Microsoft adds BI to Dynamics GP

Microsoft has unveiled Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010, an enterprise resource planning solution for medium-size businesses that want advanced functionality, strong business intelligence (BI) reporting options and interoperability with other line-of-business applications, reports TMCnet.

Newer sets of Role Centres, Web services and the ability to complete tasks through other software are said to be some of the additions in this release.

According to Microsoft, with more than 40 000 customers in a wide range of industries, Microsoft Dynamics GP has proven itself as a flexible, powerful business management solution.

SAS Institute has developed high-performance computing model that uses HP BladeSystem Infrastructure servers configured as a private grid to process massive amounts of data, states Network World.

Analytics jobs that previously took an entire day to process can now be reduced to a few hours or even minutes. Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, and Chris Bailey, director of the Advanced Computing Lab at SAS, demonstrated the patent-pending technology on stage at the SAS Global Forum in Seattle.

The demo used five racks of blades, with 196 blades in total. Each blade had eight CPU cores, providing a total of 1 664 cores. The model processed roughly one billion records of stock market data -100 000 market states, two horizons and 4 000 instruments - in two minutes, 26 seconds.

IBM has unveiled several storage products that are designed to automate the movement of data to appropriate storage media and make it easier for users to use analytics to gain insight from the data, says Computerworld.

Driven by a rapidly growing pool of sensors and gadgets digitising information, worldwide data already vastly exceeds available storage space; yet enterprise demand for storage capacity is expected to have grown at a compound annual growth rate of over 43% between 2008 and 2013.

IBM's DS8700 disc storage system will now include IBM's System Storage Easy Tier feature, which uses performance monitoring software or data tiering technology to move only the most active data to faster solid-state drives.