High reliability and system availability are absolutely crucial for database and the underlying server hardware. A 67% majority of organizations now require that their databases deliver a minimum of four, five or six "nines" of uptime for their most mission critical applications. That is the equivalent of 52 seconds to 52 minutes of unplanned downtime per database/per annum. Those are the results of ITIC's 2013 - 2014 Database Reliability and Deployment Trends Survey, an independent Web-based survey which polled 600 organizations worldwide from August through October 2013. IBM DB2 and Informix databases, followed closely by Microsoft SQL Server, achieved the highest overall reliability and customer satisfaction ratings for product performance, security, technical service and support and the value of its pricing and licensing agreements. Oracle DB scored high for reliability and performance but lagged far behind IBM and Microsoft in customer satisfaction with pricing, licensing and technical support.

In this Advisory, Clabby Analytics looks more closely at the importance of implementing an integrated infrastructure - and its relationship to business analytics. The paper will examine the business analytics workloads, discuss how these workloads put different demands on the underlying systems and infrastructure, and provide guidance designing an integrated business analytics environment that will provide organizations with high performance, resiliency, and a scalable growth path.

Forward-thinking organizations are recognizing the superiority of Power Systems technology. The Power Systems family offers the ultimate system for today's compute intensive business applications and databases. Power Systems continues to prove itself as the ultimate system for compute intensive workloads, high performance analytics, high performance UNIX, and high performance computing.

The cloud decision may be the easy part. For most businesses, the benefits promised by cloud computing - including agility, process optimization, speed to market, and cost reduction - warrant a closer look, if not a test drive. At least at the decision-table, curiosity and hope in the potential for transformation are winning out over caution. This practical guide offers steps for moving your company into the cloud, at whatever pace you prefer, with a focus on the SmartCloud Services portfolio offered by IBM and its partners.

It's not easy being today's CIO. As growing numbers of employees bring their own computing devices to work, CIOs are faced with a tough choice: Find a secure way to let employees conduct business on their own devices - or simply say no. If you'd rather say yes, read the article to learn how IBM balances openness and risk management in the enterprise mobile workplace. You'll take away five steps to consider when embarking on a "bring your own device" (BYOD) program.

IT managers and industry experts talk a lot about performance and capacity, but those are often only replacement terms for the real issue: economics. Storage decisions are only necessary because of economics -- otherwise all data would be stored in main memory. With the data avalanche always looming and growing, two key trends are critical: simply storing less, and then tiering or caching what is ultimately stored.