Five Minute Briefing - Data Center
January 9, 2012
Five Minute Briefing - Data Center: January 9, 2012. Published in conjunction with SHARE Inc., a bi-weekly report geared to the needs of data center professionals.
News Flashes
BMC Software announced the availability of the latest release of the BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping solution, which adds collaborative application mapping. According to BMC, application discovery and the mapping of dependencies is critical for succeeding with strategic IT initiatives such as IT service management, data center automation and transformation, cloud computing and virtualization management, service impact management and service costing. With this new capability, BMC aims to help reduce the time, effort and cost of mapping multi-tier applications to the IT infrastructure supporting them, enabling IT to better understand how applications and infrastructure work together to deliver the services that enterprises depend on.
Brocade, a network backbone vendor, says that its latest storage area network (SAN) controllers are now qualified for mainframe environments, enabling enterprises to fully exploit the capabilities of their IBM zEnterprise FICON infrastructures. Brocade's DCX 8510 directors, based on 16 Gbps Fibre Channel SAN technology, are part of its line of FICON-capable directors and switches. Brocade DCX 8510 FICON directors are intended to help organizations leverage the capabilities of System z, particularly IBM zEnterprise 196 (z196) mainframe solutions.
IBM has completed the acquisition of Platform Computing, a provider of cluster, grid and cloud management software for distributed computing environments. Financial terms of the acquisition of the Toronto, Ontario-based company were not disclosed. The acquisition was first announced in October 2011.
The European Commission says it has reached a settlement with IBM on its antitrust actions in the mainframe maintenance market. IBM commits to make spare parts and technical information swiftly available, under commercially reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, to independent mainframe maintainers, according to a statement released by the commission.
IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Green Hat, a software quality and testing solutions vendor for the cloud and other environments. Financial terms were not disclosed. Green Hat, which is jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware, delivers automated testing solutions for complex systems relying on cloud, web services, messaging, service oriented architecture, enterprise service bus, business process management, complex event processing, and SAP
CiRBA Inc., a provider of data center analytics software, has begun shipping CiRBA version 7, which provides a console for visualizing and controlling virtual and cloud infrastructures.
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a provider of high-performance solid-state drives for computing devices and systems, and Marvell, an integrated silicon solutions vendor, have unveiled what they call the industry's fastest and most versatile PCI Express (PCIe) storage system. The jointly developed Z-Drive R5 is designed to offer an intelligent, hardware-meets-software managed solution designed to help accelerate database, enterprise, and virtualization applications, the vendors add.
Oracle has introduced a new release of Oracle Tuxedo 11g, an application server for C/C++, COBOL, and dynamic languages. Optimized to run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2, the new release of Oracle Tuxedo 11g provides a dynamic, scale-out solution for low-latency mission-critical applications. The new release also includes Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for IMS 11g, a new product within the Oracle Tuxedo family that Oracle says will help customers reduce IT costs and increase business agility by simplifying the migration of IBM mainframe IMS applications to open systems.
Veryant, a COBOL modernization vendor, is shipping three integrated new products, including a package designed to help companies improve productivity and reduce costs as they modernize COBOL legacy applications. The new offerings, Veryant ODBC, isCOBOL File Server, and isCOBOL Graphical Terminal, are new additions to Veryant isCOBOL Evolve (2011 Release 3), a platform for COBOL application development, deployment, maintenance, and modernization.
News From SHARE
SHARE's webcast series kicks off 2012 with a new installment aimed at helping you determine how to incorporate data encryption in your enterprise to maximize security. Enterprise Encryption 101 will take place Thursday, January 26 at 10:00 a.m. CST. Led by Philip H. Smith III from Voltage Security, Inc., this webcast will look at the issues and opportunities surrounding encryption technologies.
Think About It
U.S. Government Data Center Closings Accelerate