OpenWorld: Oracle to deliver VMware-ready software
236611
SAN FRANCISCO - Oracle and VMwareÂ  are developing an easier way to install and configure Oracle's software, executives from the two companies said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference Thursday.ADVERTISEMENTSolaris 10(TM) OS: Position your business ten moves ahead.Solaris 10 OS has arrived and provides even more reasons for the world's most demanding businesses to operate on this, the leading UNIX platform. Like the fact you can run Linux and Solaris applications side-by-side and run the same OS on SPARC(R), AMD Opteron(TM), and Intel processor-based systems. Discover more reasons and how Solaris 10 OS can move your business ahead today.
531688
Diane Greene, president of VMware, said she wonders how effective an operating systems-based approach to virtualization can be.
446822
You want to put my hypervisor where? Cisco put some flesh onto its scrawny "Data Center 3.0" virtualization initiative at VMworld today, by announcing the union of its VFrame Data Center provisioning appliance with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3.â¦
423635
SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle is working on a tool to provide a complete life cycle for building, managing, and updating database applications, a company executive revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference here on Wednesday morning.
437702
Christopher Jones has a note on his blog today about the Orcale Develop Conference happening in San Francisco October 23rd through the 25th and some of the PHP involvement there.    First on my ToDo list is Oracle's user conference. PHP is well represented at Oracle Develop. This is a new part of the huge Oracle OpenWorld event running in San Francisco in a few weeks.   Registrations are still open for Oracle Develop. You can register separately or if you register for the full OpenWorld you get the Develop conference gratis, I was told.  Check the fine print on this.    Talks for the conference include:  Rasmus Lerdorf's "Getting Rich with PHP" "Hands-on Lab: Developing and Deploying Oracle and PHP" from a representative from Oracle and Christopher Jones giving a talk on "The PHP/Oracle Experience: Building for Scalability"    Check out the conference website for more information and to register today.
51273
Oracle at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco next week plans to focus on its âData Hubâ technology for business intelligence, content management for the masses, grid computing, and integration, an Oracle official said on Thursday.
304403
The first candidate for the final version of Microsoft's next server operating system is imminent, including a test version of the 'Viridian' virtualization software.
180525
VMware Inc., known for its virtual machine technology for servers and workstations, is turning its attention to the client space. The Palo Alto, Calif.
755395
As its battle with Oracle continues, the software maker attempts to offer some good news by unveiling tools designed for manufacturers.
514913
InfoWorld - Hoping to keep the heat on archrival Microsoft, VMware on Wednesday will give developers a glimpse of an early version of its Virtual SMP product that allows a single virtual machine to work with as many as four processors, which in turn can more effectively drive mission-critical applications.
611927
(InfoWorld) - With Web 2.0, SaaS (software as a service), and open source grabbing all of the headlines, launches of enterprise infrastructure software that were once major IT events now sometimes seem like forgotten affairs. Certainly the new millennium marked a downturn in interest for traditional, monolithic back-end software. Yet, boosted by virtualization, there appears to be plenty of life in old-school offerings. According to its 2007 global IT market forecast, IDC predicts that spending on infrastructure software will grow 9 percent this year, faster than any other software category. In this 'diminished' environment, Oracle's pending release of its upgraded 11g database may not grab the imagination of the technorati, but it remains significant to a vastly underestimated group of IT users. The global database market grew 14.2 percent last year to total $15.2 billion, according to Gartner. Oracle, which released its last major database upgrade, 10g, four years ago, already holds almost half the market. That's more than double the share of second-place IBM. The official launch of 11g is set for next Wednesday, July 11, in a New York City ceremony overseen by Oracle President Charles Philips. Publicly, Oracle has for the most part avoided specifics, saying that 11g will offer improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, and manageability. Tidbits