IBM: "Our Largest Launch Ever of Storage"

IBM announced its largest launch ever of new storage hardware, software and services that are the building blocks for the world’s strongest information infrastructure portfolio. The new IBM offerings are designed to enable businesses, governments and other institutions to transform static data managed in silos into more dynamic information that is accessible by individuals wherever they go in a cloud computing environment.

As consumers now look to ‘take their information’ with them – improving their healthcare, security, entertainment, social life and consumer experience anytime, around the globe, in real time – businesses are struggling with outdated data centers, which are unable to handle the increased information management demands.

The proliferation of the mobile web, connected sensors everywhere, from cars to pipelines, online medical records, and the explosive growth of Web 2.0 data and social networking, are leading to 16-fold growth in each individual’s ‘information footprint’ by 2020, according to IBM. Infrastructures need to adapt today to meet this demand.

In response, IBM delivered critical elements for an information infrastructure as part of its New Enterprise Data Center strategy. These elements focus on the availability, compliance and retention, and security pain points for clients as they re-design their data centers. More than 30 new and upgraded products and services are being introduced across the IBM portfolio to meet these critical needs:

Internet-Scale Availability: Today’s infrastructure is not designed to efficiently manage the estimated two billion people who will be on the Web by 20113 nor the expected one trillion connected objects – cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines – comprising ‘the Internet of things.’ Cost-effective, scale-out technologies are needed as an essential element of a client’s information infrastructure to enable Internet scale and speed for the management of vast amounts of online information within an organization and out to billions of individuals. Businesses must be prepared for this new phase of “cloud computing,” giving consumers access to data and systems remotely, from any device, anywhere. To meet these needs, IBM announced a series of products and offerings enabling Internet Scale Availability.

Among the highlights:

An entirely new low cost, highly scalable disk storage system designed to handle today’s diverse mix of information – from Web 2.0 to traditional applications such as financial services. Developed from the XIV acquisition in January, this new enterprise disk offering features a unique grid-based architecture that offers easier management, greater performance scalability, self-tuning/healing and thin provisioning to help reduce the cost and complexity of information storage while enabling consistently quick access of data for today’s dynamic range of workloads.
Designed to meet demanding mid-range data center requirements, IBM is introducing a new disk storage system DS5000 which can add interfaces, increase performance, grow capacity as Internet scale demands, and be reconfigured on-the-fly.
IBM is offering new SVC storage virtualization software that helps clients more efficiently manage and consolidate volumes of business data, providing clients with a storage solution designed to help improve utilization rates, energy efficiency, availability, and scalability of critical applications.
As a means to support storage optimization, IBM is announcing new scale out file services (SOFS), flexible storage virtualization services that will help alleviate data storage challenges by enabling quick implementation of highly scalable, global, clustered network attached storage systems.

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Scalable disk storage system developed from the XIV acquisition

Consolidation and Retention
Today’s information infrastructure suffers from massive inefficiency in both duplicate sources of the same information and excessive energy costs. Leading analysts have stated that 50 percent of data centers will run out of power or space for their data centers sometime in 2008 and the energy consumed by U.S. data centers will grow from 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent of the nation’s total energy consumption over the next five years.5 To meet these needs, IBM announced a series of products and offerings enabling data center consolidation and retention:

IBM is delivering new software and hardware ProtecTier from the Diligent Technologies acquisition in April, which will help clients eliminate information clutter by reducing redundant data by a factor of up to 25:1.
To help clients retain and back-up copies of their critical data off-site, and ensure the continuous availability of e-mail and mission critical applications and data on site in the event of a disaster, IBM is introducing Onsite and Remote Data Protection offerings through its acquisition of Arsenal.
Physical space is a huge problem for data centers today as they look to consolidate, so a new high density tape storage library frame TS3500 is being introduced that can hold up to three-times more cartridges in the same footprint — nearly twice that of Sun7 — in just 10 square feet of floor space.
IBM is introducing an upgraded high end disk offering that adds more IBM mainframe storage functionality for customers dealing with large database growth in their mainframes. The DS8000 updated disk offering will also have RAID 6 protection – while delivering 50 percent more storage capacity in the same footprint with new, higher capacity, performance-optimized drives – allowing clients to keep data center costs and energy usage down.

