Search390.com | Consolidation sparks mainframe revival
...Last week, IBM announced that Sparkassen Informatik, one of the largest providers of IT services for the German banking industry, has purchased 20 IBM z990 "T-Rex" mainframes to anchor one of the largest IT consolidation projects ever undertaken. The four-year deal is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, IBM said.
"This is the biggest deal of its kind I've ever seen," said Edward Broderick, principal analyst at the Robert Frances Group, of the Sparkassen Informatik deal. Without a doubt, both deals are a reflection of the growing demand for the z990 mainframe, which Broderick refers to as a "glorious implementation of technology, the maturity of zOS, autonomic computing and on-demand."
"They have taken a legacy mainframe and injected vigor and enthusiasm into what people thought was dead," he said. "It's not dead. It's not in the hospital. It's not even sick. Companies are now figuring out that client/server was a smoke-and-mirror charade." Not only is it not dead, it's actually thriving. According to IBM's fourth-quarter results, sales of the monolithic server were up 33% from the previous year. Some say the surge could just be the natural spike in sales expected following the release of the much-anticipated T-Rex z990 mainframe, which experts say breathed life into an ailing platform...
autonomic computing & on-demand...
musings on autonomic social & knowledge networks...
In my continuing research at the intersection of emerging social and knowledge networking trends, I have been tracking news in my 'knowledge notes' Weblog on 'autonomic' or 'self-healing' systems. As I was performing a search on 'autonomic knowledge management' this morning I came across the following article by Christopher Meyer, [coauthor of It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business] for Wired Magazine, - The New Facts of Life - in which he writes:
...networks could play a critical role as machines come to resemble living creatures. In life, as on the Net, connections matter more than processors. The Internet could allow sensors to interact in emergent ways, forming an autonomic nervous system for the physical world. An early version is taking root in Los Angeles, where sensors at intersections identify approaching buses and ask a central computer whether they're on time. Late buses get the green light; the system gives crossing traffic extra time in subsequent cycles. The result: 25 percent improvement in transit times without creating congestion.
Oddly enough, our growing knowledge of life processes could have its biggest impact in the social sciences. Social systems, after all, are made up of interacting agents, i.e., people. When we become adept at applying these insights to the social sphere, we'll be able to run simulations that reveal, say, the conditions under which Iraq would reconstruct itself. At that point, the new science of life will help us not only live better, but live better together...
In the above citation, Meyer talks about the importance of connections over processors. Isn't this concept - of relating as biological 'connections' - at the very hub of our current fascination with Social Networking Services [SNSs]? Centralized, standalone SNSs are fun at times, initially compelling, but eventually boring if they do not add value in our day-to-day lives.
Meyer also posits that "Scientific advances point to a startling conclusion: The nonliving world is very much alive." And these networks do indeed take on lives of their own - existing with or without us as - the non-biological representations of the 'us' aspect of our social groups and, - to the degree that we have shared, connected in, or up linked in these spaces - our social knowledge. This is the field of analysis in which we will often find social scientists such as Valdis Krebs at play - tracking, tracing, and trending our digital trails.
It is this delicate dance of 'us' maintaining 'presence' - in either loosely or tightly choreographed associations - that keeps these networks lively and infused with both our individual and collective knowledge. While I was ruminating over writing this post on 'autonomic knowledge management' this morning I was also chatting with Jim McGee who recommended that I reference David Reed's work in this area.
An excellent recommendation that inspired me to question - How soon and/or successfully will the current eruption of both Knowledge and Social Networking Services morph into viable components and/or extensions of David P. Reed and Andrew Lippman's visionary architecture of Viral Communications?
Historically, people do not scale well, networks do - and autonomic or self-healing networks hold the promise of robust scalability. An important upgrade for ailing telecom carriers and service providers who suffer from extensively manual business processes that are quite simply not sustainable in our burgeoning 'network-centric' world. Cultural change is imperative in the current 'carrier-class' world in order to 'tool up' for the near and distant future of wireless networking.
Reed & Lippman state, "The Essence of scalable wireless networks is cooperation..." I think that this 'cooperation' concept also applies to 'us' as the wetware components of these network architectures. Reed & Lippman also assert in a May 19th, 2003 Viral Communications draft that "the impact of enabling architectural innovations is amplified when they are in synchrony with cultural change." [This draft is available as a PDF file in the Viral Communications related link below.]
