IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled new technologies designed to help organizations with today’s greatest challenges, including the need for improved security, the ability to take advantage of cloud computing, and the requirement to manage and analyze vast amounts of data. The new offerings include the most powerful enterprise Power Systems to date, a new high-end disk storage system and key software updates for IBM’s newest mainframe computer.
The announcement is part of IBM’s continued focus on Smarter Computing systems aimed at solving the varied and intensifying challenges organizations are facing, from security vulnerabilities to managing ballooning data volumes that are expanding through social and mobile technologies.
IBM customer Toyota Australia is one example of a company with complex data management needs. Running a sophisticated just-in-time manufacturing, logistics and parts operation at its Altona plant in Melbourne, Toyota Australia uses a series of IBM Power servers running SAP software on AIX to manage and analyze data about vehicle parts availability, shipping estimates, inventory levels and sales planning. The manufacturing process is entirely reliant on this infrastructure in order for production operations to run as efficiently as possible so that not only can its dealerships receive car deliveries on time to meet consumer demand but it can meet export market demand.
According to Toyota Australia CIO James Scott, “One of our company’s top concerns is data management delays. This has the potential to negatively impact our production line, costing us tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, and the profits of our 250 dealerships across the country. Having a fast, reliable technology infrastructure is critical to the success of our business and IBM gives us the tools we need to support the organization most effectively.”
New Power Systems Tout POWER7+, Elastic Capacity on Demand and Fast Business Analytics
As a result of more than $1.4 billion in R&D investment, IBM today is announcing itsenterprise Power Systems with new hardware and software innovations designed to help customers gain business insights fast and securely.
IBM Power 770 and Power 780 servers now feature the new POWER7+ microprocessor, a technology that offers a performance boosts of 30 to 40 percent on application workloads compared with previous versions. Among its many features, the POWER7+ offers an expanded 2.5x L3 cache memory, greater security with faster file encryption for the IBM AIX operating system, and memory compression that results in no increased energy usage over previous generation POWER7 chips.
At the top of the Power line, the Power 795 server has been enhanced to enable customers to run very demanding applications, such as business analytics, fast by utilizing up to 16 terabytes of memory with new 64GB Dual In Line Memory Modules (DIMM).
In addition, IBM has added several new capabilities to its family of Power Systems servers to help customers build virtualized private cloud or managed service cloud infrastructures, and respond dynamically to changes in application and workload requirements. Elastic Capacity on Demand for Power Systems Pools, for example, enables the sharing of resources across multiple servers, which can improve the availability and enhance the access to resources during planned and unplanned maintenance activities.
When managing a cloud-based infrastructure with IBM PowerVM virtualization software, customers can now more easily move individual server partitions to quickly balance resources in reaction to changing business needs. Single virtual machines can be moved three times faster and concurrent migrations can occur up to 4.7 times faster than with previous versions
The average corporate IT infrastructure is cyber-attacked nearly 60,000 times every day and the average total organizational cost of a data breach is $5.5 million, making security one of the top priorities of enterprise organizations. To enhance data security and regulatory compliance, IBM PowerSC security and compliance software along with Trusted Surveyor has been updated and now provides real-time security alerts and delivers improved compliance reporting.
IBM Accelerates Enterprise Storage Capabilities for Big Data
The deluge of information organizations continue to grapple with is posing increasingly dynamic challenges for IT administrators. Mounting data volumes are not only stressing system performance and manageability, but security as well. To help customers respond to these challenges, IBM today solidified two of its high-end storage systems with dramatic performance and security updates.
The IBM System Storage DS8870 is the newest and most powerful member of the company’s DS8000 family of “high-density” enterprise class storage systems. Upgraded with the advanced IBM POWER7 processors and up to 1TB of system cache, the DS8870 delivers up to three times more performance for transaction processing applications than the current DS8800 model. What’s more, according to the Storage Performance Council, the DS8870 has also achieved the number one ranking in its standardized SPC-2 benchmark result. In addition, the DS8870 comes standard with full self-encrypting drives for additional security.
On the tape storage front, IBM updated the IBM Virtualization Engine TS7700 Release 3, a system that melds virtualization with magnetic tape. The system is an update of the TS7700 Enterprise Virtual Tape Library System, which is typically used in enterprises powered by mainframes and is designed to help administrators virtualize their existing tape storage systems for improved manageability, capacity and security. The Virtualization Engine takes the system to new levels of each, with end-to-end encryption and the ability to connect up to six systems in a grid architecture for greater access to information, as well as redundancy.
The new Technical Computing for Big Data solution includes IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS), an advanced file management platform often used in high performance computing environments for storing and delivering large volumes of data for weather modeling, oil exploration and digital media production. Combining GPFS with the latest IBM Platform Symphony scheduler and application platform, as well as the IBM Intelligent Cluster, delivers enterprise clients a scalable, high performance environment for analytics.
