Five Minute Briefing - Information Management
March 15, 2011
Five Minute Briefing - Information Management: March 15, 2011. A concise weekly report with key product news, market research and insight for data management professionals and IT executives.
News Flashes
Cloud.com today announced CloudStack 2.2, the latest version of its open source cloud computing platform. CloudStack is an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of scalable public and private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds. Using CloudStack as the foundation, data center operators can build cloud services within their existing infrastructure to offer on-demand, elastic cloud services. CloudStack is available for immediate download from the open source cloud computing community.
ExtraHop Networks, a provider of network and application performance management solutions, announced it now supports IBM's DB2 database. The addition of DB2 rounds out ExtraHop's support for the top three providers, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. ExtraHop customers now will be able to monitor database transactions in real time without having to run invasive tools such as SQL profilers and agents, which tend to degrade performance. With the addition of DB2, the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system now "covers just about every major relational database that we've encountered within an enterprise IT environment," Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Fuzzy Logix, LLC, a provider of advanced analytical solutions, has announced the availability of in-database analytics working with IBM Informix database software to serve the large base of customers who are seeking to use easily accessible analytics to gain competitive advantage. The product, DB Lytix, is a rich, in-database analytics library built during more than eleven years of extensive research on advanced analytical methods. It contains functions for mathematical and statistical analysis, data mining, and Monte Carlo simulations. With the library now ported to IBM Informix, DB Lytix can leverage the high performance of Informix to bring gains in processing speed to analytic solutions.
Red Gate Software has added the ability to source control data to SQL Source Control, providing a complete tool for source controlling all database elements from within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). SQL Source Control connects users' existing source control systems - either Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Subversion (SVN) - to SQL Server. In addition to providing source control for both static data and database schema, SQL Source Control 2.0 supports a shared model that allows development team members to see each other's database changes in real time. This complements the dedicated model introduced in V1.0 last summer.
ScaleBase is seeking 50 additional customers to participate in an expanded private beta program for the ScaleBase Database Load Balancer, which enables multiple database servers to work like a single database. The ScaleBase private beta was first announced on January 1, and since then dozens of customers have registered for the program. The company is now seeking additional users of MySQL on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS who would like to try the technology.
On the heels of the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge, in which the IBM Watson system demonstrated the capability to understand natural language, IBM has launched a global skills initiative to educate clients, business partners, and college students on how to use IBM business analytics and information management software, and many of the underlying technologies of the Watson computing system, to capture information from new sources and use it to create business opportunities.
Revolution Analytics, a commercial provider of software and services based on the open source R project for statistical computing, and IBM Netezza have announced a partnership to integrate Revolution R Enterprise and the IBM Netezza TwinFin Data Warehouse Appliance. According to the vendors, this will enable customers seeking to run high performance and full-scale predictive analytics from within a data warehouse platform to directly leverage the capabilities of the open source R statistics language. Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will work together to create a version of Revolution's software that takes advantage of IBM Netezza's i-class technology so that Revolution R Enterprise can run in-database in an optimal fashion. General availability of this integrated solution is currently planned for later this year.