IBM Boosts Smarter Computing Initiative to Help Customers Tackle Big Data
- New IBM Smarter Storage approach provides for greater performance, efficiencies
- Real-time Compression, LTFS management, and Tivoli upgrades lift storage systems
- IBM makes technical computing more accessible to enterprise customers
- IBM Platform Computing software enables technical computing systems to deliver faster results
ARMONK, N.Y. - IBM (NYSE: IBM) today accelerated its Smarter Computing initiative by announcing a broad array of performance and efficiency enhancements to its storage and technical computing systems - the engines of Big Data.
As part of its ongoing Smarter Computing effort, IBM today announced a new strategic approach to designing and managing storage infrastructures with greater automation and intelligence, as well as significant performance enhancements to several key storage systems and the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center suite. At the same time, the company announced its first offerings that incorporate software from IBM's acquisition of Platform Computing earlier this year. These offerings are intended to help a broader set of enterprise customers use technical computing to achieve faster results with applications that require substantial computing resources to process growing volumes of data.
"Enterprises are dealing with data that is increasing exponentially in both size and complexity," said Rod Adkins, senior vice president of IBM Systems & Technology Group. "The enhanced systems and storage solutions we're announcing today have the performance, efficiency and intelligence to handle this Big Data. This is smarter computing that allows our clients to organize and analyze their data to better understand and serve their customers."
IBM Smarter Storage for Smarter Computing
Constructing and evolving storage infrastructures to better respond to constant social, economic, and business change is critical to the long-term viability of every organization. To do it right, they need a smarter approach to storage - an approach that exploits automated intelligence to increase the efficiency, utilization, and performance of storage systems while lowering costs.
According to a survey of more than 300 global CIOs conducted by IBM and IDC, the most efficient companies have been able to spend more than 50 percent on new projects that were transformative to their business.
By implementing techniques such as virtualization, de-duplication, automated tiering and cataloging, IT leaders are able to reduce the amount of time their architects spend provisioning storage by up to 50 percent as well as reduce the cost by up to 20 percent.
With more than 256 petabytes of client data managed, IBM has been building a portfolio of products and technologies for the past several years toward this end and today announced a formal approach behind it called IBM Smarter Storage. With this approach, customers are able to architect storage infrastructures that leverage such leading edge technologies as Real-time Compression and automated tiering to help get more performance out of their systems, faster and for less cost.
To drive this initiative further, IBM is announcing enhancements to a several key products. For example, it is adding Real-time Compression to IBM Storwize V7000, as well as to the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), the company's industry-leading storage virtualization system.
Unlike traditional storage systems that compress only "low activity" data, or data not frequently accessed, Real-time Compression on the Storwize V7000 and SVC systems compresses active data by as much as 80 percent, increasing total effective storage capacity by up to five times.(1) In addition to Real-time Compression, IBM also added four-way clustering support for Storwize V7000 block systems that can double the maximum system capacity to 960 drives or 1.4 petabytes.
"From the move to electronic records to the ballooning sizes of medical images, storage in medical centers as large as ours, is rapidly becoming ground zero for Big Data," said Rick Haverty, director of information systems division at the University of Rochester Medical Center. "IBM has recognized the need to start approaching the management of the growing data volumes in a strategic, smarter way, through built-in intelligence, automation, and the cloud, to gain greater performance, reliability and better economics."
IBM added efficiency and performance boosts to several other systems as well, including:
- IBM System Storage DS3500, designed for small and mid-sized
organizations and DCS3700, designed with high density for high
performance computing environments, now feature Enhanced FlashCopy
capabilities that result in 50 percent more snapshots, designed to speed
up backups; and thin provisioning, which helps increase utilization of
disk storage while lowering storage costs by reserving unused pools of
storage for applications on an as-needed basis;
- IBM Tape System Library Manager (TSLM) is new software that expands and
can simplify the use of IBM TS3500 tape libraries by providing customers
a single, consolidated view of multiple libraries. The TSLM works with
multiple generations of enterprise and LTO-based drives and media to
store data into a single reservoir of tape that can be managed from a
central point through IBM Tivoli Storage Manager;
- IBM Linear Tape File System (LTFS) Storage Manager is new software that
provides lifecycle management of multimedia files, such as large video
files, to customers using IBM LTO 5 tape libraries and IBM's LTFS
Library Edition. As a result, video archive licensing costs can be
dramatically lowered, as well as video tape cartridge costs.
- New enhancements to the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC)
suite will enable organizations to better manage big data storage
requirements. With a new web-based user interface, TPC can radically
change the way IT managers view and manage their storage
infrastructures. Also new to TPC is the integration of IBM Cognos, which
provides intuitive reporting and modelling that can enable customers to
easily create high-quality ad hoc and customized reports for better
decision making. TPC offers simplified packaging that provides
comprehensive management, discovery, configuration, performance and
replication in a single license.
In addition to these new enhancements, IBM will advance the Smarter Storage approach further in the future when it announces plans to extend its IBM Easy Tier capabilities to direct-attached, server-based SSDs to help customers coordinate data migration between their disk systems and servers. IBM Easy Tier automatically moves data to the most appropriate storage, including multiple tiers of disk and SSD, based on policy and activity.
