Data Center Management Articles
Petabytes, and more, of data are meaningless without guides to what it all is. Future data users need to know where it came from, how it was filtered, and how it was transformed. Without some functional level of governance we are headed toward a "datapocalypse"—having lots of content but little of value.
Posted June 09, 2015
If you've been managing databases for any length of time, you've probably had to contend with the "noisy neighbors" scenario. In this scenario, you have several applications, each with their own database residing on a single instance of SQL Server, which don't share the resources of the server nicely. To deal with this issue, you might want to investigate Resource Governor as an alternative.
Posted June 09, 2015
By and large, it seems like today's IT professionals belong to one of two camps: either traditional on-premises IT or the cool, new age cloud. Sometimes, it can even seem like we are talking about two different species. After all, for many of us who come from the client-server era, cloud can be intimidating. Even worse, it can be a source of real anxiety; becoming obsolete is a constant risk in an industry that evolves as fast as ours.
Posted June 09, 2015
BMC has introduced a self-service web design tool designed to enable applications to be integrated into the vendor's Control-M Workload Automation offering. The new tool, Control-M Application Integrator, includes a community hub that enables sharing of development information.
Posted June 08, 2015
HP announced enhancements to the HP OneView management platform, which unifies processes, user interfaces and the application programming interfaces (APIs) across HP server, storage, and Virtual Connect networking devices. The company has also formed a new partnership with Arista Networks to enhance data center network efficiency.
Posted June 08, 2015
IBM is acquiring Blue Box Group to simplify the running of private clouds using OpenStack-based solutions. Blue Box is a privately held company based in Seattle that provides businesses with a private cloud as a service platform based on OpenStack. IBM says the addition will help businesses integrate their cloud-based applications and on-premises systems into OpenStack-based managed cloud. Additionally, Blue Box strengthens IBM Cloud's existing OpenStack portfolio with the introduction of a remotely managed OpenStack offering. This offering provides clients with a local cloud and increased visibility, control and security.
Posted June 08, 2015
CA Technologies has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rally Software Development Corp. a provider of Agile development software and services, for approximately $480 million, net of cash acquired.
Posted June 08, 2015
To help users extract insights from data lakes,Teradata has made a multi-year commitment to contribute to Presto's open source development. Based on a three-part roadmap, Teradata's says its contributions will be 100% open source under the Apache license and will advance Presto's code base, scalability, iterative querying, and ability to query multiple data repositories.
Posted June 08, 2015
Veeam, which offers solutions for data backup and disaster recovery, is integrating its services with EMC when it releases its Veeam Availability Suite v9 later this year. The integration will enable IT to create backups and recover individual items from EMC storage snapshots. Enterprise IT will be able to use Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots to rapidly create backups from EMC VNX or VNXe storage snapshots up to 20 times faster than competing products, according to the vendor.
Posted June 04, 2015
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., has completed its acquisition of Pentaho, a data integration, visualization and analytics company. According to Hitachi, Pentaho will retain its existing brand and continue to operate independently as "Pentaho, a Hitachi Data Systems company" under the leadership of its CEO, Quentin Gallivan, who will now report to Kevin Eggleston, senior vice president of Social Innovation at HDS.
Posted June 04, 2015
Oracle has introduced Oracle Documaker Mobile, a new product that enables businesses to produce the same content for print and for mobile delivery. This new offering enables businesses to use content and business rules created for paper-style output in new device responsive documents designed for delivery to mobile devices.
Posted June 03, 2015
New and emerging companies are taking aim at data management challenges to help customers get more value from their data. Here, DBTA showcases the approaches of 10 companies we think are worth watching.
Posted June 01, 2015
SAP has announced the cloud edition of SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), which adds new simplification and innovations across core business functions. In addition, the new release gives customers the opportunity to deploy real hybrid scenarios — combining on-premise and cloud solutions.
Posted May 28, 2015
The Pure Storage FlashArray 400 Series is now certified by SAP as an enterprise storage solution for the SAP HANA platform. The certification enables Pure Storage to participate in SAP's program for SAP HANA tailored data center integration using its certified solution.
