Five Minute Briefing - Data Center
October 15, 2012
Five Minute Briefing - Data Center: October 15, 2012. Published in conjunction with SHARE Inc., a bi-weekly report geared to the needs of data center professionals.
News Flashes
AT&T and IBM announced a business agreement to deliver a "network-enabled" cloud service that uses private networks rather than the public Internet. The companies are combining AT&T virtual private networking, new technology from AT&T Labs, and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ cloud capabilities to create what they say is a faster and more secure shared cloud service. "As more organizations realize that cloud can be secure, easily managed, and a key part of their business strategy, cloud will quickly evolve as a tool for innovation rather than just for infrastructure," says Erich Clementi, senior vice president for IBM Global Technology Services.
BMC Software delivered major updates to its IT Service Management portfolio, that enable organizations to transform their service desk into a flexible, proactive "genius bar" experience. This new approach, to be built into a number of BMC's ITSM products, helps IT organizations transition from passive, infrastructure-oriented support functions to ones that deliver more proactive, personalized enablement to today's highly mobile workforce. "Enterprise IT organizations and service providers want to deliver a differentiated, modern service experience," says Kia Behnia, BMC's chief technology officer.
GT Software, provider of technology solutions for enterprise modernization, has rolled out Ivory Hub, a product suite targeted at mainframe enterprises seeking to address the demands for rapid application delivery for mobile, web, and cloud. Ivory Hub is designed to help organizations modernize their mainframe investment in a secure and low-maintenance environment. "The overall purpose and intent of the technology is to simplify accessing resources on the mainframe that are valuable, yet in many ways hidden due to the lack of skilled resources in the marketplace today," Chris Garner, senior vice president of the products group at GT Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. GT Software will also present a webcast about Ivory Hub Thursday, Oct. 18 at 11 am ET.
SnapLogic, a provider of enterprise cloud integration tools, announced new enterprise platform features intended to help lower the effort to integrate with traditional data sources. Meeting the needs of enterprise IT architects, the latest release of the SnapLogic Integration Platform provides high availability and rollback support, smarter server shutdown options, and a more intuitive interface for administrative tasks. "This release, like most other SnapLogic releases, is for both private and public clouds," Zeb Mahmood, principal of product management for SnapLogic, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
News From SHARE
Join SHARE and IBM at 10:00 a.m. CDT on Thursday, November 8 for a complimentary webcast and learn how the latest innovations for CICS Transaction Server will help you deliver a smarter and more agile transaction processing experience to your business users. Speakers Fraser Bohm, Lead CICS Developer, IBM Software Group and Andrew Bates, CICS Product Line Manager, IBM Software Group will show how you can benefit from major enhancements such as Cloud-style CICS applications and infrastructure through Platform-as-a-Service, policy-based management, a new Web container and advancements in performance and scalability. This webcast, featuring CICS Transaction Server for z/OS® V5.1, will introduce exciting new capabilities and innovation throughout the CICS portfolio that will truly help shape the future of critical information systems on System z®.
Think About It
Research teams from CornellUniversity and Microsoft are setting forth a proposal for building data centers without wires or cables. "Conventional data centers, based on wired networks, entail high wiring costs, suffer from performance bottlenecks, and have low resilience to network failures," the researchers say. Instead, they propose a new methodology for building wire-free data centers based on emerging 60GHz RF technology. Ultimately, they claim, wireless data centers can deliver "higher aggregate bandwidth, lower latency, and substantially higher fault tolerance than a conventional wired datacenter while improving ease of construction and maintenance." Interestingly, the proposal draws upon schematics laid out in a paper written in 1889 by mathematician Arthur Cayley