 to simplify the governance, management, and security of IBM's z/OS platform, notes David Luft, senior vice president of software engineering for CA's Mainframe Business Unit. Separately, the company unveiled its new name — CA Technologies — to demonstrate its commitment to managing and securing IT environments and to deliver more flexible IT services to its customers.
Posted May 17, 2010
AES has announced CleverView for cTrace Analysis v6.2, designed to help global enterprises accelerate virtualization migration and keep virtualized environments running smoothly.
Posted May 17, 2010
IBM announced that it has acquired Cast Iron Systems to broaden the delivery of cloud computing services for clients. Cast Iron Systems, a privately held company founded in 2001 and based in Mountain View, Calif., provides cloud integration software, appliances and services. Cast Iron Systems' clients include Allianz, NEC, Peet's Coffee & Tea, Dow Jones, Schumacher Group, ShoreTel, Sports Authority, Time Warner, and Westmont University.
Posted May 17, 2010
Luminex, developer and provider of the Channel Gateway Modern Mainframe Virtual Tape products, announced enhanced enterprise features of their Channel Gateway products. These new features and capabilities include real-time local and remote status monitoring of tape availability and integrity at a remote disaster recovery location and "Synchronous Copy" capability in which local tape operations complete only after replicated tape data is validated to be available.
Posted May 17, 2010
Clerity, a provider of mainframe management solutions, announced enhancements to Clerity Universal Test Manager (UTM), an automated tool for creating, managing, and validating automated application test cases during large-scale mainframe migrations.
Posted May 17, 2010
Brocade and EMC Corporation announced an agreement for EMC to resell the Brocade IP networking portfolio of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switching products through the EMC Select program. This new agreement reflects the companies' joint commitment to address key customer requirements with 10 GbE switching products as they consolidate and virtualize data centers on their journey to the private cloud.
Posted May 17, 2010
SAP and Sybase, Inc. announced Wednesday afternoon that SAP's subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Sybase for approximately $5.8 billion, in a transaction that will bring the companies together to enable customers to become better-run "unwired enterprises." The transaction is expected to close in July 2010, and Sybase will be run as a standalone company. "This is a strategic moment for SAP, for Sybase, our customers, and the IT industry," said Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP and a member of the SAP executive board, in a conference call for analyst and the press. "This acquisition is about accelerating growth for both businesses. This transaction is fully aligned with our strategic objectives to significantly expand our addressable market, opening up new opportunities in mobility, in-memory computing, and analytics."
Posted May 13, 2010
IBM Offers Linux Webcasts On-Demand 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.For a replay of "Discover the Benefits of Running Your WebSphere Workloads on Linux and System z" go here.For a replay of "Cloud Computing Made Easy with IBM and Linux," go here. For a replay on "System z and Linux: The Winning Combination," go here. For a replay on "Leveraging Linux with the IBM Client for Smart Work," go here.For a replay on "IBM Smart Business Development and Test with Linux on the Cloud," go here.
Posted May 12, 2010
On May 3rd, Jean Staten Healy, director of Linux strategy at IBM, gave a keynote presentation entitled "Linux as a Catalyst for a Smarter Planet" at the Red Hat & JBoss EMEA Partner Summit in Valencia, Spain. Healy discussed the role that Red Hat Enterprise Linux plays within the context of a Smarter Planet, and how IBM's Linux strategy helps support IBM and Red Hat's joint clients.
Posted May 12, 2010
To broaden the delivery of cloud computing services for clients, IBM has acquired Cast Iron Systems, a privately held company, founded in 2001, that provides cloud integration software, appliances and services. Cast Iron Systems' clients include Allianz, NEC, Peet's Coffee & Tea, Dow Jones, Schumacher Group, ShoreTel, Sports Authority, Time Warner, and Westmont University. The acquisition will expand IBM's process and integration software portfolio, which grew more than 20% in the first quarter of 2010.
Posted May 12, 2010
Virtual Bridges, an IBM partner and maker of the VERDE desktop virtualization suite, has announced the availability of VERDE 4. According to the vendor, this release provides higher levels of simplicity, ease of deployment and management for administrators, as well as ease of use and a high-fidelity desktop experience for end users, often cited as major issues in VDI deployments.
Posted May 12, 2010
Embarcadero Technologies has released Rapid SQL XE, the latest version of its integrated development environment (IDE) that enables developers and database administrators (DBAs) to produce high quality SQL code faster. Rapid SQL XE includes direct native support for heterogeneous database environments from a single user interface, and debuts support for Embarcadero InterBase and the open source Firebird database, in addition to full Unicode support.
