Data Center Management Articles
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 December 18, 2014
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 December 18, 2014
EVERTEC, Inc., based in Puerto Rico, offers a comprehensive suite of services for core bank processing, cash processing and technology outsourcing. EVERTEC relies on IBM zEnterprise EC12 system running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z to support key financial systems and Oracle databases.
Posted December 18, 2014
Whether your business provides big data and analytics to others, or you use big data and analytics to enhance your own products, research and marketing, it is necessary to have a fast, efficient and reliable infrastructure and architecture.
Posted December 18, 2014
Red Hat Summit brings together thought leaders and executives from across the technology industry to participate in keynotes and sessions on community, innovation, collaboration and customer success. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet with Red Hat product teams, hear from expert users at leading customer and partner companies, get hands-on training and learn best practices and strategies for innovation and success.
Posted December 18, 2014
Although big data promises to dramatically alter the business environment, technology is only a decision enabler.
Posted December 18, 2014
In 2013, Bon Ton Stores invested in upgrading IT, continuing to update and expand its eCommerce sites, and launching a new mobile site supporting delivery of promotions and online purchasing.
Posted December 18, 2014
Oracle has opened its latest cloud development facility in Toronto's downtown tech center. The company plans to increase its Toronto cloud software development team by 30% with a focus on advancing Oracle Marketing Cloud.
Posted December 17, 2014
Violin Memory has announced availability of its Oracle Performance Analysis Service (O-PAS). Violin says the tool helps IT professionals remove the complexity of reporting, analyzing and decision-making around Oracle databases to lower the costs of their Oracle deployments while increasing Oracle database and associated application performance.
Posted December 17, 2014
2015 is going to be a big year for big data in the enterprise, according to Oracle. Neil Mendelson, Oracle vice president of big data and advanced analytics, shared Oracle's "Top 7" big data predictions for 2015. "The technology is moving very quickly and it is gaining to the point where a broader set of people can get into it - not just because it is affordable - but because they no longer require specialized skills in order to take advantage of it," he said.
Posted December 17, 2014
BlueData, which provides EPIC Enterprise, software to enable enterprises to create a self-service cloud experience on premise, has announced the growth of its big data partner ecosystem. Thirteen new companies spanning infrastructure, big data distributions, ETL/BI applications and system integrators have joined the partner program to accelerate the adoption of big data private cloud on-premises.
Posted December 16, 2014
Rackspace has announced its affiliation with the OpenPOWER Foundation, and is now an official member. Rackspace announced its affiliation with OpenPOWER in a blog authored by Aaron Sullivan, senior director and distinguished engineer at Rackspace. According to Sullivan, Rackspace has already been involved with OpenPOWER for more than 18 months. "We worked amongst the founders for months before the foundation launched, and remained engaged after launch, but chose to remain quiet. We've been evaluating the technology and the movement for quite some time," noted Sullivan.
Posted December 16, 2014
Oracle has announced its latest-generation NAS storage system, the Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4. Co-engineered with Oracle Database 12c, the ZFS Storage ZS4-4 provides analytics for pluggable databases, doubles previous generation performance to enable faster time to actionable intelligence, and also provides high-level protection against security breaches with fine-grained encryption capabilities. The OS 8.3 adds over 30 enhancements and three new innovations that expand Oracle's leadership in NAS performance, efficiency, and application-engineered storage, said Oracle executive vice president John Fowler.
Posted December 10, 2014
Town Sports International (TSI) operates fitness clubs in major United States metropolitan areas, including New York, Boston, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. TSI needed a high-availability, high-performance platform to host its updated Oracle E-Business Suite applications, but wanted to avoid the complex and lengthy deployment timelines typically associated with integrating servers, networks, and storage from multiple vendors, as well as the costs and data center space requirements associated with such projects. To meet its goals, TSI deployed an architecture based on two Oracle Database Appliances with the virtualized platform, one for test and one for production, as the platform for its deployment of Oracle Database with Real Application Clusters, Oracle VM and Oracle E-Business Suite.
Posted December 10, 2014
Luminex Software, Inc. has introduced a new line of mainframe virtual tape products, which it calls virtual tape vaults. Luminex's new MVT Vault is designed to store second or third copies of virtual tape data out-of-region for data protection.
Posted December 08, 2014
CA Technologies has announced what it calls its "Management Cloud" - a portfolio of applications, delivered from the cloud, that enable customers to make portfolio decisions, deliver service experiences and empower mobile workforces. "The Management Cloud portfolio was developed to manage complexity and transform IT investments into business value rapidly and effectively," said James Harvey, general manager of IT Business Management at CA Technologies.
Posted December 08, 2014
HP has refreshed its portfolio of midrange and flash-optimized systems to offer new workload-centric storage personas, including unified storage access as well as data protection for flat backup to HP StoreOnce. This announcement builds on HP's vision for HP Converge Storage to simplify storage through polymorphic architectures with a single platform built for the new style of IT, said David Scott, senior vice president and general manager of storage for HP.
Posted December 08, 2014
IBM and Docker, Inc., a provider of application container solutions, have formed a strategic partnership intended to help customers more efficiently build and run applications that can be moved between cloud and on-premises systems. "As enterprises demand tools that allow them to develop applications in a consistent and easy manner, Docker containers have quickly become the de facto building block for doing so," said Angel Diaz, vice president of open technology and cloud performance solutions at IBM.
Posted December 08, 2014
IBM has announced that the availability of a beta for Watson Analytics, a cloud-based, natural language-based cognitive service that can provide access to predictive and visual analytic tools for businesses.
Posted December 08, 2014
SOA Software is shipping EnVision, an API analytics platform intended to help enterprises obtain information on the reach and performance of their application programming interfaces. The solution uses MongoDB as its data store.
