Luxury car makers Audi and Mercedes took differing approaches to generating brand awareness during the 2013 Super Bowl: Audi, through its “Prom” big game commercial and subsequent #BraveryWins hash tag campaign on Twitter; Mercedes via its “Soul” big game commercial, featuring a few high-profile celebrities and a very aggressive price point, appealing to a younger [...]
21
Feb
Are We Under A DDoS Attack?
Ensuring reliability and security of the IT infrastructure at a bank is not an easy task. It gets harder when the bank is very popular, with many branches spread across the country. The potential sources that can affect the end user experience (EUE) range from the internal infrastructure and the internal banking application through various [...]
The other day I ran a Pig script. Nothing fancy; I loaded some data into HBase and then ran a second Pig job to do some aggregations. I knew the data loading would take some time as it was multiple GB of data, but I expected the second aggregation job to run much faster. It [...]
For the past decades, mainframe experts have been tasked with tuning their systems, applications, databases and individual DB2 SQL executions. Traditional Monitoring and Application Performance Management (APM) tools provide useful insight to support these tasks. APM for the Mainframe is therefore well established and saves more money by optimizing MIPS and MSUs than these performance [...]
No matter which team you were cheering for (or if you even watched the game at all), Super Bowl Sunday 2013 was more than a football game. Since the late 1990s, Super Bowl advertisers have tried to successfully link their TV ads to their online properties, sometimes with mixed results. Even 15 years later, companies [...]
The other day I was looking at a web application that was using MongoDB as its central database. We were analyzing the application for potential performance problems and inside 5 minutes I detected what I must consider to be a MongoDB anti pattern and had a 40% impact on response time. The funny thing: It [...]
Bon-Ton operates 273 stores in 23 states of the US and offers online shopping through fifteen active WebSphere application servers hosted in two eCommerce data centers. 85% of its online eCommerce content is served through Akamai which is smart and necessary in order to serve the 25 million requests they see on their web site [...]
By Trever Scott, Senior Director/IT Leader of Information Technology at Dole Fresh Fruit North America As Senior Director/IT Leader of Information Technology at Dole Fresh Fruit North America, I am responsible for providing consistent and reliable distribution services for our division. Dole’s mission is to provide our customers with safe, healthy, high-quality products and services. [...]
A couple of weeks ago we helped a customer get more visibility into his production environment with Compuware dynaTrace. He was already using it in other environments, so he knew what he was getting. Anyway, a couple of hours later I read a tweet from him: “Just hooked up dynaTrace. Can’t wait for tomorrows traffic [...]
Since the early days of the technology industry, “wanna be” upstarts have followed a simple strategy – bash the category leader. Today, blogs make it easy for those less well known to make silly claims in an attempt to attract attention. While we are flattered that the “wanna bes” recognize us as the leader in [...]
