IBM's new storage technology helps companies embrace cloud and big data

"Tenkine Server channel May 28" IBM recently unveiled a preliminary survey of 750 multinationals at IBM's EDGE2014 conference, noting that less than 10% of companies are well prepared for cloud computing, large data analysis, mobile devices and the proliferation of social media applications. The research, which was launched by IBM's Business Value Research Institute, called IT Infrastructure critical, received a total of 18 countries, feedback from 750 CTO, CIO and other technical executives in 19 industries aims to uncover the infrastructure, business, and organizational challenges that enterprises face in the new IT era.

The survey aims to better understand the major trends affecting the IT infrastructure and the challenges that enterprises face in maintaining and upgrading existing technologies, particularly in the area of technology migration. In addition, IBM hopes that this survey will delve into the ways in which companies can leverage infrastructure to improve market competitiveness. Surveys show that 70% of businesses recognize that IT infrastructure plays a crucial role in helping them gain competitive advantage and optimize revenue and profits. Most respondents (62%) said they planned to increase their IT infrastructure investment over the next 12-18 months.

Mr. Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems and technology and integrated supply chain, said that through discussions with technical executives, we found that the current historic business and technology transition is making it imperative for companies to deploy a computing infrastructure to achieve business goals. Now innovative companies have realised that only the right infrastructure can help them create real competitive advantages and drive revenue growth.

According to a preliminary survey, 46% of respondents said it was difficult to transfer large amounts of data safely and efficiently between different regions. In addition, 43% of respondents said they faced challenges in maintaining a secure environment and were under pressure to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of the global storage environment. While acknowledging the importance of the IT infrastructure, only 22% per cent of the respondents developed a clear enterprise-level IT infrastructure strategic roadmap.

IBM System and Technology department, Mr. Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of the Integrated Supply chain division, says that large data is a powerful force that drives customers to transform each component of the computing infrastructure, and that the first step is to adapt the traditional application environment to meet new requirements for social, mobile, and analytical workloads, achieve greater scale and faster data access. As we continue to optimize our storage product lines, customers will be able to make informed business decisions based on data quickly and easily, while providing their customers with a more personalized experience. To help companies cope with the challenges, IBM has launched a number of new programs that cover systems, software, and related features designed to help businesses create intelligent infrastructures that leverage cloud computing for faster access to large data insights and improved performance.

New development of storage technology to realize fast data access

At the software definition Storage conference held last week, IBM just announced the latest software that allows customers to access any data from any device at any location. Recently, IBM again announced the introduction of the software based on the new enhancements. With these technologies, Storwize, XIV, tape libraries, and flash products will be able to meet the storage requirements of large-scale cloud deployments through virtualization, real-time compression, and automated tiered storage (easy-tiering) and mirroring technologies, and allow customers to quickly access information. New High-performance storage solutions include:

The new storwize V7000 has "times" for large data: IBM storwize V7000 and V7000 Unified provide new clusters, real-time compression, and active Cloud engine capabilities to help customers manage the growing volume of data. Compared with friends of similar products, the system provides twice times the capacity, including:

Twice times the capacity, the industry's only support for real-time compression of the storage system, the average compression rate reached 55%, such as the same 1 300GB hard disk, can provide 600G online available storage capacity.

Twice-fold scalability, compared to previous generations, the number of expansion cabinets supported from 10 to 20, up to 4PB.

Twice-fold performance, CPU Max 32 core upgrades to 64 cores, cache Max upgrade from 64G to 512g,sas interface from 6Gbps to 12Gbps.

IBM XIV Cloud Storage for Service providers can provide partners with an affordable, efficient infrastructure and a pay-as-you-go (pay-per-use) pricing model that helps them reduce the initial procurement costs of up to 40% of the system. In addition, the product offers a number of new features, including the XIV multi-tenant support capability, which splits the XIV storage capacity into multiple logical partitions and assigns to different tenants, providing enhanced data security and better cloud computing economics.

The data architecture used by TS4500 Tape Library not only keeps high utilization, but also can hold 3 times times of cloud data in the same space, so it can support large-scale cloud deployment.

The IBM DS8870 Flash array delivers up to 3.5 times times the performance boost while reducing space requirements by 50% and reducing energy consumption by 12%.

According to news reports, the scientists at the IBM Zurich Institute combined with Fuji Film Co. announced that it has achieved a record density of 85.9 billion bits per square inch, creating a new set of low cost particle linear tapes. The technology is a major breakthrough that can help provide the most resilient, reliable and cost-effective data storage technology for large data.

Infrastructure critical New Customer solutions

In this data is the capital of the society, infrastructure is critical, so IBM announced the following customer solutions:

Kelsey-seybold Clinic is located in Houston, USA, is a leading comprehensive medical institution and the first responsible medical organization in the United States (accountable Care from, referred to as "ACO") certified members. The agency wants IBM to help it achieve infrastructure virtualization, simplify desktop management for doctors and nurses, and achieve faster access to growing numbers of patients. IBM Advanced Partner Mark III offers IBM Flex BAE, high-speed flashsystems, SAN Volume Controller software, and Atlantis Ilio, Citrix App-V and Epic software solutions that successfully help the clinic speed up the server, eliminate the waste of storage capacity, and save storage costs.

When the number of patients increases dramatically, from equipment management to professional personal support, everything becomes overloaded and information technology is not spared. Each new patient and medical record produces a new set of information, including structured medical records, unstructured medical images, audio and video. Because some information has to be stored, managed, and maintained by the system, medical institutions increasingly want to reduce the overload system by looking for higher performance, while at the same time making system management as simple as possible.

That's why the Houston Kelsey-seybold Hospital is starting to virtualize, specifically a desktop virtualization solution. To help employees better utilize the thousands of virtual desktop environments based on the IBM Pureflex system, the Kelsey-seybold hospital, together with partners IBM, Atlantis Computing and Mark III, built a Citrix based XenDesktop Desktop Virtualization solution that covers the entire hospital. Rather than distributing independent desktops and laptops to 20 clinics and administrations that make up medical practice, we have shifted to another way of deploying--employees can access their virtual "desktops" from any device in any location to obtain their personal applications and data.

This solution delivers faster and easier delivery of electronic medical records, making it easier for employees to view and manage medical records, and to improve desktop management and optimize the application's benefits. The speed of virtual desktops improves the management capacity of hospitals and becomes centralized and process-intensive. Overall performance is enhanced primarily because the IT solution deploys IBM Flashsystem and IBM Storage virtualization software. This combination not only accelerates application performance, but also enables easy and rapid storage expansion, as expected storage requirements and response times grow.