August 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Pimp my datacenter wrap-up: Photos and words
It's been a while since the first Pimp My Datacenter article ran, but there's more information to come. To begin, take a look at some of the images from the air-conditioning installation.
Posted by Curt Franklin on August 11, 2008 03:00 PM
January 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)
mValent advances configuration management
MValent with its Integrity v5 product for change and configuration management is adding capabilities for provisioning configuration settings to large-scale distributed environments.
Also featured is detection and management of configuration changes and change reporting for IT audit and compliance.
Intended for large enterprises, mValent Integrity v5 offers automated deployment tools that provision configuration settings across multiple hosts and locations, the company said. This alleviates labor-intensive, error-prone manual efforts that can delay rollouts of new applications or upgrades, according to mValent.
Changes can be made to application infrastructure including application servers, Web servers, database servers and OSes. These changes can be sent out to thousands of servers simultaneously, said Jim Hickey, chief marketing officer at mValent.
A Java API featured in v5 enables integration with other tools such as ticketing systems or configuration management databases.
Also featured in Integrity v5 is the addition of analytical capabilities to its "Compare" tool, which pinpoints configuration inconsistencies that can cause downtime. A new automated change dashboard helps IT managers head off change compliance problems.
Available Tuesday, an entry-level configuration costs around $150,000.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 22, 2008 06:32 AM
November 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Shacking up with Leopard: Apple's OS X Leopard hit the North American market one week ago this evening, prompting Tom Yager to swing by the Apple store, MacBook Pro in hand, then make a beeline for an isolation chamber (the local Holiday Inn) for an intensive evaluation. (Nothing gets between Yager and a new Mac OS.) While we wait for the resulting review, you can track his progress on Enterprise Mac. For the quick-and-dirty on what Leopard will mean to users, the best places to start are two of Tom's recent posts to Ahead of the Curve, "Apple OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrad" and Tom's "Leopard: Not an OS, but a system you operate".
Small (and cheap) project management: If Microsoft Project is more than enough, free and open source OpenProj might be just enough. Curt "Dr. Gantt" Franklin takes the tidy project manager for a spin in SMB IT.
Help your datacenter help itself: The self-checking and "phone home" features in many server and storage systems use the Axeda ServiceLink service-monitoring system. A new offering from Axeda, called ServiceLink for Datacenters, brings these remote access links under a central management portal -- reducing the risk of data exposure, reports Storage Insider Mario Apicella.
Welcome to Estonia: If you think your business is immune to the kind of massive distributed denial of service attack that shoved Estonia off of the Internet, think again, advises our Security Advisor, Roger Grimes.
Posted by Doug Dineley on November 2, 2007 12:05 PM