Virtualization Articles
With the annual Oracle users conference COLLABORATE about to begin, Andy Flower, president of the IOUG, spoke with 5 Minute Briefing about the IOUG's strong areas of focus in terms of overall conference content, and how the addition of the MySQL user base into the Oracle community is evolving. Citing a MySQL keynote, 75 sessions at COLLABORATE focused on MySQL, and a new MySQL Council headed by Sarah Novotny, Flower says the IOUG is making strides in giving voice to the MySQL community within the IOUG and setting a stage for positive interaction with Oracle.
Posted April 06, 2011
UC4, an IT automation provider, has announced a new line of IT automation tools that supports a range of environments across enterprises. The company simultaneously announced it is shipping ONE Automation, a new solution for cross-platform automation, along with UC4 Automation Platform version 9, designed to provide end-to-end enterprise automation.
Posted March 29, 2011
Queplix Corp., a provider of data virtualization solutions, has announced two new product families to bring the benefits of data virtualization to ETL (extract, transform and load). According to Queplix, the VirtualETL and CloudETL families simplify the ETL process, enabling users to configure Queplix's Application Software Blades, providing easy connections to target applications and reducing the time required to integrate applications.
Posted March 23, 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
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
Queplix Corp., a provider of data virtualization solutions, has announced two new product families to bring the benefits of data virtualization to ETL (extract, transform and load). According to Queplix, the VirtualETL and CloudETL families simplify the ETL process, enabling users to configure Queplix's Application Software Blades, providing easy connections to target applications and reducing the time required to integrate applications. The VirtualETL family includes enterprise-class VirtualETL, which allows ETL teams to connect any two enterprise applications together, and professional-class VirtualETL, which allows users to connect any two applications that use relational database management systems. With CloudETL, users can connect any two cloud-based applications or connect a cloud-based application with one that is on-premise.
Posted March 02, 2011
Composite Software, a data virtualization vendor, says it is joining with Clarity Resource Group, a business intelligence (BI) consulting firm, to offer data virtualization products and services that increase BI agility in financial services, communications, retail, health care and energy industries.
Posted March 01, 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
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
Queplix Corp., a provider of data virtualization solutions, has introduced a virtual migration platform that enables users to rapidly migrate data from one application to another. The product, Queplix Virtual Migration Manager, is a new module of the Queplix Virtual Data Manager platform, and can reduce migration time from months to days, the vendor says. "Virtual Migration Manager uses the power of data virtualization to supercharge the ETL process," Michael Zuckerman, CMO of Queplix, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We do this by eliminating much of the time and programming effort, and greatly simplifying the use of the Virtual Migration Manager toolset. Our object dashboard enables users to integrate multiple sources rapidly, relational, object or XML, and see them all converted into one view in a single dashboard."
Posted February 15, 2011
HP announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Vertica, a privately held, real-time analytics platform company based in Billerica, Mass. According to HP, the acquisition will enhance its capabilities for information optimization, adding sophisticated, real-time business analytics for large and complex sets of data in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Vertica's platform aims to help customers analyze massive amounts of data quickly, resulting in "just-in-time" business intelligence.
Posted February 15, 2011
Vormetric, a provider of enterprise system encryption solutions, plans to announce tomorrow Vormetric Data Security for Amazon EC2, which enables organizations to remotely apply and manage transparent file-level encryption on data in Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud) environments. Vormetric has seen a surge in customer interest in leveraging cloud-based services, Gretchen Hellman, vice president of marketing and product management, Vormetric, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The cost benefit and the IT agility benefits of the cloud are completely apparent, and so the question is: Why aren't more enterprises moving to the cloud - and that definitely is because of security concerns."
Posted February 08, 2011
Over the past 3 years, the IOUG ResearchWire studies conducted by Unisphere Research have focused on Oracle technology as well as trends affecting data professionals, allowing IT professionals to benchmark where their organizations stand within their own technology environment. Executive Summaries of all IOUG ResearchWire reports are publicly available for free download and full study reports are also available to IOUG members at no charge when they sign in with their user name and password.
Posted February 02, 2011
Data growth is driving the use of virtualization within data centers. The virtualization evolution from server to storage to desktop is catching on at many small-to-medium size businesses, as well as at large enterprises. Aimed at providing a better end-user and administrator experience than their physical counterparts, virtualized desktops promise lower cost of acquisition and management with a highly scalable, easy-to-deploy and fully protected environment. However, with virtualization desktop infrastructure (VDI) comes a set of new challenges. Chief among these are storage and server resource allocation and data protection and recovery.