IBM Strengthens Technical Computing Portfolio for Enterprise Clients
Once considered the domain of supercomputing, workloads such as simulations, computer modeling and analytics are increasingly being adopted by a broader set of mainstream clients to drive business benefits.
In order to make technical computing easier to use, IBM is enhancing its portfolio of hardware platforms with software to create integrated solutions that can help enterprises more quickly derive value from high performance applications that require a lot of computing power and data. At the same time, IBM is committed to maintaining support for non-IBM systems with existing Platform Computing partners. The highlights of what IBM is announcing today include:
- The IBM Platform Symphony family, a grid manager that is now integrated
with the MapReduce software framework to provide faster throughput and
performance for demanding analytics and big data workloads in a single
grid environment. Platform Symphony's resource sharing model makes it
cost-efficient for clients to expand their analytics environment as
needed.
- The IBM System x Intelligent Cluster integrated with IBM Platform HPC
software to simplify cluster deployment, deliver results more quickly
and improve productivity so clients can focus on research and analysis
instead of managing their IT infrastructure.
- The High Performance Computing (HPC) Cloud portfolio from IBM expanded
with the new IBM Platform Cluster Manager offering as well as IBM
Platform LSF to provide clients with a shared pool of cloud resources
available from anywhere, making it easy to create and manage HPC clouds.
The new IBM Platform Cluster Manager enables clients to self-provision
clusters in minutes and automatically, dynamically manage cluster
environments that include both IBM Platform Computing and non-IBM
workload managers.
These new offerings will help IBM aggressively pursue the over $20.3 billion combined opportunity for technical computing, which IDC is projecting for 2012 and that is expected to grow at 7.6 percent annually to almost $29.2 billion by 2016.(2)
Other technical computing offerings IBM is announcing today include:
- IBM Platform LSF family - IBM Platform LSF is a comprehensive set of
intelligent, policy-driven workload management and scheduling tools that
can be used to manage high performance workloads across a distributed,
virtualized IT environment with up to 100 percent utilization to help
keep costs low.
- IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) - GPFS now includes Active File
Management (AFM) software to provide fast, trusted access to
unstructured data regardless of where the data resides so it can quickly
be turned in to insight.
- IBM System x iDataPlex dx360 M4 - The latest iDataPlex system can double
performance on selected workloads with the latest Graphics Processing
Units (GPUs) from NVIDIA, increases maximum memory to 512GB and - with
the new slotless FDR (Fourteen Data Rate) Infiniband adapter - provides
superior performance and flexibility for technical computing
environments.
Services and Financing
Complementing the new storage enhancements, IBM is offering a suite of services encompassing virtualization, automation and cloud technologies and that address the supply and demand side of storage. The new offerings use analytics and automation to infuse intelligence into everyday workflow with tools and services including:
- Intelligent Storage Service Catalog (ISSC) - Improves the way storage is
used by simplifying how it is requested. ISSC promotes more efficient
storage allocation and governance by establishing standards that can be
used to optimize provisioning, backup, replication and archiving.
- IBM SmartCloud services for storage - Provides support for IBM's family
of cloud storage products including IBM SmartCloud Managed Backup, IBM
SmartCloud Archive, and IBM SmartCloud Object Storage, which improve
data backup, resiliency and management of massive quantities of
unstructured data from a cloud environment. The cloud offers clients
flexibility, cost effectiveness and the ability to achieve faster
recovery time making archiving, exploration, and analysis faster and
easier for businesses.
Flexible financing options provided by IBM Global Financing make it simple for clients to acquire IBM storage systems, while enabling them to manage budgets more easily with predictable monthly payments. Credit-qualified clients that elect financing can quickly benefit from IBM's enhanced storage systems by taking immediate delivery and deferring their first payment for 90 days. Clients also can take advantage of 0 percent financing for 12 months.
About IBM
For more information on IBM Storage, please go to www.ibm.com/storage and follow us on twitter @IBMStorage.
For more on IBM technical computing go to www.ibm.com/technicalcomputing and follow us on twitter @ibmhpc.
For more on IBM Tivoli go to www.ibm.com/tivoli and follow us on twitter @ibmtivoli.
For more on IBM Storage Services, go to http://www.ibm.com/services/storage.
IBM and the IBM logo are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. For a current list of IBM trademarks, please see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks, or service marks of others.
IBM Global Financing offerings are provided through IBM Credit LLC in the United States and other IBM subsidiaries and divisions worldwide to qualified commercial and government clients. Rates and availability are based on a client's credit rating, financing terms, offering type, equipment and product type and options, and may vary by country. Non-hardware items must be one-time, non-recurring charges and are financed by means of loans. Other restrictions may apply. Rates and offerings are subject to change, extension or withdrawal without notice and may not be available in all countries.
1) According to IBM test results.
2) Source: IDC, The Broader HPC Market: Servers, Storage, Software, Middleware, and Services, #234682, May 2012
Media Contact(s)
IBM Media Relations
Mike Zimmerman
(914) 766-4935
(585) 698-9974 (mobile)
mrzimmerman@us.ibm.com
IBM Media Relations
Joanna Brewer
(415) 545-2270
jmbrewer@us.ibm.com
SOURCE
IBM
