Stories about: Tivoli

IBM on Wednesday launched a collaborative research initiative with two US universities Big Blue says could ultimately deliver software applications that enable self-managing virtual data centers and automation in cloud computing environments.

IBM, Google, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo have joined the corporate board of the OpenID Foundation, giving a boost to the group's efforts to simplify the process of signing into Web sites.

IBM unveiled a website and IT security software application Thursday as part of its effort to compete with HP and Sun Microsystems for customers in the fast-growing small and medium business sector.

Red Hat has changed the pricing model for its SaaS-based system monitoring and added support for more software packages, the company said on Wednesday.

If you curse your "tier-one" IT management solution as too cumbersome, too complex, and too expensive, you're not alone. In arecent Gartner study that declares the "Big Four" -- BMC, CA, HP, and IBM -- increasingly vulnerable to SaaS (software as a service) and open source alternatives, surveyed users gave their vendors mostly C's and D's, and a good number of incompletes.

IBM coined the term autonomic computing in 2001 and since then has been beating the automation drum across its software and hardware product lines. The premise of a self-healing, self-protecting, self-optimizing and self-managing data centre caused some industry watchers to scoff, but Big Blue stuck to its plans and now has about 450 autonomic features shipping in 70 or so IBM products. Now with virtualization, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and other innovative technologies increasing complexity across corporate data centres, IBM says automation is needed more than ever. Ric Telford, vice president of autonomic computing at IBM, recently talked with Denise Dubie to learn more about the state of the company's autonomic initiative.

Vitria Technology and CA are ready to release service-oriented architecture software products aimed at letting customers more easily monitor and fix problems that occur in an SOA environment.

With many of today's systems and network management tools tied to physical machines, silicon valley start-up Qlusters is touting its open source openQRM suite as a bridge to the virtual world.

The Zurich-based research lab at IBM has come up with a new approach to shield sensitive information, such as credit card number or medical data, in document exchange.

A former network engineer turned author and open source software developer, Taylor Dondich says applications such as Nagios provide a viable low-cost, high-performance alternative to commercial IT management and monitoring tools. Dondich recently discussed with Denise Dubie the evolution of open source management applications, the emergence of commercial vendor support packages and why the time is right for IT managers to consider open source for their IT monitoring needs.

Companies running virtual servers will soon find them easier to back up as the list of software vendors supporting VMware grows, but the cost to backup could vary significantly depending on whether vendors charge a fee based on virtual or physical servers.