How can we - as early adopters - influence the evolution of Social Networking Services so they do enhance our communications - aside from the current widely practiced activities of job searching, dating, friend finding, and strengthening weak ties?
If you utilize one or more of the current entrants in this swell of online SNS offerings [such as LinkedIn, Friendster, Orkut, Ryze, and/or Tribe] - what value, if any, do you derive from them? And, harkening back to the citation with which I started this post, has one [or more] of these services assisted in helping you to successfully reduce the 'traffic congestion' at the 'intersections' in your life? And, in closing, any insights, comments, or ponderings on the recent and future blurring of lines between 'wetware,' 'software,' and 'hardware' in an infinitely connected wireless world?
Related Links:
Wired | February 2004 | The New Facts of Life
Viral Communications
Feedster Search: autonomic computing
autonomic computing - CiteSeer ResearchIndex
The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com
Without autonomic capabilities to maintain themselves by "learning" from experience and infusion of new data, knowledge management systems will not achieve their destiny as pervasive success tools for the 21st century manufacturing enterprise." [BMST Knowledge management]
Reed's Law says that the value of the network that comes from supporting the formation and sharing of information among persistent groups (group forming networks) grows exponentially in the number of elements.
autonomic data management platform...
PRESS RELEASE (eMediaWire) Solid Rounds Out Ecosystem Partnerships, Signs Agreements with Marathon International, UXComm
CANNES, FRANCE (PRWEB) February 25, 2004--Solid customers are building and shipping applications like SGSN and VoIP Switches that have stringent uptime SLAs. With these new partnerships, Solid customers benefit from a pre-integrated stack of components that stretches from the board level through the chassis to the operating system to high-availability management. This proven ecosystem ensures faster time to market at lower development cost and lower Total Cost of Ownership.
Said Jussi Harvela, Solid president and CEO, "These agreements cement our ongoing relationships with several strategic partners and demonstrate the power of the Solid ecosystem to deliver time-to-market value. Infrastructure applications are built on a complex hardware and software foundation. Bringing these companies together into the Solid ecosystem delivers synergistic value to our joint customers, ensuring fastest time to market at lowest cost."
About Solid Autonomic Data Management Platform
The Solid Autonomic Data Management Platform is the first example of a data management solution that assures developers the data will take care of itself. The Solid platform supports the creation of applications that are self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting. The Solid Autonomic Data Management Platform is a software suite made up of three tightly coupled components:
* A pair of embeddable, lightweight, high-speed database management systems,
* A carrier-grade high-availability hot-standby option, and
* Asynchronous data distribution technology
This optimized combination is encapsulated in a low-maintenance framework to create an easy-to-manage platform that can take care of sophisticated data management needs in complex environments like network infrastructure applications running on blade servers. Solid customers realize dramatically reduced cost of development and reduced time to market. Their customers see a compellingly low total cost of ownership (TCO).
solaris 10 goes autonomic...
BetaNews | Sun Preps Solaris 10 With 'Predictive' Self Healing
By David Worthington, BetaNews
February 23rd, 2004, 6:06 PM
Sun Microsystems has fleshed out an updated release of its Solaris operating system. After deciding upon the structure and nuances that would make up Solaris 10, Sun homed in on supplying its customers with superior value, stability, security, and performance.
To meet its self-imposed checklist, the Solaris product team turned to its technology tool chest which includes: N1 grid containers, a new "predictive" self healing framework, process rights management derived from Trusted Solaris, and a new bottleneck hunting technology dubbed dynamic trace.
autonomic computing technologies...
Market Wire :: Vision Solutions Collaborates With IBM in Adopting Its Autonomic Computing Technologies
IRVINE, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 02/23/2004 -- Vision Solutions, a leading managed availability solutions provider, today announced that it is collaborating with IBM on its Autonomic Computing initiative, and is one of the first IBM Business Partners to adopt the groundbreaking new technologies. These technologies will create a new way of managing systems and the architecture will lay the foundation for an autonomic, self-healing infrastructure that will help users to perform problem determination and remediation more quickly and easily.
This collaboration includes the design elements and implementation of the Common Base Event format, a basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data via web services. Common Base Event was recently introduced by IBM as a common format for log/trace information.
autonomic add-on...
