IBM Boosts Smarter Storage Initiative …

IBM Corp. accelerated its Smarter Computing initiative by announcing an array of performance and efficiency enhancements to its storage and technical computing systems – the engines of big data.

                 Smart Storage for Big Data

As part of its ongoing Smarter Computing effort, the company announced a new strategic approach to designing and managing storage infrastructures with greater automation and intelligence, as well as performance enhancements to several 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. They 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, SVP 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."

Constructing and evolving storage infrastructures to better respond to constant social, economic, and business change is critical to the long-term viability of an organization. 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% 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% as well as reduce the cost by up to 20%.

With more than 256PB of client data managed, IBM has been building a portfolio of products and technologies for the past several years toward this end and announced a formal approach behind it called IBM Smarter Storage. With this approach, customers are able to architect storage infrastructures that leverage such 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, te company is announcing enhancements to several products. For example, it is adding Real-time Compression to Storwize V7000, as well as to the System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), the company’s 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%, increasing total effective storage capacity by up to five times, according to IBM test results. In addition IBM also added four-way clustering support for Storwize V7000 block systems that can double the maximum system capacity to 960 drives or 1.4PB.

"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 SMBs and DCS3700, designed with high density for high performance computing environments, now feature Enhanced FlashCopy capabilities that result in 50% 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 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 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 change the way IT managers view and manage their storage infrastructures. Also new to TPC is the integration of IBM Cognos, which provides reporting and modelling that can enable customers to create ad hoc and customized reports for better decision making. TPC offers simplified packaging that provides management, discovery, configuration, performance and replication in a single license.

In addition to these enhancements, the company 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. It moves data to the most appropriate storage, including multiple tiers of disk and SSD, based on policy and activity.

Strengthening 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 announcements:

• The 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 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 HPC cloud portfolio 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 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 the company pursuing 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% annually to almost $29.2 billion by 2016.(Source: IDC, The Broader HPC Market: Servers, Storage, Software, Middleware, and Services, #234682, May 2012)

Other technical computing offerings announced:

• Platform LSF family – It is a 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% utilization to help keep costs low.
• General Parallel File System (GPFS) – It now includes Active File Management (AFM) software to provide fast access to unstructured data regardless of where the data resides so it can quickly be turned in to insight.
• 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) IB adapter – provides performance and flexibility for technical computing environments.

Services and Financing
Complementing the new storage enhancements, the company 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. It promotes more efficient storage allocation and governance by establishing standards that can be used to optimize provisioning, backup, replication and archiving.
• SmartCloud services for storage – Provides support for IBM’s family of cloud storage products including SmartCloud Managed Backup, IBM SmartCloud Archive, and 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 storage systems, while enabling them to manage budgets easily with predictable monthly payments. Credit-qualified clients that elect financing can benefit from IBM’s enhanced storage systems by taking delivery and deferring their first payment for 90 days. Clients also can take advantage of 0% financing for 12 months.