By Jon William Toigo, Enterprise Systems
Numerous research and analysis firms are already projecting
information security to be the next big boom in technology spending,
and the storage guys are hoping to go along for the ride with
encryption products.
Before you jump on the storage encryption bandwagon, you need to
think things through. Security may be getting a free ride on the
backs of current and upcoming legal mandates, with an organization's
front office temporarily suspending requirements for a rigorous
business-value case for every IT acquisition proposed. But that
doesn't mean encrypting your data is the right thing to do or that
current tools are the silver bullets for getting the job done.
One statistic that keeps coming up is this: encrypting your
backups can impose a 40-percent delay on data restore rates,
assuming that you have the presence of mind to stash offsite and out
of harm's way the keys and another copy of whatever you used to
encrypt the data.
[More]
By Stephen Swoyer, Enterprise Systems
To the buyer belong the spoils, especially when the buyer in
question has ponied up $1 billion or more. So it was that IBM
co-opted last week's Ascential World customer confab and turned it
into a showcase for its stack of data integration products.
For many attendees, IBM's first-ever Information Integration
Live! event marked a coming-out party for Big Blue's master data
management strategy, and not a moment too soon. MDM is fast going
mainstream: large ISVs such as SAP and Oracle already market
MDM-specific offerings of their own, while business intelligence
players such as Hyperion Solutions, Informatica, Teradata and others
have announced MDM-related initiatives.
There's also a sense in which IBM, with its array of federated
data access, content management and metadata management
technologies, almost seems late to the party. Dan Druker, director
of master data management with IBM, disputes this idea. For
starters, Druker says, MDM is a good fit for Big Blue's overall
information integration strategy. "IBM has historically talked about
On Demand, and what we're seeing is that as companies move to
service-oriented architectures, they're seeing information more and
more as a service, and this [information service-enablement] is
really what we've been trying to do with all of our integration
technologies."
[More]
By ADT Staff
LiveTime Software, a provider of Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based
service management software, has announced the general availability
of the LiveTime Appliance, which the company claims is the
industry's first service management appliance.
Designed exclusively for 64-bit operation, the appliance has been
specifically optimized for high concurrent access, fault tolerance,
and security and is based on Sun's Solaris 10, according to the
company.
The appliance is designed for organizations that want a pre-
configured, hardened service and support solution with no
maintenance, LiveTime says. Customers can use built-in MySQL or
PostgreSQL RDBMS, or connect to any third-party database such as
Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase and many others.
[More]
Services by
Design
In the most radical articulation of
service enablement, traditional software development will be almost
entirely supplanted by a virtual paradigm which disparate Web
services are orchestrated dynamically to power composite
applications.
The Leap from Illusion to
Fusion
Following its acquisitions of
PeopleSoft and Siebel, Oracle is touting a strategy it calls Project
Fusion that it says will bring its products together. Meanwhile,
detractors point out fusion can also blow things apart.
Middleware is in the Open,
Finally
Until recently, middleware for the
open-source community meant app servers, and open-source app servers
usually meant JBoss. Today, there are more options.