Guardian Unlimited | Online | IT news
Autonomic add-on
IBM's promise to create self-managing systems took a new turn this week with the release of the The Autonomic Computing Toolkit. The kit is a free download aimed at supporters of the Eclipse project, an open-source initiative, sponsored by IBM, to develop and maintain a basic framework upon which application development environments can be built. The ACT is designed to supplement these environments by providing a standard way to build self-healing applications. Included in the download are embeddable components, tools, usage scenarios and documentation that IBM says will be supplemented and expanded over the next year.
autonomic computing roadmap...
IBM :: An autonomic computing roadmap
by Nicholas Chase (nicholas@nicholaschase.com)
President, Chase & Chase, Inc.
For an autonomic computing system to discover and control events and situations, it uses a control loop that constantly monitors the system looking for events to handle. This control loop is defined by the autonomic computing reference architecture, as shown in Figure 2:
Figure 2. Control loop
The Control loop is the system by which events can be detected and dealt with. The process involves four steps:
Monitor: First, the system looks for the events, detected by the sensor from whatever source -- be it a log file or an in-memory process. The system uses the knowledge base to understand what it's looking at.
Analyze: When an event occurs, the knowledge base contains information that helps to determine what to do about it.
Plan: After the event is detected and analyzed, the system needs to determine what to do about it using the knowledge base. The symptom database might have information, or a central policy server might determine the action to take.
Execute: When the plan has been formulated, it's the effector that actually carries out the action, as specified in the existing knowledge base.
autonomic computing toolkit...
IBM delivers autonomic tools | CNET News.com
IBM's push to create systems that can manage themselves is moving from the drawing board to the commercial development community.
The company plans to release on Monday an open-source toolkit that will let programmers build autonomic, or self-managing, capabilities into their own applications. The Autonomic Computing Toolkit will be offered at IBM's DeveloperWorks Web site as a free add-on to the Eclipse Development Environment. IBM expects that software companies as well as corporate developers will use the tools.
Previously, Big Blue has used AlphaWorks, its site for prototype software, as the venue for the release of code arising from its research into autonomic computing. The shift to the DeveloperWorks site indicates that the software is fully tested and supported by IBM, said David Bartlett, the company's director of autonomic computing. He said IBM may decide to charge for the software.
IBM's autonomic computing initiative, launched in 2001, aims to create hardware and software that have the "intelligence" to monitor and manage themselves as part of a distributed computing system. It reduces the cost and complexity of operating computers by cutting back on the need for human administrators.
The overall goal is to let systems resolve problems automatically. Last year, Big Blue issued a blueprint describing the different aspects of its autonomic computing vision.
autonomic networking...
Tech Laboratories, Inc. Says Its Recently Introduced DynaTrax(TM) Virtual Technician Can Help Automate VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol)
NORTH HALEDON, N.J., Feb. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Tech Laboratories, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: TCHL - News) announced today its recently introduced DynaTraX(TM) digital switch matrix, "Virtual Technician", when placed in a digital VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) network can automate IT infrastructure/reconfiguration for both service providers and digital phone users.
The DynaTraX(TM) placed between the VoIP network equipment and IP phone users allows quick connectivity of IP phone stations to network assets automatically without human intervention.
Bernard M. Ciongoli, president of Tech Laboratories, Inc., said, "No longer do technical personnel need to enter a digital telephone closet. All connectivity or reconfiguration can be done from a management workstation. Branch office operations can be managed from either a remote or central office."
The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market already enjoys growth in the wide area network (WAN) and is positioned for robust growth in the enterprise.
The worldwide demand for VoIP equipment is expected to be much larger than traditional phone systems in the next 10 years. Driving this robust growth is the efficiency derived from a unified network for voice, data and video.
"We believe our DynaTraX(TM) system can be a value-added appliance to help automate the management of VoIP networks in the future," said Ciongoli.
The Company recently announced the introduction of DynaTraX(TM) Enterprise Management System (DEMS) to thwart the increasing threat posed by cyber terrorists. This software/hardware system provides the ultimate in positive access security. The Company also recently introduced DynaTraX(TM) Virtual Technician, which provides autonomic self-healing and self-managing of network technologies.
To view video on Tech Laboratories' comprehensive DynaTraX(TM) technology, go to the Tech Laboratories, Inc. website at www.techlabsinc.com click on "Global Network Management Communications" and download video.
autonomic networking...
