Build business advantage into your data warehouse – and ensure success. Many organizations have realized that their OLTP database management system can’t perform the high-volume analytic tasks required of today’s successful data warehouse. What’s their solution? Extend the benefits of their Oracle operational environment with a Teradata solution. This brochure outlines how the Oracle to Teradata Solution Migration Service integrates Teradata Database into your existing Oracle operational environment and allows you to reap the benefits of analyzing centralized, integrated detailed data from the source system based on Oracle or other database systems.
Google has been ordered to pay $5 million by an East Texas jury that found for Bedrock Computer Technologies LLC in an almost two-year-old Linux-related patent case. The jury found the patent valid. Patent watcher Florian Mueller, who broke the story, says the case has “major implications for the IT industry in general and for Linux in particular…Many companies using Linux have already been required by the patent holder to pay royalties, and many more will now, based on this jury verdict, elect to pay.” Mueller says the decision also has “ramifications for Google’s Linux-based Android mobile operating system.”
Virtualization maven VMware hit the ball out of the park Tuesday when it said its first quarter revenues cleared $843.7 million, up 33% year-over-year, and profits came in at $125.8 million, up 60%, or 48 cents a share. Wall Street thought it would do 42 cents on $815.4 million. Its shares were up over 14% Wednesday to $98.49, an airy height the stock hasn’t seen lately, based on its forecast. It said it imagines sales this quarter will be $860 million-$880 million, above the $845.1 million analysts were projecting, and that it would end the year at $3.55 billion-$3.65 billion. It means to keep hiring.
Setting up Application Performance Monitoring is a big task, but like everything else it can be broken down into simple steps. You have to know what you want to achieve and subsequently where to start. So let’s start at the beginning and take a top-down approach The first thing to do is to be clear of what we want when monitoring the application. Let’s face it: we “do not want to” ensure CPU utilization to be below 90 percent or a network latency of under one millisecond. We are also not really interested in garbage collection activity or whether the database connection pool is utilized. We need to monitor all of these things in order to reach our main goal. And the main goal for this article series is to ensure the health and stability of our application and business services. To ensure that we need to leverage all of the mentioned metrics.
Recently there was a bigger discussion at dynaTrace around the cost of exceptions. When working with customers we very often find a lot of exceptions they are not aware of. After removing these exceptions, the code runs significantly faster than before. This creates the assumption that using exceptions in your code comes with a significant performance overhead. The implication would be that you better avoid using exceptions. As exceptions are an important construct for handling error situation, avoiding exceptions completely does not seem to be good solution. All in all this was reason enough to have a closer look at the costs of throwing exceptions.
A problem has come to my attention over the last few years and I thought Java.net would be a good place to talk about it. I have noticed that many reporting integrations use vendor-supplied examples verbatim. This is an issue. With JasperReports (the Java-based reporting tool), the reports contain SQL code. That SQL code can tell a hacker a lot about the database (type, version, table names, column names, and such). This opens up an attack vector, and many people host their report files in the same directory as the web files. Worse still, some people write JSPs with the database connection information (login, password, host name, database name) in plain text - inside the JSP files!
Java EE 7 is the next version of the major enterprise platform has been approved by the JCP board recently. We find significant support for Cloud Adoption in the proposed platform. This platform analyzes how Java EE could be a major Cloud Platform much like .net has been positioned in the form of Windows Azure.
It seems from a couple of press reports that EMC now has its very own VC arm – EMC Ventures – that it put together in February under Mark Lewis, the chief strategy officer of its Information Infrastructure Products unit run by Intel émigré Pat Gelsinger. VentureWire, which broke the news, suggests the thing has a broader scope than the usual strategy of investing in the odd, directly complementary start-up and then pointed out that EMC took a piece of the $20 million C investment that went into cloud biller Aria Systems in February, a round led by InterWest Partners.
The go-between who carried insider information about pending industry mergers between Wilson Sonsini lawyer Matthew Kluger and trader Garrett Bauer for 17 years pleaded guilty Monday to charges of securities fraud and conspiracy. He was identified as mortgage broker Kenneth Robinson, who ultimately taped compromising conversations between his friends for the FBI. Kluger and Bauer were arrested last week. The government said Kluger stole Wilson Sonsini’s M&A secrets about deals like the Intel-McAfee, HP-3Com and Oracle-Sun acquisitions and gave them to Bauer to trade on. Prosecutors said he’s been doing it since he was a summer associate at Cravath Swaine & Moore, IBM’s white glove law firm, and tipped Bauer off to Big Blue’s acquisition of Lotus and Tivoli.