Posted December 08, 2014
Citus Data is releasing an open source extension, "pg_shard," that enables PostgreSQL to scale large datasets and operational workloads. "PostgreSQL continues to grow as one of the most popular databases in the world," said Umur Cubukcu, CEO and co-founder of Citus Data. "With pg_shard, CitusDB is making PostgreSQL horizontally scale in a simple way, while keeping the benefits of a mature, open ecosystem, and taking its relational advantages to the next level."
Posted December 04, 2014
With the new tools available that allow companies to monitor database resources, pinpoint the root cause of problems, speed up applications, and prevent crashes, some may wonder if companies will need DBAs at all in the future. However, the risk to DBAs and technology professionals as a whole is not that their jobs are going away, but that they may opt to not take the time to understand and use the tools and technologies that will allow them to be better professionals. This can place them at a disadvantage to their peers and curtail their ability to add value to the organization, therefore limiting their careers.
Posted December 03, 2014
Exploding data assets and the need for greater agility are helping to drive the move to virtualization. More than two-thirds of organizations in a recent Unisphere Research survey among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group indicate that the number of Oracle databases they manage is expanding. At the same time, many managers admit that their IT departments are sluggish when it comes to responding to new business requirements. For more than 50% of organizations, it takes their IT department 30 days or more to respond to new initiatives or deploy new solutions. For one-quarter of organizations, it takes 90 days or more.
Posted December 03, 2014
Oracle has introduced its latest-generation NAS storage system, Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4. Co-engineered with Oracle Database 12c, Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 enables analytics for pluggable databases.
Posted December 03, 2014
To many observers, the cloud has been ill-defined and even hijacked as a viable term by vendors. However, all can agree on the solid definition of cloud provided by the U.S. National Institute of Standards (NIST). Recently, NIST came out with additional guidelines detailing what elements should go into cloud computing.
Posted December 03, 2014
DBmaestro, a provider of DevOps for database solutions, has announced the availability of an open application programming interface (API), enabling customers and developers to connect to any release management system and continuous delivery product. According to the vendor, DBmaestro TeamWork will now automate and integrate with IBM, Microsoft, CA and others, allowing any release management manufacturer to offer database build and deploy automation and adding functionality to its product.
Posted December 02, 2014
New cloud-based DevOps services, software and infrastructure from IBM is designed to help organizations develop and deliver quality software faster. "Software success is increasingly indistinguishable from business success," said Kristof Kloeckner, general manager of IBM's Rational Software Group.
Posted November 24, 2014
API management and cloud integration provider SOA Software rolled out a new release of its Lifecycle Manager, which offers new capabilities to assist and manage DevOps automation."The new release brings enhanced collaboration and shared metrics visibility across Dev and Ops teams, to ensure automated application deployment and enforce functional testing and product sign-offs," said Brent Carlson, SVP of engineering for SOA Software.
Posted November 24, 2014
A set of consulting and managed security service solutions from Big Iron Solutions is intended to enable organizations to rapidly identify, secure and monitor credit card data in order to meet PCI-DSS requirements. To date, many mainframe computer systems have not been meeting these requirements, according the company which states that this failure is due mainly to the fact that adequate technology, processes and effective standardized security practices have not existed on the mainframe.
Posted November 24, 2014
Syncsort has announced the latest release of its flagship mainframe software product - Syncsort MFX for z/OS - which exploits IBM's zHPF architecture, the most recent advance in optimizing mainframe I/O for storage devices.
Posted November 24, 2014
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the Amazon EC2 Container Service, a container management service intended to make it easier to run and manage distributed applications using containers on AWS. Initially, the EC2 Container Service supports Docker, enabling customers to easily launch, manage, and scale from one container to hundreds of thousands of containers across a managed cluster of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
Posted November 24, 2014
Host Analytics, a provider of cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM), has completed a financing round of $25 million led by Centerview Capital Technology with participation from existing investors Advanced Technology Ventures, Next World Capital, StarVest Partners, and Trident Capital. The new funding brings the total capital invested in the company to $77M across five rounds
Posted November 24, 2014
IBM is bringing a greater level of control, security and flexibility to cloud-based application development and delivery with a single-tenant version of Bluemix, the company's platform-as-a-service. The new platform allows developers to build applications around their most sensitive data and deploy them in a dedicated cloud environment while avoiding the compliance, regulatory and performance issues that are presented with public clouds.
Posted November 21, 2014
SUSE has announced general availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, the newest version of its platform for efficiently deploying and managing highly available enterprise-class IT services in physical, virtual or cloud infrastructure. New products based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 feature enhancements that more readily enable system uptime, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate innovation. The foundation for all SUSE data center operating systems and extensions, SUSE Linux Enterprise meets the performance requirements of data centers with mixed IT environments, while reducing the risk of technological obsolescence and vendor lock-in.
Posted November 20, 2014
IBM in collaboration with NVIDIA, and the Jülich Supercomputing Center, part of the largest research center in Germany, plan to launch a new competency center to advance the creation and optimization of research applications on GPU-accelerated OpenPOWER compatible systems.
Posted November 20, 2014
Before the OpenStack Summit held earlier this month in Paris, OpenStack operators and application developers were asked to provide feedback on their experiences. It was the fourth consecutive survey conducted by the User Committee prior to each Summit.
Posted November 20, 2014
LinuxCon Europe and KVM Forum were recently held in Dusseldorf. Adam Jollans, Program Director for Linux and Open Virtualization Strategy at IBM, attended the events and shares his reflections on what took place in a new blog on The Linux Foundation website.
Posted November 20, 2014