Security
Ensuring that the information in a data center is secure and being accessed only by those authorized has become a top concern for all data centers – large and small. A recent data center hack cost one company more than $60 million dollars in damages through theft of data and unauthorized use of credit card information of consumers. Meanwhile, the availability and authentication of data – from massive corporate and government databases to the 1 billion people expected to be using the mobile web10 this year – is a key priority.

IBM is enhancing its leading DR550 compliance disk storage offering with enhanced drives that will enable 33 percent more disk capacity. Unlike the EMC Centera, the IBM system allows partitioning to run third-party ISV applications and leverages both disk and tape, allowing clients to reduce their total cost of ownership and power consumption up to 50 percent.
IBM is offering clients the world’s fastest one terabyte storage tape drive, the TS1130, far surpassing the current Sun offering, to help them protect and archive more information with less cost and less energy usage. Storing up to one terabyte of uncompressed data per tape cartridge, storage backups can be completed up to 54 percent faster than the previous IBM generation drive.
In the emerging area of information security and encryption key management for storage – where information is ‘locked’ and can only be accessed by users who have ‘keys’, IBM will release new Tivoli Key Lifecycle Management software, which helps automate the management of keys where disk and tape storage devices cannot be compromised if lost or stolen.
To help client cost-effectively monitor, secure and manage their IT infrastructures while addressing increasing workloads, IBM is announcing new Remote Managed Infrastructure Services (RMIS). These services offer clients a new model for efficient IT management and security with minimal disruption to existing environments, allowing clients to maintain their existing assets on-site.

More than 30 new products and services from IBM Systems and Technology Group, IBM Software Group and IBM Research were announced today, supporting the information infrastructure pillar of IBM’s New Enterprise Data Center strategy. Coupled with new announcements from IBM’s Global Technology Services business, IBM aligns critical storage usage to a clients’ direct business priorities, helps them reduce the risk, cost, complexity and planning efforts required for large data migrations, and delivers strategic IBM design and implementation services to target client pain-points.

Through home-grown innovation, development and acquisitions, this announcement marks a $2 billion investment, three years of research and development, and a global team of more than 2,500 storage technical professionals, engineers and researchers from nine different countries including France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, Switzerland, United States, and the United Kingdom. Key acquisitions of XIV, Diligent, Cognos, Arsenal, Optim, FilesX, Softek, and NovusCG over the last 24 months add strategic pieces to the strongest ever information infrastructure portfolio of offerings unveiled today.

"The world is re-tooling its underlying IT infrastructure in a dramatic shift away from a decades-old client/server model to a radically more efficient Internet-style architecture. This requires different thinking and new capabilities, which we are addressing in this information infrastructure launch, with our investments going forward, and how IBM will do business with our clients," said Andy Monshaw, General Manager, IBM System Storage. "There is no bigger opportunity for our clients than to unlock the value they have in their data centers and help them create smart, innovative offerings to their end users – the consumer. IBM is the only company in the world – not HP, not EMC, not Sun — with decades of research, industry knowledge and market leadership to make this a reality for our clients.”

To help clients accelerate their data center transformation initiatives and integrate these new IBM information infrastructure offerings into their data centers, IBM is also announcing the global opening of the New Enterprise Data Center Leadership Centers. At these new centers, more than 500 IBM engineers and experts across locations in the U.S. and Europe will work with clients and focus on solutions and best practices around energy efficiency, consolidation and virtualization, business resiliency and security and service management and information infrastructure.

These new tools and offerings for the IBM information infrastructure will allow clients to streamline their data centers with highly integrated storage offerings focused around archive, compliance, retention, and security pain points to help clients deliver information as a service to their customers – the consumers, who are looking for access to information at any time from any device. These tools and technology resources which IBM has been developing and amassing, open doors to new industry collaborations, and on demand storage technologies – a key pillar in the emergence of cloud computing.

IBM Global Financing, the lending and leasing business segment of IBM, offers low-rate financing and environmentally safe storage asset disposal for this comprehensive suite of new information infrastructure offerings. IBM Global Financing rates are as low as 4.6% for hardware purchases; 4.8% for software; and 6.3% for services for best qualified clients.