Ultra-Powerful IBM Gateway System Speeds Up Storage Networking
ARMONK, NY -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 01/27/2004 -- IBM today introduced a powerful new storage system that uses POWER chips designed to speed shared data across clients' IT networks, while allowing clients to maximize their existing storage hardware investments.
The new IBM TotalStorage NAS Gateway 500 system uses POWER 4 microprocessors and networking software designed to help clients extract value from their existing storage infrastructures by providing a fast, reliable, common link to various locations where data resides. The product is designed to reduce the need to create islands of new storage systems that can require greater levels of administration and support.
"The new IBM TotalStorage NAS Gateway 500 is a key part of our Network Attached Storage strategy to deliver unparalleled benefits for customers who want to use gateways to access shared data faster and cheaper," said Leslie Swanson, vice president, IBM Storage Systems. "Today's data centers often share a mix between heterogeneous NAS and SAN technologies. The new gateway can help customers leverage current storage investments while reducing the manpower necessary to support them."
POWER Processing for Multiple Platform Environments
The gateway boasts some of IBM's most powerful and innovative technologies, combining IBM's proven AIX operating system with the stability and strength of IBM award-winning POWER processors. Agents for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, Tivoli Storage Resource Manager, and Tivoli SAN Manager are included to allow customers to manage the gateway seamlessly with the rest of their storage infrastructure. POWER processors provide NAS Gateway 500 customers with powerful file transfer performance.
Built with flexibility and openness in mind, the NAS Gateway 500 is designed to provide file serving capabilities for IBM eServer systems, IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server and IBM TotalStorage FAStT products. The gateway also supports UNIX, Linux and Windows clients. When used with IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller, the gateway can support storage servers from other vendors as well. As a result, clients have the flexibility to evolve their storage infrastructure as their business and technology needs change.
The IBM NAS Gateway 500 system incorporates autonomic computing technologies that monitor and maintain system performance, helping to free administrators to focus on critical business processes. Clients also have the option of employing the gateway's autonomic technology to report abnormal processes to IBM technicians for evaluation and corrective response.
The French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) -- a key player in research, development and innovation in the area of energy, defense, information technology, communication and health -- has had early success as a beta customer of the NAS Gateway 500. "After completing the early phases of our installation of the NAS Gateway 500, we are impressed with the performance and its ease of implementation," stated Philippe Bizeul, system infrastructure manager, CEA.
The IBM TotalStorage NAS Gateway 500 will become generally available through IBM and IBM Business Partners on February 6, 2004, with prices starting at $60,000.
autonomic data collection...
Chorus Systems Selected to Present its Systems Management Solution at Venture 2004 Conference
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C., Jan. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Chorus Systems, developer of Uptime, a leading-edge autonomic problem analysis and remediation software solution, announced today that it has been selected as a presenting company at the Venture 2004 Conference sponsored by the Council for Entrepreneurial Development. Chorus Systems was one of 7 additional companies selected to present at the Conference on April 27-28, 2004. During the first selection round in December 2003, CED chose six other innovation-based companies from North Carolina.
"We've developed a solution that can collect and assimilate a tremendous volume of systems data and boil it down to straight-forward actions that represent real savings in problem management time and cost -- all with zero impact to end users," says Sirus Chitsaz, CEO of Chorus Systems.
"Chorus Systems is an interesting young company combining a wide range of advanced technologies in creating an innovative new approach to automating support for PCs and Servers," says David Gilroy, Partner at Wakefield Group.
The final application deadline for other companies interested in presenting at Venture 2004 is Jan. 31. The Venture 2004 Selection Committee, chaired by Mike Elliott of the Wakefield Group, is seeking high growth North Carolina-based companies from an array of industries that are looking to raise either initial or subsequent rounds of professional equity capital.
Venture 2004, scheduled for April 27-28 at The Friday Center in Chapel Hill, NC, is the Southeast's premier venture financing conference. Presented by CED with support from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and the National Venture Capital Association, Venture 2004 will continue a 21-year tradition of showcasing North Carolina's hottest investment opportunities to hundreds of venture capitalists and financiers from throughout the United States. Since 1999, Venture presenters have raised over $1.5 billion in venture capital. In addition to company presentations, CED's Venture 2004 will include leading industry speakers, extensive networking opportunities and exclusive investor-only events.
