Five Minute Briefing - Data Center
September 16, 2013
Five Minute Briefing - Data Center: September 16, 2013. Published in conjunction with SHARE Inc., a bi-weekly report geared to the needs of data center professionals.
News Flashes
IBM says it has completed the acquisition of CSL International, a provider of virtualization management technology for IBM's zEnterprise System. CSL International was a privately held company headquartered in Herzliya Pituach, Israel. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has released a new version of its data replication software intended to address requirements for big data analytics, business intelligence, business continuity and disaster recovery initiatives. Addressing expanding use cases for the solution, Attunity Replicate 3.0, is engineered to provide secure data transfer over long distances such as wide area networks (WANs), the cloud and satellite connections, said Lawrence Schwartz, vice president of marketing at Attunity, in an interview.
BDNA, a Data as a Service (DaaS) company, announced its Purchase Order Normalization solution, intended to help change how IT spend is calculated and managed. BDNA's PO Normalization solution provides a view from purchasing to deployment with more accurate and precise data than has been previously available through standard accounting and purchasing systems. Such data can provide better spend analysis, improved business value realization, forward planning, demand management and reduced software audit risk, BDNA says.
BMC Software, a provider of system management software, has introduced a new tool intended to help companies decrease their IBM mainframe software expenses. With its new Cost Analyzer for zEnterprise, BMC says it is able to deliver predictive analytics that can help IT departments plan, report and reduce their mainframe licensing charge by identifying system peaks, and recommending preemptive cost-reduction strategies. BMC Cost Analyzer is targeted at the majority of IBM mainframe customers, who are paying for their core IBM software on a usage basis which is determined by the monthly peak usage over a four-hour average, Jay Lipovich, director of Solutions Marketing, BMC Software, told 5 Minute Briefing in an interview.
IBM introduced a flexible computing platform that it claims will provide three times as many cores as current one-unit rack servers. The NeXtScale System is an addition to IBM's x86 portfolio, designed to run applications with the power of a supercomputer in any data center, via an open architecture that will support options for compute, storage, and graphics processing acceleration.
Phoenix Software International announced it will soon be shipping the latest version of its mainframe spool management tool. The new software, (E)JES Version 5, Release 3.0, includes features built to take advantage of the latest release of IBM's z/OS operating system (V5R3), including email notifications and a REST-based API.
IBM has introduced an array of new software, system and services offerings to help organizations manage big data projects. The technology is aimed at helping customers increase their confidence in their data, their speed in gaining business value out of their data, and sharpen their skill sets to address big data challenges."We have to hold that data to the same standards, manage it, and govern it appropriately for the enterprise. You can't drop those standards because it is unstructured data," said Nancy Kopp-Hensley, a director in product marketing and strategy for Big Data Systems at IBM, in an interview.
News From SHARE
Technical sessions are the "heart and soul" of SHARE events. Whether you were able to attend SHARE in Boston last month or not, read about a few key takeaways from some of the most widely-attended sessions from the event in the latest President's Corner blog post SHARE in Boston 2013 Journal: Tales from the Sessions.
Think About It
Oracle holds an enviable position in the IT marketplace with a wide array of database systems, development tools, languages, platforms, enterprise applications, and servers. Riding the coattails of this industry giant is a healthy and far-flung ecosystem of software developers, integrators, consultants, and OEMs. These are the partners that will help make or break Oracle's struggle with new forces disrupting the very foundations of IT. And lately, Oracle—long known for its own brand of xenophobia and disdain for direct competitors—has been making a lot of waves by forging new alliances with old foes. This is opening up potentially lucrative new frontiers for business partners at all levels.