Five Minute Briefing - Data Center
March 19, 2012
Five Minute Briefing - Data Center: March 19, 2012. Published in conjunction with SHARE Inc., a bi-weekly report geared to the needs of data center professionals.
News Flashes
Serena Software announced enhanced offerings that help automate, control and instrument important application development and operations processes to deliver DevOps and Orchestrated IT. DevOps is the growing practice of developers and operations teams working in tandem to roll out and manage applications, and Serena defines "Orchestrated IT" as IT management systems that tie together existing tools into a more streamlined process-driven human workflow.
At last week's SHARE conference in Atlanta, CA Technologies announced the first five recipients of $35,000 scholarships to its Mainframe Academy, an accelerated educational curriculum that helps promising young technologists expand their skills and fill potential talent gaps in future mainframe management. CA announced the scholarship program last March as part of its workforce education effort, promising over $1 million in grants to attend the Mainframe Academy through 2016. Recipients are selected by SHARE representatives, who award scholarships to applicants that demonstrate a desire to master mainframe programming skills.
IBM has announced new software to beef up its SmartCloud line of management and monitoring tools for cloud deployments. IBM's new SmartCloud Foundation offerings enable organizations to install, manage, configure and automate the creation of cloud services in private, public or hybrid environments with enhanced levels of control, the vendor says.
Symantec Corp., a provider of security, storage and systems management solutions, has released Symantec Data Insight 3.0, the latest version of its solution that helps improve information governance by providing information about ownership and usage of unstructured data such as documents, presentations, spreadsheets and emails. With data volumes growing rapidly, and unstructured data in the enterprise growing even faster, Symantec says it is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to stay on top of who owns the data and how it is being used. This makes it challenging to manage and protect it, a situation further complicated by data governance objectives to reduce costs, reduce risk and achieve compliance.
UC4, a provider of IT automation solutions, announced the general availability of a tool that enables IT organizations to plan software releases, track progression and perform automated deployment. UC4 Application Release Automation V2 also is designed to simplify implementation by delivering built-in support for common middleware, source code management tools and issue tracking tools.
News From SHARE
75% of organizations are not collecting data from their social media networks. That is the top-line finding of a new Unisphere Research study which was presented at the 2012 SHARE ExecuForum, March 12-13 in conjunction with SHARE in Atlanta last week. A deeper look reveals that this does not signal a bleak day for social media data collection. While adoption rates for measurement of social media networks appear low today, organizations plan to begin monitoring and analyzing this data over the next one to five years. Planned investments in this area continue to trend upward each year. This trend signals that the social media business intelligence market is still in an "early adopter" phase, but is rapidly growing in relevance.
Think About It
For enterprises grappling with the onslaught of big data, a new platform has emerged from the open source world that promises to provide a cost-effective way to store and process petabytes and petabytes worth of information. Hadoop, an Apache project, is already being eagerly embraced by data managers and technologists as a way to manage and analyze mountains of data streaming in from websites and devices. Running data such as weblogs through traditional platforms such as data warehouses or standard analytical toolsets often cannot be cost-justified, as these solutions tend to have high overhead costs. However, organizations are beginning to recognize that such information ultimately can be of tremendous value to the business. Hadoop packages up such data and makes it digestible.