Stories by: Beth Schultz

How to optimize, accelerate and otherwise ignite application performance

Managing data stockpiles can be tough. These technologies can help ease the difficulty.

US Navy servicemen and women don their blues, whites or khakis, depending on the occasion and task at hand. For systems engineers at the Navy's Surface Combat Systems Center, however, the color of choice these days is green.

Thanks to virtualization and a host of other technologies, storage has left its silo. Its performance affects the whole computing shebang. Fortunately, new technologies that cross the boundaries of storage, management and compliance are smoothing over performance issues and easing the pain (and expense).

Spun off from the broader storage-resource management market, these tools monitor and report on backups across multiple vendors' backup products. In doing so, they can ease the auditing process. They create a way to implement chargeback programs for backups. They let network executives offer and verify service-level agreements for backups, and more.

For the past five years, Dave Bartlett has been IBM's chief authority guiding large enterprises on how best to use self-managing technologies and standards. Today, as vice-president of industry solutions, Bartlett is charged with using his autonomic-computing expertise to create highly repeatable, end-to-end packages that any company in a vertical market segment could implement easily. Here he delivers a status report to Beth Schultz about autonomic computing, a foundational New Data Center concept.