Posted May 28, 2015
CA Workload Automation Advanced Integration 1.0 for SAP Business Warehouse has received SAP certification. Specifically, the SAP Integration and Certification Center has certified that CA Workload Automation Advanced Integration 1.0 integrates with SAP Business Warehouse to provide a unified view for jobs running in both SAP and non-SAP applications.
Posted May 28, 2015
Many DBAs are now tasked with managing multi-vendor environments, and handling a variety of data types. Increasingly, DBAs are turning to strategies such as database automation to be able to concentrate more on the big picture of moving their enterprises forward.
Posted May 28, 2015
OpenStack turns five this year, and the project has come a long way in its short life so far. Last year brought major improvements in areas such as upgradeability between versions and overall usability, which upped the appeal of OpenStack to enterprises while also netting important backers such as HP (acquired private cloud vendor and one-time OpenStack competitor Eucalyptus) and VMware (OpenStack was a recurring theme at VMworld 2014).
Posted May 26, 2015
Cloud computing requires many features, and every company launching either public or private clouds seeks a range of features, including multi-tenancy with the greatest number of people sharing the same machine as possible, dynamic scaling of environments immediately without waiting to provision, capacity tracking, and support for thousands of users with a handful of IT professionals.
Posted May 26, 2015
Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) announced that its board of directors has unanimously approved a plan to separate the company into two publicly traded, pure-play leaders: one to serve commercial and government clients globally and one to serve public sector clients in the United States.
Posted May 26, 2015
IBM has expanded its suite of OpenStack services that enable customers to integrate applications and data across hybrid clouds including public, dedicated and local cloud environments. "By delivering a complete portfolio of OpenStack services to the market, we are enabling our clients with what they need to quickly move applications and data across multiple cloud environments without fear of getting locked into a single cloud environment," said IBM vice president of cloud architecture and technology Angel Diaz.
Posted May 26, 2015
Akanda, an open source network virtualization vendor selling to OpenStack environments, and NGINX, Inc., a provider of load-balancing software, have formed a partnership to provide simplified, enterprise-grade "load balancing as a service" for OpenStack environments.
Posted May 26, 2015
Red Hat, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source solutions, is offering a technology preview of Red Hat Gluster Storage with capabilities from the OpenStack community's new Manila project. The Red Hat Gluster Storage with Manila technology preview is planned for inclusion in the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 release.
Posted May 26, 2015
Cirba Inc., a provider of software-defined infrastructure control solutions, has added support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-based environments running OpenStack's cloud management platform."Many organizations are looking to adopt more than one hypervisor. Having the ability to model all workload demand in one system is critical to understanding how much infrastructure is required, how it should be configured and where new workloads should be placed to take maximum advantage of available resources," said Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of Cirba.
Posted May 26, 2015
Compass Datacenters has launched a beta software project that is linking mobile and wearable technology with data center management processes. "Wearable technology is very cool. But do you know what else is cool? Getting all of your employees to operate and maintain your data center facility by the book so you get the most availability out of your data center," said Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters.
Posted May 26, 2015
BMC is rolling out BMC Database Solutions with Next Generation Technology (NGT), targeted at DB2 for z Systems to meet 24x7 infrastructure demands and reduce database management costs.
Posted May 26, 2015
Think administering z/VM will be difficult? Think again. With IBM Wave for z/VM (IBM Wave) with Oracle, IT organizations can unleash the power of z/VM virtualization, improve productivity, simplify management, and accelerate the cloud journey with innovative technology that helps reduce the barriers to management of virtualized environments.
Posted May 21, 2015
IBM Research and SCA are partnering to create a shared service cloud for the municipalities of New York that is predicted to eliminate 25% of government's IT budget by streamlining applications and connecting siloed municipalities. The IBM mainframe is the platform that New York trusts to host that cloud. In addition to its time-tested scalability, reliability and security, it offers the lowest total cost of ownership — supporting the state as it strives for reduced spending and a smarter, future-ready IT infrastructure.
Posted May 21, 2015
Challenged to do more with less, Dundee City Council identified IT as an area in which it could cut costs. The council consolidated its Oracle Database environment supporting critical services from distributed servers to an IBM zEnterprise BC12 platform, dramatically improving efficiency.