it has revealed include free migration and management tools that will let administrators oversee non-Oracle databases at the same time they manage their Oracle ones. Oracle has also said that 11g will have new compression technology that could potentially reduce customers' storage demands by two-thirds, the ability to store unstructured data faster than traditional file systems, and better partitioning. Fleshing out the details Web accounts by beta testers and others are now confirming those reports. According to what appears to be a presentation by Oracle Vice President of Technology Mark Townsend, many of the new features are in the area of "change assurance." These help companies save money and testing time when migrating to new hardware or making configuration changes. For instance, features like database replay and SQL replay let DBAs view how changes in the database or SQL code affect performance. 11g will also let users set up test environments using snapshot standbys and help automate rolling database upgrades. Other features include online table and index redefinition, support for online hot patching and continuous availability of online applications even when they are in the midst of an upgrade, and automatic diagnostic workflow to fix problems faster. In the area of information lifecycle management, 11g will allow DBAs for the first time to partition by interval, ref, or virtual column. It also adds a new composite way to partition. According to an article by Jim Czuprynski, an Oracle senior instructor at Fujitsu Consulting who beta-tested 11g, some of the best new features include in-memory caches for retaining widely used, slow-changing data; better diagnosis and repair features; and enhancements to Oracle's flashback tools for data recovery. Longtime Oracle watcher Donald Burleson notes in his list of 11g features support for schema-based Document Type Definitions for describing the internal structure of XML documents as well as more scalable Java for faster performance. On security, an area for which Oracle has been criticized of late, Burleson says 11g will include improvements such as case-sensitive passwords and an inviolable audit vault that protects against insider threats. Iggy Fernandez, editor of the NoCOUG Journal, the official newsletter for the Northern California Oracle Users Group, praises what he says is 11g's unheralded "learning optimizer" feature. "When relational databases replaced hierarchical and network databases in the 1980s, the promise was that programmers would no longer need to optimize their queries by hand," said Fernandez. While no database has "completely realized" that vision, 11g, says Fernandez, is a "great step -- the query optimizer simply learns from its mistakes -- in fact, it can stop a query that is already in progress and try a different approach!" "Performance tuning is the biggest component of database administration effort today, and the learning optimizer could produce tremendous labor savings if it works as advertised," Fernandez said. But will users upgrade? With 11g, will Oracle be able to extend its lead over IBM -- whose release of DB2 9 "Viper" last summer did not lead to mass early uptake, according to the Gartner figures -- by convincing users to rush and upgrade? Kevin Closson, chief software architect for clustering vendor Polyserve, says yes, based on how stable this release already is known to be. "From everything I've seen in this release, there should be no technical reasons holding back customers' adoption," Closson wrote in his blog. But Amy Stuemky, database administrator for travel tour operator Globus, says her organization is just starting to move its 50 Oracle databases to 10g. "Our philosophy with Oracle is that it is too bleeding-edge with any first release," Stuemky said. And the company is only moving now because Oracle's regular support, called Premier Support, is about to end. "Oracle almost pushes you [to upgrade] by desupporting its stuff," she said. Fernandez agrees that expecting users to rush to 11g any faster than they did with prior versions would be unrealistic. "There is just too much effort involved in testing and upgrading critical business systems and new releases can be plagued with software bugs," he wrote. "Speaking for myself, I would prefer Oracle to fix the bugs that still remain in the previous version instead of give us a feature-packed new version!" Oracle will go slow with one aspect of 11g. For its free Express Edition aimed at students and developers, which Oracle debuted in 2005, the company won't release an upgrade until the more stable 11g R2 comes out, according to an Austrian developer, Slavojub Krishan, who cited conversations with Oracle executives at a recent developer conference.
