IBM unveils building blocks for 21st century infrastructure

At its core, the new, more dynamic infrastructure will bring more intelligence, automation, integration, and efficiencies to the digital and physical worlds.

As a result, it will enable businesses and governments to better respond to and manage challenges presented by today's globally integrated planet. IBM's point of view is how clients can reduce cost, improve service and manage risk while building the IT infrastructure needed to thrive in today's business climate.

Global connectivity is driving increasingly complex supply chains, ultra-empowered consumers, and making issues such as governance and compliance, managing risk, and fending off security threats increasingly difficult and complex.

And with one-third of the world's population on the Internet by 2011, 4bn mobile web subscribers today, and the staggering amount of data and intelligence being driven by the rapid proliferation of smart sensors, RFID tags, and intelligence being built into everything from pets to power grids, the world's infrastructure is at a breaking point.

Fortunately, there are new computing models that can literally "reinvent" existing IT systems, making them leaner, flexible, resilient and smarter, creating what we call a dynamic infrastructure.

As part of its smarter planet strategy, IBM enables an evolutionary new model for efficient IT delivery with an innovative approach to enable clients to manage information more effectively and mitigate information risks with a dynamic infrastructure that efficiently and securely stores, protects, and provides optimized access to information.

IBM Information Infrastructure helps clients meet the challenge of managing the information explosion by enhancing capabilities in four key areas: information compliance, information availability, information retention, and information security (CARS).

Organizations can maximize the benefits of the information explosion by developing and implementing an Information Infrastructure that aligns with business goals. A comprehensive information infrastructure not only addresses governance, risk and compliance concerns, but also helps streamline operations for increased efficiency and improved capacity.

An Information Infrastructure drives four core capabilities that impact service levels and business risk :

--Information Compliance—Reduce regulatory, operational and reputation risks, audit costs and audit deficiencies.

--Information Availability—Deliver continuous and reliable access to information, in any form, at any time, to any device.

--Information Retention—Retain and maintain access to business records for legal, regulatory or business needs.

--Information Security—Protect and securely share information across the enterprise, partners and customers

The four Information Infrastructure capabilities are referred to as CARS, for short.

In response, IBM announced products and services to fulfill the requirements for a dynamic infrastructure characterized in :

• The integration of digital and physical infrastructure, providing the ability to use information technology to manage business processes, increasingly intelligent physical infrastructure and assets, and drive new and improved services as a result. This is known as "Service Management."

• The ability to manage, store, and analyze the 15 new petabytes of information the world is now generating per day-- eight-times more information than in all US libraries combined. This will enable clients to address massive information management requirements associated with today's governance, compliance, availability, retention, risk, and security challenges.

• A reduction of massive inefficiencies and greater resilience in today's interconnected world. Data centers costs, for example -- for energy, space, etc. -- have risen eight-times since 1996; and average distributed server utilization is just 6-15%.


1. The Integration and Management of Digital and Physical Worlds:

The 21st Century infrastructure will increasingly rely on "service management" -- using computing power to more intelligently manage businesses processes and physical assets such as power grids. IBM announced several new offerings:

• IBM System Storage DS8000

The IBM System Storage DS8000 series that is the highest performing Enterprise Disk Systems in the market provides new functional capabilities, allowing clients to better choose the combination of price and efficiency that is right for their application needs. New options include :
- Solid State Drive (SSD)
- 1 TB 7,200 rpm Serial ATA (SATA) Disk Drive
- Intelligent Write Caching Algorithm
- Remote Pair FlashCopy
- Support for VMWare SRM (VMWare Site Recovery Manager).

• IBM System Storage DS5000

Building on many decades of design expertise, the DS5000 series' seventh-generation architecture delivers industry-leading performance, real reliability, multi-dimensional scalability and unprecedented investment protection. This multi-dimensional scalability enables the DS5000 series storage system to extend beyond the normal three- to four-year life cycle, protecting your storage investment by delaying (or even eliminating) the expense of migrating data to a new system and allowing you to amortize its acquisition costs over extended periods of time.

- DS5000 Delivers performance of 750K IOps (Highest Mid-Range disk system performance in the market).
- DS5000 Support 8Gbps FC Interface connection to hosts.
- DS5000 Support SSD (Solid State Disks).
System Configuration:
- Well-suited for environments with concurrent workloads such as consolidation and virtualization.
- Unique host interface cards designed to provide investment protection and life cycle longevity
- Designed to support high availability with dual active-toactive, hot-swappable controllers, power supplies and many non-disruptive firmware upgrades
- Connectivity to IBM SAN switches, directors and routers
- Heterogeneous support for the most common operating systems, including Microsof t Windows, UNIX and Linux

• IBM SOFTEK (Migration Services for data for open systems attached to System Storage disk system)

To maximize new storage technology investments, organizations need efficient data migrations that help limit the risk of data corruption or loss, and business disruption. IBM Migration Services for open systems attached to System Storage disk systems provides professional services performed by technical specialists to plan and manage a non-disruptive migration of data in pre-sized ServicePac options.

