SMS is an automated storage management system that removes many of the manual procedures that are associated with managing datasets, such as determining which volume a dataset should be stored on, calculating the amount of space to allocate to the dataset, and determining when a dataset is no longer needed and can therefore be deleted or moved to off-line storage. When creating a dataset under SMS, you assign that dataset to a pre-defined storage class, management class and data class. By specifying the class, SMS will perform the required operations automatically. In addition, an installation can set up automatic class selection (ACS) routines, which will automatically pick the SMS classes based on the dataset name.
Outsourcing in IT Industries
Outsourcing, or the use of third-party service providers, is a business strategy that is being considered more frequently by IT and financial institutions as they respond to an increasingly competitive marketplace. While not new, many of the activities currently being outsourced, such as information systems, business processes and internal audit, are integral to the functioning of the organization, vital to supporting core businesses and create dependencies upon service providers. Given the scale and prevalence of these types of arrangements, outsourcing raises potential supervisory concerns.
Trends in Computer Technology
Computer electronics are experiencing an extraordinary drop in price, increase in power, and reduction in size. On the other hand Software technology is expanding steadily, although not as rapidly as the hardware. New software techniques will allow computers to process a wider variety of data. Software technology is the limiting factor in controlling the rate at which new applications appear.
Cloud Strategy is Essential
At the core of cloud computing—whether you’re using a public cloud service, building your own private cloud, or taking a hybrid cloud approach—is the need to have your specific requirements incorporated into a well-developed cloud strategy. It’s not a simple exercise, as your cloud road map must address all aspects of your performance, security, control, and availability requirements……
Disaster Recovery High on List of IT Pros’ Concerns, Study Finds…..
As an IT professional, what would you say are the top three concerns that keep you awake at night? According to the results of a recent survey, your peers listed security, downtime (disaster recovery), and talent management, in that order.
The survey was commissioned by Sungard Availability Services, a cloud computing, disaster recovery, and managed hosting services provider based in Wayne, Pa. I had the opportunity to discuss the findings with Ric Jones, CIO at LifeShare Blood Centers, a blood donation services provider in Shreveport, La., that’s a Sungard AS customer. Jones ranked disaster recovery ahead of security on his own list of concerns, but he indicated that the two are inextricably linked.
“Disaster recovery is extremely important to the success of LifeShare Blood Centers. If the primary data center in Shreveport experiences downtime for even a few hours, it disrupts the nonprofit’s ability to collect the data needed to gather and distribute critical, life-saving blood supply,” Jones explained. Continue reading
BMC Engage: Defending IT in an Increasingly Digitized Cloud World
I’m starting to feel like a coast-to-coast ping pong ball because this week I am in Orlando at BMC Engage 2014. BMC is undergoing a transformation that, to a certain extent, mirrors the transformation that IT itself is undergoing. It is shifting from being a firm that was largely known for providing management services on mainframes to a firm that is enabling ever more socially engaged services across a variety of platforms, the cloud, and for users that are increasingly on a new class of mobile devices.
The turnaround for BMC is proceeding very well. It now has the resources to do a major show like Engage again, and the size of the audience at this event is in line with the groups that firms like IBM, HP, and Microsoft attract. This post is on the opening keynote.
BMC’s Turnaround
The keynote opened with a review of where BMC is. It is now private and doing so well that it has been able to increase its investment in the business by $120M. It has reorganized to focus the efforts of the firm on innovation and customer success, and done a major executive change-out, attracting top names from a who’s who of firms in the IT space. In effect, BMC is from top to bottom about as close as you can get to a new company.
Era of Digitalization
The industry is in its third age. The first age was craftsmanship (mainframe/terminal), the second age was IT industrialization (client/server/LAN/Internet), and the third is digitization. Digitization is basically virtualizing the real world in data. Elements of this have social aspects; they increasingly reside on cloud resources, and they create massive repositories (Big Data), which in turn are turned into actionable information (analytics). Continue reading
Information Technology
When people hear the words “Information Technology,” the first things that come to mind are computers and the Internet. It may also bring up words like “network,” “intranet,” “server,” “firewall,” “security,” as well as more arcane expressions such as “router,” “T-1,” “Ethernet,” or the mysterious and exotic-sounding “VoIP” (pronounced “voyp”). In fact, information technology is all of these things, and more. It’s hardly new, however. Information technology is as old as the brain itself, if you think of the brain as an information processor. As far as I.T. being a science, even that goes back as far as the earliest attempts to communicate and store information. Continue reading
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