Posted May 11, 2010
While enterprise users are ready to move a broad set of workloads to the cloud, they remain wary of moving their most critical business application workloads there, according to the results of a recent Unisys poll.
Posted May 10, 2010
UNITE will hold its conference this month - May 23-26 - at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel. In recent years, the UNITE conference has traditionally been held in the fall. The timing was changed based on extensive interviews done with focus groups at the last conference in Minneapolis, Jim Shelton, chairman of the board for UNITE, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "I think it has been received pretty well," says Shelton of the change. "We are certainly getting plenty of registrations, and we are actually running slightly ahead of Minneapolis."
Posted May 10, 2010
In today's economic climate, application modernization has an even greater significance and return on investment potential for global organizations than has been seen over the past few decades. While most business drivers for application modernization are well known and change little from year to year, some newer drivers are emerging, and certain older drivers are growing in urgency - all increasing the impetus for change.
Posted May 10, 2010
Mergers and acquisitions often come quickly and when they do, it is critical to have tools and utilities capable of scaling to meet new challenges so operations continue seamlessly, customer service standards are upheld, and costs are contained. This was the case for UGI Utilities, a large natural gas and electric service provider in the eastern U.S. In 2006, UGI acquired the natural gas utility assets of PG Energy from Southern Union Company. A longtime customer of BMC, UGI found it was aligned with the right software company to provide implementation of mainframe service management solutions as well as first class support to get the job done and successfully integrate the newly acquired company's data into its environment, saving time and money.
Posted May 10, 2010
Application monitoring started off with a simple need - to help an administrator or manager of an application, monitor and manage its performance. It was narrow in scope and limited in use - to monitor a single application and provide metrics useful for managing that application only. Monitoring tools were often provided by application vendors, but the growing and complex nature of IT environments necessitated the entry of third-party monitoring tools. These were more specialized, with the ability to centrally monitor several different applications. They helped administrators gain visibility across several different applications, understand where problems occurred, and helped to quickly resolve them.
Posted May 10, 2010
Today it's all about optimizing the business. IT is being charged with finding ways to simplify and automate business processes, making them both more reliable and less expensive to operate. It's a never-ending process, and as time goes on, the demands get greater. Yet while IT has largely been successful to date in helping other parts of the organization save time, money and effort, the same cannot be said for itself.
Posted May 10, 2010
Until recently, IT professionals have been conditioned to regard response time, or throughput, as the ultimate measure of application performance. It's as though we were building automobiles and only concerned with faster cars and bigger trucks. Yet, just as the automotive industry has come under increasing pressure to develop more fuel-efficient vehicles, so has the IT industry been challenged to reduce the power drain associated with today's data centers.
Posted May 10, 2010
Oracle president Charles Phillips unveiled Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g during a presentation in the Guggenheim Museum's Peter B. Lewis Theater filled with customers, analysts and the press. "Now that we can instrument the entire stack, because it is our stack, we can do things we couldn't do before," Phillips told the audience. There is value in being able to get a handle on management costs and gain more predictable environments so downtime is not a threat, and integration is not a struggle, he stressed.
Posted May 05, 2010
Pillar Data Systems has introduced new features to increase the performance, efficiency and ease of management for its Pillar Axiom storage system, building on the Axiom's Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities.
Posted May 05, 2010
Progress Software Corporation has announced what it describes as the industry's first Type 5 JDBC drivers - intended to overcome the limitations in Type 4 JDBC driver architecture, which renders them impractical for use in modern Java applications. Progress DataDirect Connect for JDBC, which features Type 5 Connect for JDBC drivers, offers a client-side, single-tier, 100 percent Java Type 4 architecture with faster performance, better use of memory footprint, and simplified deployment.
Posted May 05, 2010
Whether you are a long-time SHARE member or new to the organization, SHARE provides multiple ways to register for its upcoming event in Boston.
Posted May 03, 2010
IBM is delivering a portfolio of software appliances across IBM brands, all powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Leveraging the SUSE Appliance Program from Novell, the initiative enables IBM to provide "plug-and-play" appliances that lower the cost and complexity of deploying applications for small and medium-sized businesses and help independent software vendors simplify the packaging of their solutions for multiple environments, enabling them to test, deploy and scale offerings.
Posted May 03, 2010
Zmanda, a provider of open source backup and recovery software, has upgraded its flagship backup and recovery management product, targeted at SMBs and departmental customers. New features include support for virtualized environments.
Posted May 03, 2010