IBM helps data center evolve toward cloud computing

For businesses, more than 70% of their IT spending has been applied to system maintenance and management, and traditional data centers are facing new challenges. "Low utilization of equipment, fragile infrastructure and long deployment of new applications are emerging as the three major challenges facing the data center today." "A few days ago, IBM senior System architect Lilifang said. For this reason, the application of virtualization is deepening and evolving into cloud computing, and IBM is trying to speed up the process.

Lilifang that virtualization ultimately takes three phases: consolidation, virtualization, standardization, and automation. In consolidation, organizations need to first reduce the complexity of infrastructure, to better manage existing equipment and ultimately reduce costs; in virtualization, enterprises should break the physical boundaries, improve hardware utilization to achieve lower hardware costs, simplify deployment purposes; in standardization and automation, enterprises should introduce standardized services To reduce deployment costs and achieve good scalability and flexible delivery.

To this end, IBM in 2009 specifically set up a system software department to help users consolidate servers, applications and operating systems, thereby enhancing the utilization of equipment, reduce costs. But virtualization is just the premise of cloud computing, and in order to achieve cloud computing, first virtualization of servers, storage, networks, and desktops, and then into services management, monitoring and metering, automation, self optimization and Web 2.0 technology.

"The cloud has far-reaching implications for the planning and continuous improvement of data centers. "The cloud, as a new form of consumption and delivery, is bringing new user experiences and business patterns to users," said Zhao Weiwu, senior Advisor to IBM IT infrastructure. The fundamental goal of cloud computing architecture is IT service delivery and security, service management is critical to support this architecture, and the virtualization of infrastructure directly affects the maturity of the cloud architecture. ”

November 2009, IBM released a new data center management software Vmcontrol. The product covers UNIX, Linux, mainframe, x86, storage systems, and networks, enabling enterprises to unify control of various information systems and virtual technologies, namely, integrating physical and virtual servers as a whole. This approach, called system pooling, is an effective way to simplify the management of enterprise data centers and to better share key resources (such as processing power, memory, and storage) and optimize their use, thereby broadening the benefits of virtualization.

Vmcontrol's release allows IBM to complete the integration management of virtualization. In the past, people often talked about server virtualization, storage virtualization, and so on, and now we're talking about cross-platform virtualization, how a single application can migrate from one server to another server without downtime, and achieve high availability.

From the current situation, IBM's cloud computing business strategy has begun to bear fruit, the Ministry of Information Technology Center, senior engineer Yenchangsheng said, through the adoption of IBM virtualization technology to reduce the overall cost of the system, and greatly improve efficiency.