Posted May 21, 2015
IBM Business Partner L3C LLP focuses on three ways to help businesses across the UK increase profitability and reduce costs: consultancy, managed services and complementary IT resources. L3C deployed IBM System z servers running Linux to provide companies of any size — including small, midsized and very large enterprises — with scalable, cost-effective, high-performance cloud services.
Posted May 21, 2015
Chartio, a cloud business intelligence service, is introducing a new solution called Data Stores for transforming and storing data for business intelligence in a more agile way. Data Stores will enable administrators to use Chartio's Data Pipeline to rapidly transform data and store it in the cloud, making it more useful and accessible for end users.
Posted May 20, 2015
Oracle is collaborating with Mirantis to enable Oracle Solaris and Mirantis OpenStack users to accelerate application and database provisioning in private cloud environments via Murano, the application project in the OpenStack ecosystem.
Posted May 20, 2015
MapR Technologies, Inc., a provider of a distribution for Apache Hadoop, is including Apache Drill 1.0 in the MapR Distribution.
Posted May 19, 2015
The shortage of skilled talent and data scientists in Western Europe and the U.S. has triggered the question of whether to outsource analytical activities. This need is further amplified by competitive pressure to reduce time to market and lower costs.
Posted May 19, 2015
As the excitement and opportunity provided by big data tools develop, many organizations find their big data initiatives originating outside existing data management policies. As a result, many concepts of formal data governance are either intentionally or unintentionally omitted as these enterprises race to ingest huge new data streams at a feverish pace in the hope of increased insight and new analytic value.
Posted May 19, 2015
Similar to the dot-com revolution, the Internet of Things is the culmination of radical advances in four core technology pillars.
Posted May 19, 2015
Business pressures, including cost reduction, scalability, and "just-in-time" application software implementation, are just some of the requirements prompting businesses to "cloudify" at least some aspect of their IT infrastructure.
Posted May 19, 2015
Data preparation is gaining considerable visibility as a distinct aspect of data management and analytics work.
Posted May 19, 2015
Hadoop is contributing to the success of data analytics. Anad Rai, IT manager at Verizon Wireless, examined the differences between traditional versus big data at Data Summit 2015 in a session titled "Analytics: Traditional Versus Big Data." The presentation, which was part of the IOUG track moderated by Alexis Bauer Kolak, education manager at the IOUG, showed how big data technologies are helping data discovery and improving the transformation of information and knowledge into wisdom.
Posted May 14, 2015
With the influx of big data solutions and technologies comes a bevy of new problems, according to Data Summit 2015 panelists Miles Kehoe, search evangelist at Avalon Consulting, and Anne Buff, business solutions manager for SAS best practices at the SAS Institute. Kehoe and Buff opened the second day of Data Summit with a keynote discussion focusing on resolving data conundrums.
Posted May 14, 2015
These days, managing a data center can be like working inside a pressure cooker. Virtualization, dynamic computing, cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things—each major development turns up the heat, but budgets, staff, and skills often lag behind explosive growth in data center scale and complexity.
Posted May 14, 2015
Every now and then, somebody will raise the age-old question "How can I measure the effectiveness and quality of my DBA staff?" This can be a difficult question to answer. And it almost always hides the actual question that is begging to be asked, which is "How many DBAs do we need?"
Posted May 14, 2015
With all the cheerleading and the steady drumbeat of new features being released to Azure, it's easy to lose track of the many cool and valuable new features released in the on-premises version of SQL Server. One of the crown jewels of SQL Server, the cardinality estimator (CE), underwent a large redesign for SQL Server 2014 to improve performance. Cardinality estimates are an extremely important part of query processing. In a nutshell, cardinality estimates are what the relation engine predicts for the number of rows affected by a given operation, including intermediate row sets like those created by filters, aggregations, joins and spool.
Posted May 14, 2015
RevCon is Revelation Software's conference that covers a wide array of topics on Revelation Software. Revelation Software users' conference this year focused on Revelation Software's flagship product, OpenInsight, and the new capabilities of version 10.0.
Posted May 14, 2015