Faster IBM DS8870 Storage Systems

IBM Corporation unveiled new technologies designed to help organizations with today’s 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 software updates for newest mainframe computer.

The announcement is part of IBM’s 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 an 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, it 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 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 is announcing its enterprise Power Systems with new hardware and software innovations.

Power 770 and Power 780 servers now feature the new POWER7+ microprocessor, a technology that offers a performance boosts of 30 to 40% on application workloads compared with previous versions. Among its features, the POWER7+ offers an expanded 2.5x L3 cache memory, greater security with faster file encryption for the 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 16TB 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 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 easily move individual server partitions to 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, 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 solidified two of its high-end storage systems with 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 storage systems.

    DS8870

Upgraded with the 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.(IBM System Storage DS8870 Performance Whitepaper, October 2012). According to the Storage Performance Council, the DS8870 has also achieved the number one ranking in its standardized SPC-2 benchmark result.(Storage Performance Council, SPC Benchmark 2 Full Disclosure Report IBM Corporation, IBM System Storage DS8870, October 2012). In addition, the DS8870 comes standard with full self-encrypting drives for security.

On the tape storage front, IBM updated its Virtualization Engine TS7700 Release 3, a system that melds virtualization with magnetic tape.

        
Virtualization Engine TS7700

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.

New Mainframe Software
for Operational Analytics, Cloud and Security
IBM announced software offerings for IBM’s newest mainframe – the zEnterprise EC12 unveiled on August 28 – to help clients operate their IT more efficiently while making use of critical information to fuel business insights and help provide better service to clients.

The zEC12 is one of the first systems to run transaction processing applications and analytics applications on one machine, enabling clients to receive and analyze structured business data in real-time. Now, IBM is making it simpler, faster and more affordable to run analytics on System z with the new DB2 Analytics Accelerator V3 appliance that can speed response times for analytics to provide business insights and results. The Accelerator can also reduce the need to store data on disk drives in the mainframe by 95%, which can lower storage costs (Based on mathematical calculations of moving data to IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator V3).

IBM is enabling its transaction processor, CICS (Customer Information Control System), to be developed, delivered and operated in the cloud in order to help zEnterprise clients build private cloud environments that can support a high volume of customer transactions. With the new CICS 5.1 portfolio, interactive applications such as ATM systems, bank-teller applications and insurance applications can be made available in the cloud.

The new IBM Security zSecure Suite V1.31.1 enhances security intelligence by spotting unusual activity before the system is compromised, monitoring for threats with real-time alerts and network behavior analytics, and managing security audits. Integration with QRadar SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) provides enterprise-wide security monitoring.

System Networking
In addition to these systems and storage updates, IBM also announced a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller for its enterprise networking portfolio. The new Programmable Network Controller provides intelligent software for IBM RackSwitch and other OpenFlow-enabled switches. Through OpenFlow, people can create virtual networks with the scalability and flexibility required to respond to business changes in cloud and mobile services environments.