gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

I just finished reading Understanding Big Data – Analytics for Enterprise Class Hadoop and Streaming Data by Paul C. Zikopoulos, Chris Eaton, Dirk deRoos, Thomas Deutsch, and George Lapis.

I think the book was distributed to everyone in Software Group Austria and while we also certainly have exciting technology in our WebSphere part of the SWG business I must say I’m now very excited about the opportunity Big Data offers.

The book starts with explaining the business challenges Big Data can help address and then talks about the technical solutions, toolkits, and capabilities IBM brings to the table to address those business challenges. It’s a quite entertaining and interesting read and while it’s not too technical it gets you excited about Big Data and helps you identify business challenges that might be addressed by using InfoSphere BigInsights and InfoSphere Streams.

We’ll also have an IBM Software Experience event in Q1 this year. This time we chose to do a PoT on Batch Modernization with Java on February 17. In this one-day workshop you’ll get to know WebSphere Compute Grid and Java-based batch.

If you would like to attend, please complete our registration form on the IBM Software Experience page.

We plan on having additional PoTs throughout the year, so if you have suggestions for topics which might be of interest, please let us know!

On Friday we announced our new IBM zEnterprise 196.

While many things are new I believe the most important change was that for the first time ever we bring the management of the IBM System z down to distributed workloads. zLinux was already a great way to run Linux workloads on System z, but with this capability we make it possible to manage workloads through a single system and use the capabilities of System x blades to extend mainframe capabilities and their associated management capabilities into distributed CPU-intensive workloads.

I find it highly interesting that a major enabler for this integration was the wide adoption and availability of a key mainframe technology on x86 systems – virtualization.

The introduction to zOS course I’m taking is getting more and more timely by the day :-)

You can read more about the hybrid support of the zEnterprise in Jim Porell’s guest post on our Smarter Planet blog.

Telekom Austria and IBM announced today that they agreed on a strategic partnership to provide managed services and cloud computing to small and medium businesses in Austria.

Today my Notes mail db was migrated to a pair of zLinux mainframes in Portsmouth as part of Project Big Green.

Migrating my Notes mail db was pretty painless given that most of the work was probably done by my colleagues who maintain the servers last night, but I’m still surprised how well it worked out considering the size of the effort. After all, the old Domino server I was on served a large part of eastern europe.

Due to the enthusiastic attendance of our IBM Software Experience last year we also planned some great workshops for you in 2010!

We start in Q1 with a workshop about Rational Application Framework for WebSphere and WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance and a separate workshop a week later about WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition.

We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as the ones we had last year! – If you have suggestions for workshops in 2H10, please let us know!

At the IBM site this announcement was hard to miss. I can’t wait to see it in action.

After getting the announcement for ISA 4.1 blue a few days ago I went ahead and installed it today. I seem to have missed the changes in 4.0 because I really happen to like the case manager feature. It has a lot of potential. In the past I was always annoyed when more and more debug tools were only available through ISA, but now I can see why. You get all the updates that are available through one interface without hunting for them separately and it’s really nice to have the gathered stuff in one place even if there is no opened PMR and given that customers can’t download files that were uploaded to ECuRep it will be even more useful. In addition you can easily share the collected files including all notes. So go ahead and try the latest IBM Support Assistant and I hope you’ll find it as useful as I am.

On Tuesday IBM Forum Vienna hosted several presentations and workshops as part of IBM Software Experience 2009 and the presentations are now available online.

Wolfgang and I held the IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Hands-on Workshop and it was great. We had a bunch of very interested clients there and some of them not only made it through the lab but also to our event in the evening :-)

No, Lotus is not the only IBM software brand that software users see.

And I’m not talking about developers or the “user interface” of Tivoli Storage Manager.

The following is not a full list, just the products I know – in alphabetical order:

• InfoSphere Master Data Management for Product Information Management [Information Management]
• Maximo [Information Management]
• Personal Communications [Rational]
• Tivoli Identity Manager [Tivoli]
• WebSphere Business Modeler [WebSphere]
• WebSphere Commerce [WebSphere]