Golfers follow the Masters 2011 - but - if you try to access masters.com right now you will get annoying popup messages from your browser telling you that you better stop JavaScript from executing because it takes too long. On my browser this looks like this: JavaScript makes your browser unresponsive when browsing masters.com This happens on every page. So - why does that happen?
Netbiscuits, a cloud software service for cross-platform mobile sites and apps, on Tuesday reports a traffic increase of 100 percent over the last six months. Today the company's mobile publishing platform delivers more than eight billion mobile pages per month for over 20,000 sites and apps. Netbiscuits' internal metrics show that the majority of all sites and apps recently built on their platform include touch-enabled features from day one. Netbiscuits' CEO Michael Neidhoefer regards touch optimization to be the order of the day for any mobile web presence. Netbiscuits' HTML5+ Framework enables touch interaction on smartphones and media tablets while also catering for sites on the long tail of mobile devices. To understand how customers take advantage of the company's HTML5+ Framework to enable touch and gesture-driven user interfaces, Netbiscuits ran an analysis across the more than 20,000 mobile sites and apps that are based on the company's mobile development and publishing platform.
Cloud Expo New York, June 6-9, 2011 early bird registration will expire on Friday. Register now for a Gold Pass for the 8th International Cloud Expo on June 6–9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City and save $500 on your full conference pass. Gold Pass Delegates will receive full conference access for four days to all conference sessions at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo as well as the Virtualization Conference & Expo June 6-9. Gold Pass registration includes: lunch on Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Welcome Reception on Day 1, and refreshment breaks, collectible conference bag and access to all conference sessions including all technical sessions, the exhibit floor, keynotes, vendor technology presentations, Cloud Computing Bootcamp and SYS-CON.TV Power Panels.
Google is losing its product development chief Jonathan Rosenberg, who reportedly felt he couldn’t give the company’s brand new retread CEO Larry Page the open-ended commitment to stay on the job that Page wanted. Or so the story goes. Rosenberg was planning to leave in 2013 when his younger kid starts college. Now he’s going this summer with plans to write a book with Google’s old CEO-now-executive chairman Eric Schmidt about Google’s management culture. Apparently he’ll come back as a Google consultant after a vacation.
Nimsoft, the unified monitoring start-up that CA bought a year ago for $350 million, has integrated a bi-directional service desk into its multi-tenant management-as-a-service widgetry. It’s supposed to improve the delivery of IT services to business users across internal and external IT infrastructures, including public and private clouds, by helping ensure that problems and potential problems are addressed. The stuff promises a common user experience and common deployment.
Intel has trotted out its latest 32nm Westmere-EX or E7 Xeons, which support up to 10 cores connected by a ring bus and are supposed to deliver up to 40% better performance than the eight-core Nehalem-EX chips they replace. Amusingly the things are considered so powerful they’re pitted against competitive RISC chips like IBM’s Power chip and Oracle’s Sparc chip and by default Intel’s own Itanium, which Intel just had to defend when Oracle said it was going to stop supporting the largely HP-used part because Intel is going to discontinue it, an allegation roundly denied. Intel said of the new Xeons, “The days of IT organizations being forced to deploy expensive, closed RISC architecture for mission-critical applications are nearing an end.”
Mark this date. Greenplum, the EMC unit, and SAS, the biggest privately held software company, have just given birth to a new buzzword: “Big Analytics.” The pair is going to start pushing an appliance that mates Greenplum’s “Big Data” database widgetry with SAS’ high-performance analytics. It will be the first time, they say, that users will be able to get an accurate read on all their data, apparently in seconds, rather than be confined to just a sample that can take hours, or even days, thanks to SAS algorithms being parallelized for the first time and a high-speed interface from Greenplum. SAS CTO Keith Collins says “SAS is redefining ‘in-memory processing.’” They’ll both sell the purpose-built Data Computing Appliance (DCA). Customers will need a license from SAS and get first-line support from Greenplum. The pair is hoping to have the widget out in late Q3, or worse case in Q4, when it will be priced.
Egenera just scored a plum. After a year of working on the deal, the company’s latest PAN Manager software is going to be available on HP’s BladeSystem c-class servers, the leader of the blade pack, creating what Egenera calls “the highest performance, most flexible platform” it’s ever released. Since Egenera already supports Dell and Fujitsu blade server platforms – as well as its own BladeFrames – its HP score means it’ll be represented on 70% of the blade systems out there. Of course HP’s decision to run with the stuff might have a little something to do with the fact that Egenera’s biggest rival is HP’s un-friend, Cisco.
