IBM consolidation technology to reduce cost and complexity

The roadshow, which is being hosted in conjunction with its general marketing and services representatives, Gulf Business Machines (GBM), will visit Bahrain on 25th September, Abu Dhabi on 28th September and Kuwait on 29th September.

The Server Consolidation roadshow will look at helping companies and government departments that have multiple servers reduce maintenance and management costs, reduce the requirement for skilled technical resources, and save on the costs of physical infrastructure. Multi-server environments are very common in organisations such as financial services institutions and government departments where branch office networks can require sometimes hundreds of servers.

IBM's new self-managing storage and server offerings allow system administrators to spend less time doing routine maintenance, while IBM's unique mainframe-derived partitioning technology allows hundreds (or even thousands!) of "virtual" servers to be run within logical images on a single machine.

As their needs for high-performance e-business systems grow, companies in the Middle East are needing to deploy more and more applications, which can result in an expensive and unmanageable server sprawl. In the Server Consolidation Roadshow, IBM will demonstrate methodology for server consolidation, with its simplification and optimization of existing end-to-end IT infrastructures, including the physical servers, as well as the applications, networks and systems management processes.

There will also be discussions from the experts on storage consolidation (including Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS), which allow businesses to have a stable foundation for growth and business continuity.

"Server consolidation is one of the most effective ways to reduce the cost of e-business systems today. Having tens or hundreds of physical servers is very expensive in terms of the skills required, skills which are often hard to find in the Middle East. IBM's server consolidation techniques, along with our intelligent self-managing systems, dramatically simplify e-business infrastructure," said Michael Paier, IBM's Manager for Systems Sales for Middle East and Pakistan. "

Customers and partners attending the 'Server Consolidation Roadshow' will also be briefed on IBM's developments in grid computing and the latest updates of the Project eLiza initiative, IBM's blueprint for developing self-managing, self-configuring and self-protecting computing systems.