271477
Oracle launched on Monday Oracle Data Integration Suite, which combines traditional data integration capabilities with an array of middleware and tooling for constructing a service oriented architecture.Data Integration Suite costs $60,000 per CPU for a package that bundles Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle/Hyperion Data Relationship Manager with the company's BPEL Process Manager, enterprise service bus, application server, business-to-business engine, and business rules engine, according to a statement."This is really Oracle attempting to go a long way toward providing a credible alternative to IBM Information Server," said James Kobielus, an analyst with Forrester Research. IBM released Information Server in October 2006; the product sits at the center of the company's Information on Demand Strategy.In turn, Oracle's suite aligns its data-integration offerings with its Fusion Middleware line for SOA.Additional options in the suite include a new pair of data quality tools, Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator and Oracle Data Profiling, which the company developed with Harte-Hanks Trillium Software."Finally, Oracle now has best-of-breed data quality tools," Kobielus said.Also, Oracle is optionally offering its Coherence Data Grid, technology acquired through Oracle's purchase of Tangosol last year, and a number of adapters, including ones for applications and unstructured content, as options.The company did not provide pricing information for the optional items.Overall, the suite reflects the further integration of two key Oracle acquisitions, Sunopsis and Hyperion, into the company's core Fusion Middleware lineup, according to Kobielus. "There's a lot of Sunopsis and Hyperion DNA in this," he said.Oracle bought Sunopsis, maker of an ELT (extract, load, transform) tool in October 2006. The company plunked down $3.3 billion in March 2007 for Hyperion, which had a master data management product among its offerings.IBM, Oracle, and SAP are now the main industry contenders in terms of a truly broad data-integration suite, according to Kobielus. Other large enterprise stack vendors, such as Red Hat or Sun, might be wise to make some acquisitions in this space, he added.Marketing materials announcing the Oracle's release stress the suite's applicability to heterogenous environments, noting its support for a broad array of databases, including IBM DB2, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, and Oracle.This is telling, right down to Oracle's positioning of its own database at the end of that list, Kobielus said. "IBM is also strongly heterogeneous," he noted.
617403
Oracle rang in the first day of its OpenWorld European conference series on Monday by touting the growth of grid computing in Europe, followed with the main news of the day: the release of E-Business Suite Version 11i.
404624
Take my services, please EclipseCon Oracle has issued a fresh chapter in its quixotic open source strategy by fully opening a key piece of its Java application server and database technology.â¦
45034
New version comes as competition looms from VMWare, which plans to release the latest beta of its Fusion product on Friday.
603729
Blog: The software maker said Tuesday that it is ready with a near-final "release candidate" version of its software, which will find its way on to servers later this year.
223004
(InfoWorld) - VMware is making a free benchmarking tool available to IT professionals Monday to evaluate the performance of virtualization technology in their datacenters. Meanwhile, it seeks to assure competitors that the benchmarking standards will be fair to all of them. VMmark is available for a free download and can be used to determine how well virtualization software works with any of six typical datacenter workloads: file server, e-mail server, Web server, a standby server, an online transaction processing (OLTP) database, and a Java order entry system. VMmark runs on either Linux or Windows. VMware shared a prototype of VMmark in October 2006 with members of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC), an industry group that establishes performance benchmarks so customers can evaluate products. At that time, SPEC had just formed a working group to develop benchmarks for virtualization software. It is still working on those benchmarks. Though helpful for comparing various products, benchmarks are controversial because of concerns that the results can be manipulated to make one vendor look better than another. SPEC and other industry benchmarking groups are organized to create fair benchmarks that will yield impartial results. VMware acknowledges the skepticism about its benchmarking tool being a fair way to compare VMware with other brands, so it strove to be impartial, said Andrea Eubanks, senior director of enterprise and technical marketing for VMware. VMware is represented on the 13-member SPEC work group that is developing the virtualization benchmark along with competitors such as SWsoft and Trigence. Major technology companies including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Intel are also represented. "We have created VMmark to be an open standard," said Eubanks. "In order to prevent misconceptions of what our intentions are. ... we presented our technology preview to SPEC so they could use it as the basis of the open-standards benchmark. We want to improve our product, we don't want to cook our benchmarks." VMware is introducing VMmark while the SPEC panel is still developing its standards. "The process to becoming a standard is a quite long one," said Eubanks. But VMware has not always been as impartial as it claims to be, said John Bara, vice president of marketing for XenSource, a VMware competitor. Bara says VMware released a white paper earlier this year comparing VMware's ESX Server hypervisor to XenSource's Open Source Xen hypervisor on a Windows operating system and the results showed VMware performed better. Bara says the comparison was not fair because Open Source Xen is optimized to run best on Linux, not Windows. XenSource's Xen Enterprise product is optimized to run Windows and would be a more balanced comparison to VMware's ESX. "We cooperate with VMware in a lot of areas, but we went back to them and said 'foul,'" said Bara. To VMware's credit, he said, it redid the test and accepted the revised benchmark that showed VMware ESX and Xen Enterprise with nearly comparable performance. Also Monday, XenSource entered into an OEM agreement with Symantec Corp. to embed Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation virtualized storage management software into Xen Source's XenEnterprise virtualization hypervisor.