Bill Vass is one of the smartest/sharpest minds I know. He is an incredible thinker with a deep understanding of human nature, physics, electronics, construction, art, philosophy, history and business. He is also one of the smartest technologists I know. When Bill decides to associate himself with something we should all take note. With that context in mind, Bill’s joining of the ZafeSoft advisory board is cause for us all to focus on the potential of this firm.
Greg Papadopoulous, Sun’s old CTO, who’s been hanging around New Enterprise Associates as entrepreneur-in-residence since Oracle took over Sun last year, has become a venture partner at the firm. He’s supposed to work with the company’s seed and early stage investments on their fundamental technology development and go-to-market strategies apparently focusing on the cloud and enterprise. He used to be – for better or worse – responsible for Sun’s $2 billion R&D portfolio.
Schooner Information Technology, the web caching and database acceleration start-up that just dumped the market-limiting IBM hardware its Memcached and MySQL appliances were tied to so it could be software-only, has added a high-availability/disaster recovery solution called Active Cluster that guarantees 100% synchronous replication. Unlike the typical MySQL replication and failover solutions that are asynchronous and vulnerable to data loss, Active Cluster is supposed to bring 100% synchronous replication to a maximum of eight MySQL servers in a cluster. That means that any transaction that was completed on the master server is guaranteed to be completed on each of the slaves so all the data is current.
Mainframe system or cloud computing? IT organizations don’t necessarily have to choose. Many mainframe advocates would argue that developing a private cloud would be redundant, as the mainframe provides the flexible, agile and always available environment promised with cloud computing. And those looking to bring cloud computing into their environments shouldn’t assume the mainframe won’t be a factor. “We are inventing the new mainframe in a sense. The internal private cloud is taking the application hosting and delivery infrastructure and managing it as a service. It has all the pieces it had before, but now you have to think of it in a service-oriented approach,” says Jim Frey, research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “It is not separate from the mainframe; the mainframe will be included in an evolutionary role. The cloud is forcing organizations to become more cross-domain and service-oriented in their management.” An October 2010 study commissioned by CA Technologies showed that 79 percent of 300 IT decision makers believed the “mainframe is an essential component of their cloud computing strategy.” And 70 percent indicated that cloud computing will sustain or extend the mainframe environment. “Your back-end data is still in the mainframe even if you have a plan for a distributed cloud environment. The data will stay where it is, and you will see cloud-hosted transactions that will continue to need to access that back-end data,” explains Wendy Wong, senior software architect for CA Technologies. “Cloud computing may require more exotic access to the mainframe than you would have traditionally, but that data is not going to move anywhere and you have to determine how you want your cloud implementation to access the mainframe and provide visibility for management.”
Dell, Equinix and Rackspace have rigged up an OpenStack cloud demonstration and test environment that they’ll show off at Equinix’ data centers in Silicon Valley and Virginia and Rackspace’s data center in Chicago. There will be additional demo environments at Equinix’ data centers in Europe and Asia in the second quarter. The idea is to get organizations assessing applications on the newfangled open source cloud platform and doing proof of concepts (POCs). The trio figures it’ll be the first demo of an open standard platform where applications and workloads can be moved between geographically dispersed OpenStack clouds.
There’s a dense filing that Novell sent the SEC a couple of weeks ago – made denser still by being redacted to the hoi polloi – that suggests that Microsoft may have done some horse trading to persuade the Justice Department to wave through the CPTN consortium’s proposed $450 million acquisition of those 800-odd Novell patents. It looks as though Microsoft is selling certain unidentified patent rights to Attachmate – which is supposed to be buying Novell for $2.2 billion – paid for with maybe as much as $8 million of Elliott’s money, Elliott being the party that put Novell in play a year ago and got a piece of the action for its trouble.
Amazon Web Services has started selling single-tenant instances that run on dedicated hardware inside an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The classic definition of a cloud is multiple virtual machines on a server used by multiple tenants sharing the cost, but that definition doesn’t suit everybody’s security or governance needs so Amazon changed the definition. It says the VPC can be just physically isolated Dedicated Instances or a mix of Dedicated Instances and non-dedicated instances. Amazon is charging a premium hourly per-instance fee plus a $10-an-hour dedicated per-region fee regardless of how many Dedicated Instances a user is running there. The regional fee is supposed to compensate Amazon for business lost because the hardware isn’t multi-tenant.
If you plan to appear for a TOGAF foundation level certification or part 1 exam, one of the difficulties you will face is a lack of free sample questions. Some questions are provided as a part of the study guide, but if you want to more practice then you will have tough time locating anything freely available on the net. This lack of practice multiple choice questions prompted me to create my own set. I have gone by the advice of Chris Eaton to create this paper before I take the test to avoid any issue that these questions copy the official exam questions.