Data management - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Strategies for pruning data in the Cloud

  Year after year, the cost of disk space has plummeted. Since you can pick up a terabyte for $50, it's often seemed a false economy to be careful with storage.

• Informatica rolls out data parser for Hadoop

  Informatica has strengthened its hand in the burgeoning market for Hadoop, the open-source programming framework for large-scale data processing, unveiling a new data parser on Wednesday that can transform piles of unstructured information into a more structured form for use in running Hadoop jobs.

• At Houston Bank, Disaster Recovery Goes Virtual

  The Project: Implement a hypervisor-based replication system to provide more streamlined business continuity and disaster recovery for Woodforest National Bank's virtualized data center.

• Beyond the Hype of Big Data

  Forrester estimates that, in general, firms use less than 5 percent of the data available to them. We also estimate that data is growing about 40-50 percent annually, but the average enterprise only captures around 25-30 percent of that. This means there is a bunch of data not being captured and used by your firm, and the divide is going to grow over time. So what?

• SAP Q3 profits soar on reduction of TomorrowNow provision

  SAP reported Wednesday a 14 percent increase in revenue in the third quarter ended Sept. 30, and said its business pipeline continues to remain very strong and companies continue to invest in IT. The business software vendor did not however revise its outlook for the full year 2011, citing the ongoing uncertain macroeconomic environment.

• IBM announces preconfigured analytics servers

  IBM on Wednesday introduced mainframe and Power-based systems for analytics in an effort to compete with Oracle's Exadata.

• HP completes Autonomy acquisition

  Hewlett-Packard has secured enough shares of Autonomy to take control of the UK software company.

• Data quality surfaces to spur financial services

  Poor data quality is robbing insurers and financial institutions of between 15 and 25 per cent of operating profits, exposing it as low hanging fruit for the growth-starved financial services industry.
  

• Wolfram makes data interactive

  Wolfram Research, the maker of the popular Mathematica computational software, has released a new platform for visualizing and interacting with complex data sets, the company announced Thursday.

• Don't gamble your company's reputation on data governance

  Over the last two decades, the primary contribution of information technologies in firms has been about efficiency and enablement: to improve processes, make people more productive, reduce time to market, or enable things that couldn't be done previously.

• SAP Q1 revenue up, but profits growth slow

  SAP saw revenue rise by 21 percent in the quarter ended March 31, with double-digit growth in all regions driven by increased software business from partners and the channel.

• Office 365 is mobile, but not mobile enough

  One of the most compelling aspects of Office 365 -- aside from its overall value -- is that you can access it from virtually anywhere. Because it is delivered from the cloud, the tools and services in Office 365 are not tied to a single PC or device, and data can be accessed from or synced among a desktop PC, the Web, and your smartphone...assuming you have a Windows Phone 7 smartphone.

• Savvier job scheduling with Platform, Terracotta updates

  Enterprise servers may get a lot busier, at least if their administrators adopt one of two freshly upgraded job schedulers, both of which promise greater control in the scheduling of workloads across many servers.

• NPR deploys Splunk for Web analytics

  In a novel use of the software, National Public Radio is using the Splunk log search engine to analyze Web traffic for its audio streams and downloads.

• Hadoop and Cassandra to merge in DataStax distro

  Uniting the seemingly conflicting values of fast data access and deep analysis, open-source software company DataStax is developing a package that will combine its Cassandra non-relational database with Apache Hadoop data process framework, the company announced Wednesday.