The beauty of the upgraded Veritas Cluster Server, says its maker Symantec, is this: the pinnacle level of high availability and disaster recovery that has been available in the physical world now applies to the virtual one. Not only can applications running in virtual machines be monitored, but they also can be recovered when an incident occurs. Virtual machine reboots, thus, are eliminated, keeping downtime to a minimum, allowing all users to do business even in the face of human error, system failure or natural disaster. Veritas allows users to choose how they want to architect their environment—that is, fail over from V to V, V to P or P to V. Downtime from patching, server maintenance and upgrades is eliminated, because applications can be moved between primary and secondary nodes with no disruption in business. The new version of Veritas Cluster Server works with existing VMware tools like vMotion, DRS and SRM and integrates with vCenter, such that users can continue to use the features of the native stack without compromise.
Resource-strapped IT teams face myriad challenges, including endpoint security, regulatory compliance, server management and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) issues. In an effort to face down these challenges, Dell beefed up the Dell KACE K1000 Management Appliance, which the firm describes as “an easy-to-use, comprehensive and affordable appliance that fulfills all of the systems management needs of organizations of all sizes”. Functions include initial inventory and discovery, software distribution, configuration management, patching, security vulnerability remediation, asset management, service desk and reporting. This latest v.5.4 of the K1000 adds features related to endpoint security and regulatory compliance, which are important to the financial services and healthcare industries, among others. Additionally, this version expands visibility and audit-trail capabilities made possible by the new machine inventory API. But most important, say the folks in Round Rock, the new appliance extends operating system support to Windows 8, Mac OS X Mountain Lion, Red Hat 6, Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2—a critical piece of the puzzle for IT admins for solving BYOD issues.
Adding measurement points to building automation systems can be expensive, and chart recorders tend to require a lot of maintenance. To overcome these limitations, Onset developed the HOBO Wireless Temp/RH Monitoring Kit—an easy-to-use, wireless system that includes everything needed to make environmental monitoring fast, cost-effective and convenient right out of the box. In just three steps, users can monitor critical temperature and humidity conditions, log data for trend analysis and stay notified of alarm conditions via text or e-mail—all without the hassles of wires or manual data offload. The monitoring kit is appropriate for applications in a broad range of facilities, including food processing plants, office buildings, laboratories and warehouses. The wireless kit includes HOBOnode Manager software, which allows users to view near real-time energy and environmental data, set alarm notifications and get an at-a-glance view of the system.
Arch Linux Environment Set-up How-To by Ike Devolder is a new book for people wanting to dig deeply into a Linux system. Through the years, myriad Linux distributions have sprung up, with some trying to do everything for the user, others less. Arch Linux seeks to be easy and user-friendly from the standpoint of developers and enthusiasts who want to customize their system to a maximum degree. Devolder's book aims to get the new Arch Linux user up to speed, and in true DIY style, it leaves the true experience open-ended. After covering installation and package management, Devolder develops the full Arch Linux environment step by step in a task + recipe format. The recipe as a solution consists of a carefully organized set of instructions to perform the task as efficiently as possible and a discussion on how to apply the solution in different situations.
Readers working with Big Data for enterprise BI and analytics will be pleased to learn about Attunity Replicate for Exadata, a new high-performance data replication solution designed to enable quick loading of Big Data into and out of Oracle Exadata. Attunity's solution is designed to empower Oracle customers to load data from heterogeneous data sources quickly and maintain the changed data continuously and efficiently. Core features include high-performance full loads and continuous change data capture, support for a wide range of data sources, a drag-and-drop GUI for designing and monitoring replication tasks, automatic schema generation and implementation of metadata changes on the target, and transparent data type transformations between source and target.
Today's landscape of security threats is changing as dynamically as IT environments, resulting in a prime breeding ground for vulnerabilities. To better assist organizations in dealing with the barrage of exploits and targeted attacks, BeyondTrust has upgraded Retina Community, a free vulnerability assessment tool based upon the network security scanner Retina Network. The solution helps to identify potential weaknesses and help prioritize which need to be addressed first. This new edition of Retina Community includes scanning profiles for security and compliance. IT professionals responsible for critical areas, such as servers, desktops, virtualization and databases can assess their focus area for vulnerabilities quickly and easily. Furthermore, the free license has increased to support the assessment of up to 256 assets, further reducing the attack surface in companies large and small.
Eighteenth-century British “Renaissance man” Charles Babbage developed the idea of a programmable computer and articulated the principles on which all modern computing machines are based. To keep Babbage's seminal ideas from disappearing, Dover Publications is updating the 1961 release of On the Principles and Development of the Calculator and Other Seminal Writings, a compilation of his writings and those of several of his contemporaries. The writings illuminate the work that eventually led to the development of the calculator. Interestingly, Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 from the late 1800s was able to compute the values of polynomial functions with results up to 31 digits. The ideas found in Babbage's writings are essential reading for anyone interested in the history of computing technology.
Git is great, but now it's got more with help from Perforce's Git Fusion. With Git Fusion, developers who use Git can continue to use their preferred tools, but they now have flexible new capabilities for customization, reuse and sharing of projects. Teams can use Git repositories and their components in new ways, combining them and creating new repositories by selectively reusing elements from other Git or Perforce code lines. Git Fusion also extends Perforce's enterprise version management capabilities to Git repositories, bringing added IP security and defensibility, scalability, compliance and visibility to disconnected projects. Perforce and Git Fusion are free for up to 20 users.
