Brief: FedEx taps Opsware to automate global data center operations
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FedEx said today that it will use software from Opsware Inc. to help it make the most of its IT resources.
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roundup Plus: Chipmaker Fujitsu prepares WiMax chip...EDS extends Opsware contract...AOL signs up for Omniture traffic tool.
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Hewlett-Packard announced on Monday that it will acquire two companies expected to improve the Silicon Valley giant&#39;s business technology offerings. Opsware, a data center automation software company founded by Netscape creator Marc Andreessen and acquired for roughly $1.6 billion, will boost HP&#39;s data center portfolio, while NeoWare, acquired for $334 million, will help HP with thin-client technology.
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HP is replacing its over-ambitious HP/UX utility data centre (UDC) service with a business automation module for OpenView, which it says will let companies be more flexible.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today revealed a new software technology from its Research labs designed to greatly enhance security and management capabilities in virtualized data centers.
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Dell (Quote, Chart) and Microsoft (Quote, Chart) continued their joint efforts to automate the data center with a deal to bundle management software that triggers changes with one mouse click.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) is rolling out a new version of WebSphere software, using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and middleware targeting retail operations.
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com October 18, 2004, 9:50 PM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been enterprise directories as organizations spawn projects around identity infrastructure.
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(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.
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Datatec International, the global arm of information technology group Datatec (DTC), has announced that its subsidiary Logicalis has acquired Solution Technology Inc (STI) - a privately-held IBM solution provider and one of IBM&#39;s top 10 business partners
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InfoWorld - Sun is expected Tuesday to ship xVM Ops Center, a datacenter automation console compatible with Linux- and Solaris-based x86 and Sparc environments.
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roundup Plus: IBM releases low-cost Unix servers...Former Cisco exec joins Red Hat board...Sun lures Siebel to x86 Solaris.
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Outsourcing vendor Electronic Data Systems has renewed an agreement for IT services from automation and utility software company Opsware that could be worth $145 million over eight years.
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roundup Plus: Hyperion targets broader base...JBoss ships J2EE app server...Firms bundle Web services wares...PMC-Sierra lowers forecast.
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Hewlett-Packard Co. said Monday it will pay $1.6 billion in cash to acquire Opsware Inc., a software company founded by Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen that helps companies lower the cost and complexity of running their data centers by automating certain management tasks.
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roundup Plus: BMC looks to simplify network operations...Data center firms settle cookie suit...nStor sells off telecoms management unit...Nortel lowers expectations.
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(InfoWorld) - Having previously made major product announcements around data and information management, IBM focused on the third leg of that strategy, content management, on Tuesday, including the vendor's first major release of its acquired FileNet technology. A year ago,Â IBM announced it would invest an additional $1 billion in data management to focus on software and services to help customers better manage and gain insight from their data. The vendor followed that up with the launch of its Information Server software in October based on technology it gained through theÂ $1.1 billion purchase of Ascential in 2005. Now, it's content management's turn. FileNet P8 4.0 released Tuesday is the first major version of the ECM (enterprise content management) software sinceÂ IBM bought FileNet in October for $1.6 billion. The software allows users to capture, manage, access, and bring together content from across their operations, automating records management and making it easier for companies to meet compliance requirements. New in the release is a J2EE-based content engine and content federation services for third-party repositories so that a company can carry out functions including search, classification, storage, updating, and deletion of content held in data stores from a variety of different software vendors. Federation is vital because it's "impossible" that any enterprise would be able to store all its content in a single repository, Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group, said during a conference call. Some enterprises currently have as many as 20 different content stores, he added. Franklin Alvarez, manager of computer applicationsÂ forÂ construction services, at utility company Consolidated Edison Company of New York, welcomed IBM's purchase of FileNet. His firm has been an IBM customer for more than 35 years and a FileNet user for more than 15 years. "We were very happy to see the two come together," he said. "It gives us real synergies to leverage." The utility begun deploying FileNet's P8 in late 2004 to automate a large amount of manual functions, particularly in the transfer of data back and forth between the company and outside agencies, such as the Department of Transportation. Alvarez's unit is responsible for the excavation work involved in laying new electricity cables or gas pipelines and in repairing existing systems in New York City --Â all tasks that require continual liaison with multiple New York agencies to obtain work permits. The utility is also keen to put more content, such as layouts of systems and compliance specifications, into the hands of its workforce while they're at excavation sites. Con Edison also uses the business process management piece of the ECM software to capture knowledge from its aging workforce, Alvarez said. "Our company is cradle to grave," he added. "It's not uncommon for someone to work here for 30 to 40 years." IBM also debuted a new Web 2.0 interface for its Content Manager OnDemand software so that users can access content held in all the vendor's ECM offerings via a Web browser. IBM's Mills wouldn't comment on whether the vendor is likely to make more ECM acquisitions. In general, he expects IBM to continue on its current run-rate of acquiring around a dozen companies annually. In the wake of a recent flurry of announcements from pureplay ECM players targeting the midmarket, IBM will continue to look at how best to serve the content management needs of midsize companies. "We're already reaching into the middle and have some skinnyed-down products," Mills said. Â