Posted February 02, 2011
Queplix Corp., a data virtualization software vendor, has introduced three new Application Software Blades in Virtual Data Manager enabling companies to integrate social media data with internal corporate systems. Companies can now automatically capture information from FaceBook, LinkedIn and Google Contacts and harmonize it with their own corporate data. According to Queplix, companies typically struggle with how to incorporate and leverage the data within social media communities for business gain. "The value of social media and its potential to enhance corporate initiatives is widely recognized, yet barely tapped," said Mark Cashman, chief executive officer, Queplix. With the new integration capability, Queplix allows organizations to combine data from social media sources with internal information, thus providing a new layer of intelligence to business-supporting functions.
Posted January 18, 2011
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0. Part of Oracle's portfolio of virtualization solutions, Oracle VM VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop computers to run multiple guest operating systems simultaneously, allowing users to get higher flexibility and utilization out of their PCs, and supports a variety of host operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, popular flavors of Linux (including Oracle Linux), and Oracle Solaris.
Posted January 05, 2011
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) has just released the findings of a new survey of IOUG members that benchmarks the rapid evolution of cloud computing among Oracle users. The survey, consisting of responses from 267 IT professionals and data managers, was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by Oracle.
Posted December 01, 2010
The IOUG has completed a number of ground-breaking studies in 2010 through the IOUG ResearchWire program. Conducted among IOUG members by Unisphere Research, 2010 IOUG ResearchWire Executive Summaries are available to all on the IOUG website.
Posted December 01, 2010
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) has just released the findings of a new survey of IOUG members that benchmarks the rapid evolution of cloud computing among Oracle users. The survey, consisting of responses from 267 IT professionals and data managers, was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by Oracle.
Posted November 30, 2010
The year 2010 brought many new challenges and opportunities to data managers' jobs everywhere. Companies, still recovering from a savage recession, increasingly turned to the power of analytics to turn data stores into actionable insights, and hopefully gain an edge over less data-savvy competitors. At the same time, data managers and administrators alike found themselves tasked with managing and maintaining the integrity of rapidly multiplying volumes of data, often presented in a dizzying array of formats and structures. New tools and approaches were sought; and the market churning with promising new offerings embracing virtualization, consolidation and information lifecycle management. Where will this lead in the year ahead? Can we expect an acceleration of these initiatives and more? DBTA looked at new industry research, and spoke with leading experts in the data management space, to identify the top trends for 2011.
Posted November 30, 2010
Storage I/O bottlenecks present a major challenge for high performance, data-intensive environments that, until now, required big IT budgets to attempt to eliminate them, Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "If you look at the different emerging markets, especially cloud computing, and you look at their economics, their business model and the different parts of the data center, the one part that breaks their model is the storage part," he explains. "You see all of these relatively inexpensive, very powerful servers connecting to storage that is kind of yesterday's technology, but very expensive."
Posted November 29, 2010
Red Hat, which recently launched the latest major release of its flagship operating platform, has announced ecosystem support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 from leading independent software vendor (ISV) partners. With a simple certification model that allows partners to deploy applications in any environment - physical, virtual and cloud - with a single certification, Red Hat enables its ISV partners to deliver flexible and portable solutions to their customers.
Posted November 23, 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 November 23, 2010
According to IBM, the market for cloud services is expected to grow to $89 billion by 2015. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which allows programs, applications, processes and data from remote PCs to be stored and managed from a central location, is well suited for cloud services and helping to drive growing demand. VERDE from Virtual Bridges will enable service providers to capitalize on this exploding market.
Posted November 23, 2010
Red Hat, which recently launched the latest major release of its flagship operating platform, has announced ecosystem support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 from leading independent software vendor (ISV) partners. With a simple certification model that allows partners to deploy applications in any environment - physical, virtual and cloud - with a single certification, Red Hat enables its ISV partners to deliver flexible and portable solutions to their customers.
Posted November 23, 2010
Pervasive Software, a provider of data integration solutions, has introduced a new release of its flagship product, Pervasive Data Integrator v10, Cloud Edition. Running on the new Pervasive DataCloud2 Fall Release, the hosted integration platform offers a new browser-based design interface and cloud connectivity.
Posted November 23, 2010
Red Hat, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source solutions, announced it is shipping the latest major release of the company's flagship operating platform. The new edition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, is designed for physical, virtualized and cloud deployments, the vendor says.
Posted November 15, 2010
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been notoriously critical of cloud computing - or at least of the way in which the term "cloud" has been applied. He often has expressed his frustration when "cloud" is applied to long established patterns such as software as a service (SaaS), especially when this is done by Salesforce.com. While there's widespread agreement that "cloud" has become a faddish, over-hyped and often abused term, some have speculated that Ellison's obvious frustration has been fueled by Oracle's inability to fully engage in the cloud computing excitement prior to the conclusion of the Sun acquisition.
Posted November 09, 2010
CA Technologies today announced CA Automation Suite, a package of new and enhanced products and solutions that offers dynamic deployment and elastic scaling of IT infrastructure and services by automating, orchestrating, integrating and standardizing the provisioning and management of physical, virtual and cloud resources.
