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Storage grid collaboration; new Tivoli Decision Support for OS/390; renaming .NET Enterprise Server

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 04/22/2003

IBM, CERN Collaborate on Massive Storage Grid

IBM Corp. and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) last month announced an initiative whereby IBM will join the CERN openlab for DataGrid applications and collaborate on creating a massive data-management system based on grid computing technology.

CERN openlab is collaboration between CERN and leading industrialpartners to create and implement data-intensive grid computing technologies that will aid scientists working with its Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is a next-generation particle accelerator designed to recreate the conditions that are believed to have existed shortly after the Big Bang.

IBM says that its Storage Tank technology will play a central role in support of the LHC. Storage Tank is an IBM project that is designed to provide a storage management framework in a heterogeneous, distributed environment, and is said to provide I/O performance comparable to that of bus-attached high-performance storage.

The goal of the IBM/CERN collaboration is to create a data system far larger than any today in existence to help scientists at the CERN’s particle physics research center understand fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the universe. The hope is that researchers will be able to determine what happened in the initial seconds immediately after the Big Bang when the universe is believed to have formed. This data will be made available to CERN researchers and colleagues working at the LHS or connecting from all over the world.

IBM and CERN will work together to extend StorageTank's capabilities so it can manage and provide access from any location worldwide to this data. By 2005, the CERN openlab collaboration with IBM is expected to be able to handle up to a petabyte of data.

When it goes online in 2007, the LHC is expected to produce billions of gigabytes of data annually.

As part of the agreement, several storage management experts from IBM's Almaden Research Center (San Jose, Calif.) and Haifa Research Lab (Haifa, Israel) will work with the CERN openlab team to create key Storage Tank extensions required by the LHC environment. Big Blue says that it will also provide the system’s first 20 terabytes of high-performance disk storage, along with six Linux-based servers.

IBM Switzerland is expected to provide additional support.

IBM Preps Tivoli Decision Support Update for OS/390, z/OS

IBM announced version 1.6.0 of Tivoli Decision Support for OS/390, a reporting tool that correlates system performance data.

Tivoli Decision Support for OS/390 consolidates and organizes z/OS subsystem data in order to feed business process solutions that are built on top of the Big Blue’s Tivoli Data Warehouse.

The new reporting tool addresses performance reporting, capacity management, and resource availability management, along with accounting and chargeback requirements.

It also collects, organizes in a DB2 database, and converts raw standard systems management data into business relevant information. In this respect, IBM says, it can help to improve operational planning, cost management, responsiveness and decision-making processes.

New in Tivoli Decision Support for OS/390 1.6.0 is a zSeries enablement pack that moves subsets of data generated by z/OS subsystems to the DB2 schema of the new Tivoli Data Warehouse infrastructure.

Tivoli Decision Support for OS/390 1.6.0 will be available June 27th. Support for Tivoli Data Warehouse will be available by August 29th, IBM says.

.NET Enterprise Servers Renamed by Scott Bekker(Courtesy of ENTMag.com)

It's been clear from Microsoft's naming announcements of the last few months that the .NET Enterprise Server products would have a new name shortly. The official word came down this week that the new name is Windows Server System.

The Windows Server System name will now serve as the umbrella term for server-based Microsoft products including SQL Server, Exchange Server, BizTalk Server, Commerce Server, Content Management Server, Host Integration Server, Project Server, Real-Time Communications Server, Internet Security & Acceleration Server, Systems Management Server, Microsoft Operations Manager and Application Center.

The name change is similar to Microsoft's recent announcement involving Office, which is now the Microsoft Office System. Both product groups appear to include SharePoint Office Portal Server 2003.

One significant aspect of the renaming is that it signals that Microsoft is unlikely to take the advice of some industry observers in broadening the appeal of some products, especially SQL Server, to support other operating systems.

Read the complete story at http://www.entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=5784.