IBM unveils cloud monitoring service

IBM is going live with an on-demand system monitoring service aimed at small to medium firms, reports V3.

The Tivoli Live Monitoring Service is designed to monitor up to 500 resources such as operating systems, applications and devices on the network. Should an outage or bottleneck occur, the IT manager is alerted to the problem via a management console.

In some cases the software also has the capability to 'self-heal' by sorting out problems automatically. "With digital information as the lifeblood of more organisations, even the smallest companies or divisions consider the data centre's functionality mission-critical," says Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli.

EMC has unveiled its FAST technology, which adds automatic tiering capability to its storage systems, enabling them to dynamically move data around so that the most accessed information is on the fastest media such as Flash drives, states Computing.co.uk.

FAST, which stands for Fully Automated Storage Tiering, was revealed earlier this year when EMC introduced its Symmetrix V-Max storage arrays, but is only now officially available on select Symmetrix, Clariion and Celerra products.

The technology enables tiered storage to be optimised for performance, typically by automatically moving the most frequently accessed data to the fastest media, which today means enterprise Flash drives.

Cisco Systems and British Telecom are creating a cloud-based service to offer businesses hosted unified communications services, says eWeek.

The goal of the partnership is to enable cash-strapped companies in a difficult economy a way to take advantage of the benefits of UC without having the extensive upfront capital costs of installing the applications on site.

The hosted IP telephony services will be accessed through BT's Onevoice UCC portfolio and hosted on its next-generation 21CN global platform. Cisco Services will build the underlying infrastructure using Cisco and third-party hardware and software.