System Configuration:
- Provides access to highly skilled data migration service specialists, project management expertise, and proven methods and tools to support an efficient and safe data migration
- Reduces the need for skilled in-house resources and enables staff to remain focused on other higher priority business initiatives
- Migration during normal business hours
- Fixed priced that clients can use for budgeting purposes

• IBM SVC (SAN Volume Controller)

Enterprise-class storage virtualization in a more affordable package for mid-sized businesses. SVC systems delivers High-End performance using Mid Range Storage Disk Systems of any vendor including IBM disk systems. SVC is the virtualization engine that allows infrastructures to stripe data across different disk systems while raising system performance.

System Configuration:
- Single point-of-control for heterogeneous storage resources.
- Pools the storage capacity of multiple storage systems.
- Support for VMWare SRM & Microsoft HyperV.
- Capability to have Incremental and Cascading FlashCopy (Snap Shots for Data).

• TS1130 Enterprise Tape Drives
The TS1130 will be the first 1TB tape drive in the market and is a key offering for financial, life science and geological/petroleum customers. TS1130 supports Native HW encryption. TS1130 support compression ratio of 1 to 3. TS1130 is the industry-first to offer improveing the high reliability of the 3592 drive and media. Now the first - first is the giant magnetoresistive read-write head.


2. Managing Staggering Amounts of Information

IBM is announcing new technologies to help clients more securely and efficiently manage skyrocketing data. IBM is the only major vendor to build media encryption into the infrastructure.

• IBM System Storage DS8000 With encryption

Full-Disk Encryption which will help increase security and reduce costs and complexity through innovative self-encrypting drives. IBM's self-encrypting storage solutions help clients securely manage information. After almost three years of enabling IBM clients to successfully secure their backup tapes with self-encrypting tape drives, the DS8000 series now extends this crucial technology to the disk system. By combining the DS8000 with its full-disk encrypting drives and Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager, the DS8000 security solution not only secures data at rest but also offers a simple, cost-effective solution for "securely erasing" disk drives that are being retired or used for a different purpose.

• IBM System Storage DS5000 With encryption

Clients no longer have to worry about security breaches resulting in exposure of customer data or confidential company information stored on disk.

System Configuration:

- Simplified, integrated Key Management
- Minimal performance impact; easy to operate
- End-to-end media encryption now possible, with support for enterprise and mid-range disk and tape.

• New Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager software

which helps organizations simplify the lifecycle of encryption keys by enabling them to centralize, automate and strengthen security through key management processes, with an increasing number of IT infrastructure elements having built in encryption to protect them.


3. Reducing Massive Inefficiency, Building Resilience

IBM announced new software that builds on its leadership in making infrastructure more resilient, virtualized, green, and efficient, while helping clients reduce costs.

• IBM Recovery Express

IBM Recovery Express offers a data center recovery solution specially designed for small and midsize enterprises. Available for IBM System i, IBM System p and IBM System x servers, Recovery Express is competitively priced to meet the budgetary needs of a smaller company and is designed for easy purchasing, implementation and management.

System Configuration:

- Avoid the expenses and complexities of a solution designed for a larger enterprise
- Leverage the competitive price point and ease of use to build a case for a data center recovery solution within your client's organization
- Recover quickly from an unplanned disruption, with minimal loss
- Protect your client's business reputation and maintain strong customer relationships

• IBM Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files

Transparent, continuous ("air bag" like) protection for critical files on laptops and file servers. It reduces or eliminates backup windows, provides faster time to value through quick and easy installation and configuration with more granular point in time restore. Also Helps ensure business continuity and personal productivity.

• Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack

TSM FastBack is a next-generation data protection and recovery software solution for critical Microsoft Windows & Microsoft Infrastructure Environments. It gives clients the power to quickly restore any amount of Windows as well as Microsoft Applications data, anywhere in the organization, from any previous point-in-time, no matter what happens to cause a data loss.

System Configuration:

- Disk-based, block-level, incremental forever backup technology improves recovery point objectives (RPO) through continuous data protection (CDP) with very little impact on production servers.
- Individual Mail Boxes & individual Messages Backup & Restore capability.
- Policy engine allows you to balance recovery requirements with the costs of storage and bandwidth on a per-application basis.
- Continuous data protection (CDP) the amount of data at risk of loss is reduced from "the last 24 hours" to "the last transaction".
- Instantly recover files, folders, volumes, and entire systems.
- FastBack Mount: drag-and-drop individual files from the backup repository
- Virtual Restore: provides near-instant access to large volumes while they are restored in the background
- Bare Machine Recovery: bring up an OS volume on a dissimilar server in < 1 hour.