Posted October 18, 2010
Compuware Corporation has announced a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based application performance management (APM) solution that provides visibility from what it calls the "first mile" (the data center) to the "last mile" (the end user). Compuware's Gomez First Mile, together with Gomez outside-in monitoring, is intended to enable organizations whose businesses depend on web applications to quickly assess the business impact of a problem.
Posted October 18, 2010
At Oracle OpenWorld last week, Oracle unveiled Oracle Fusion Applications. Commenting on the debut of Oracle Fusion Applications during a keynote that highlighted major OpenWorld announcements, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, explained that the portfolio takes the best features of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, the Oracle E-Business Suite, and Siebel and re-implements them on top of a modern middleware infrastructure entirely written in Java.
Posted September 28, 2010
CiRBA Inc., a provider of data center intelligence software, has introduced a new version of its flagship software that combines cross-platform analytics with flexible role-based views of environments through customizable dashboards. Version 6.0 of CiRBA provides an enterprise solution for capacity and efficiency management, with cross-functional dashboards that enable executives, capacity managers, and operations to collectively manage efficiency and risk across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure.
Posted September 20, 2010
Enhancing its portfolio of desktop virtualization solutions, Oracle has announced Oracle Secure Global Desktop 4.6, a solution that delivers server-hosted applications and desktops to client devices, enabling businesses to manage applications centrally in the data center, resulting in higher security, decreased operational costs, and increased mobility.
Posted September 15, 2010
Oracle is a fast-changing company, and in recent years, its pace has accelerated to blinding speed. The software giant has expanded well beyond its relational database roots to encompass applications, management tools, service-oriented architecture and middleware, and even hardware. There are now many components to Oracle - from three major databases, to enterprise resource applications, to web applications to development languages to open source desktop tools.
Posted September 07, 2010
Quest Software, Inc. announced today that it has added Apache Cassandra, an open source NoSQL database, to its list of supported NoSQL platforms with the second beta release of Toad for Cloud Databases. Toad now supports data access and management for Apache Cassandra, Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft Azure Table Services, Apache HBase, and any open database connectivity-enabled relational database.
Posted September 07, 2010
Oracle recently hosted a 6-hour online forum to showcase its strategy for virtualization. Oracle's Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, and John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, kicked off the agenda of analyst, customer and product webcasts, by explaining how Oracle delivers a complete virtualization offering, all the way from desktop through the data center and why that approach provides more customer benefits than point solutions.
Posted September 02, 2010
At VMworld 2010, HP yesterday introduced HP CloudStart, an all-in-one solution for deploying an open and flexible private cloud environment within 30 days.
Posted August 31, 2010
At VMworld, Precise unveiled Precise for Cloud, a transaction performance management solution designed to ensure quality of service (QoS) for applications running on private cloud platforms at the Global 5000 and their global ISPs. Precise for Cloud is intended to solve what the company says are most pressing issues facing cloud architects and virtualization managers: application QoS, performance problem isolation, and problem resolution. Now in beta, the product is expected to be generally available before the end of the year.
Posted August 31, 2010
Quest Software, Inc. and Virtual Computer, Inc. announced a technology alliance to deliver a desktop virtualization and management solution that meets the end-to-end computing needs of large enterprises. The technology is intended to provide anywhere, anytime access to both centralized and distributed end user environments through the integration of Quest vWorkspace client and Virtual Computer NxTop 3.0 enterprise platform.
Posted August 31, 2010
Oracle has announced 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. New features in Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.2 include global hot-desking, multi-company capabilities, enhanced video and audio capabilities and administrative enhancements. Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.2 is part of Oracle Virtualization, the industry's most complete virtualization portfolio - from desktop-to-data center.
Posted August 24, 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
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
CA Technologies continued its investment in virtualization and cloud management, by announcing the acquisition of privately-held 4Base Technology, a virtualization and cloud infrastructure consulting firm. 4Base will become the CA Virtualization and Cloud Strategy group, a competency practice within the CA Services division. With experience in more than 300 engagements, 4Base will help customers move quickly, pragmatically and successfully from virtualization to cloud by providing strategic advice and implementation expertise.
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
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
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 July 21, 2010
CA Technologies yesterday announced the general availability of five products in the CA Virtual portfolio, which offer comprehensive management capabilities designed to help increase business agility by providing a better way to provision, control, assure, secure and optimize virtual environments. The five products are CA Virtual Assurance, CA Virtual Automation, CA Virtual Configuration, CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers, and the latest addition to the portfolio, CA Virtual Privilege Manager. The company also introduced the CA Virtual Foundation Suite, which combines select virtualization management products at a special price.
Posted July 20, 2010