Texas Pickup

So I was on a flight from Austin to New York City today.

Charlie Sheen was nowhere to be seen.

But Scott Pelley, the correspondent with “60 Minutes,” was on my flight, and he even had a Texas cowboy hat in tow.  I assume, the native Texan that he is, Pelley was celebrating Texas Independence Day along with the rest of we native Texans.

So, I figured since we’re no longer a republic, I’d go ahead and come visit my second home, the great city of New York, where I’ll be in tow through the weekend, and spending the next couple of days in a variety of meetings.

Back in Viva Las Vegas, our IBM PULSE event pulsed on.  Yesterday, we heard some more key news coming from the event, this time around the ever-ubiquitous IT topic, cloud computing.

In that announcement, IBM showcased a series of technology breakthroughs that extend the company’s leadership in virtualization, image management, and cloud computing, including software that can virtualize a data center within minute to instantly meet business demand.

Instant data center.  You gotta dig that.

The market opportunity for cloud-related technologies, including hardware and software, is expected to grow to $45B by 2013, according to IDC (it was around $17B in 2009).  In other words, demand for big clouds is growing as organizations seek to expand the impact of IT to deliver new and innovative services while realizing the economies of scale the cloud can provide.

The power of the cloud model lies in its ability to harness varying technology investments by enabling rapid and dynamic scheduling, provisioning and management of virtualized computing resources on demand.

Enough backdrop (Get it?  Clouds?  Backdrop?)

First, IBM announced a new, advanced virtual deployment software — now available as an open beta program — that has unmatched dynamic provisioning and scheduling of server resources, two capabilities core to cloud functionality.

While traditional technologies deploy virtual machines slowly, requiring significant hands-on management from IT staff, the new IBM software can deploy a single virtual machine in seconds, dozens in a few minutes and hundreds or thousands at the unrivaled speed of under an hour.

In addition to speed, the new IBM software provides a powerful “image management” system to help organizations install, configure and automate the creation of new virtual machines to better meet business demands, while minimizing costs, complexity and the risk associated with IT deployment.

IBM also announced three new breakthroughs for managing virtual environments.

First, for the automation of IT resources, IBM has expanded the capabilities of Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.2 to help better manage virtual computing resources by automating best practices for data center provisioning activities.

Second, IBM demonstrated technologies that provide a centralized management platform for hybrid cloud environments for both on and off premise deploments.

And third, the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual environments now integrates with and extends clients’ requirements to meet backup and recovery needs, online database and application protection, disaster recovery, reduction in stored data, space management, archiving and retrieval.

In the virtualized environment, this software improves the frequency of backups to reduce the amount of data at risk, and enables faster recovery of data to reduce downtime following a failure. By off-loading backup and restore processes from virtual machines, Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments allows users and applications to remain productive without disruption.

You can get all the nitty gritty details here.

In the meantime, I’m off to celebrate Texas Independence Day in New York City!