"Cloud Computing & Virtualization" - The Next

SOURCE :- Taken from www.CXOTODAY.com




The initiative will be backed by a total investment of $2 billion over three years.

With the proliferation of the mobile Web, the average individual's "information footprint" - the digitization of entertainment, healthcare, security, social networking, retail preferences - will grow from 1 terabyte (about 50,000 trees cut and printed) per year to more than 16 terabytes by 2020, according to IBM.

"As India goes through a radical shift away from the decades-old client/server model to a radically more efficient Internet-style architecture, we have taken a giant leap to address foreseen customer challenges with the new information infrastructure launch. With our future investments and key acquisitions throughout the last 24 months we have cemented our strategy to provide information on demand," said Shashi B Mal, director, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/ South Asia.

"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 for 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, market leadership and the end-to-end capabilities to make this a reality for our clients."

Shailesh Agarwal, vice-president (Business Systems) Systems & Technology Group - IBM India/South Asia said, "Infrastructures need to adapt to meet this demand, and in response, IBM today is delivering 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. 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."

Today's infrastructure is not designed to efficiently manage the estimated two billion people who will be on the Web by 2011 nor the expected one trillion connected objects - cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines - comprising "the Internet of things", IBM stated in its press release.

Businesses require cost-effective, scale-out technologies and must be prepared for this new phase of "cloud computing," giving consumers access to data and systems remotely, from any device, anywhere. IBM announced a series of products and offerings that it claims will enabling Internet scale availability;

IBM XIV system - A new and scalable disk storage system designed to handle diverse mix of information - from Web 2.0 to traditional applications such as financial services. According to IBM, this new enterprise disk offering features a 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.

DS5000 - DS500 is a new disk storage system which can add interfaces, increase performance, grow capacity as Internet scale demands, and be reconfigured on-the-fly, according to the company.

IBM SVC - A new 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.

Scale Out File Services (SOFS) - As a means to support storage optimization, SOFS offers flexible storage virtualization services that will help alleviate data storage challenges by enabling quick implementation of clustered network attached storage systems.

IBM has also launched a series of products aimed at tackling data duplication and high energy costs that result out of it due to growing storage requirements.

These products are:

IBM ProtecTier - A new data de-duplication software and hardware from the Diligent Technologies acquisition in April, which may help clients reduce redundant data by a factor of up to 25:1

Onsite and Remote Data Protection - Through IBM's acquisition of Arsenal, Onsite and Remote Data Protection offerings will 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

TS3500 - A new high density tape storage library frame that can hold up to three-times more cartridges in a 10 square foot footprint, providing nearly twice the storage density of Sun, according to IBM.

DS8000 - An upgraded high end disk offering that adds more IBM mainframe storage functionality for customers dealing with large database growth in their mainframes. IBM claims the 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.