POWER Overload

IBM announced today a slew of new servers, services, and software to help minimize the rising costs and complexities of operating modern data centers.

These new offerings are intended to help IBM clients around the globe reap the benefits of IBM’s three-year, $3 billion (U.S.) investment in POWER7 systems that are primed to handle new workloads and perform powerful, real-time business analytics.

The announcement includes new blade servers (see image below) built on IBM’s POWER7 workload-optimized systems’ design and new systems software design to reduce time to workload deployment.  They also include new services to help remotely implement the systems (and in turn reduce deployment costs by 25%).

In the announcement, IBM also announced that the POWER7 technology achieved record performance for a range of workloads.the same 64-bit POWER® technology at work in some of the world’s most critical data centers in government, research, finance and high-tech industries, among others.

The IBM BladeCenter PS700 takes advantage of the workload optimization features of POWER7 technology.

There are many facets and contours to this announcement, so to get the full read I would recommend you check out this press announcement and then follow the links to the information that will be most useful to you.

But make no mistake as to the headline here: More computing capacity at a lower price point designed to optimize your workloads faster in the pursuit of more actionable business insights.

New IBM Smart Analytics Systems

IBM today announced new systems highly-tuned and optimized to help clients more quickly draw insights from vast amounts of data to anticipate emerging business trends, capture new opportunities and avoid risks.

These new optimized systems support all environments in a data center, enabling clients to handle higher volumes of transactions and analyze data where it resides.

As part of today’s news, IBM is announcing IBM pureScale Application System with POWER7 technology and Smart Analytics Systems for x86 and mainframe environments.

Each is integrated at every level — from microprocessors to hardware and software, highly-tuned for analyzing enormous amounts of data and in real-time handling data intensive transactions.

Analyzing data where it resides in the data center is very important as clients seek to shorten the cycle time between processing and results, and want to avoid the costs of migrating data from one system to another.

Wall Street firms, for example, are paying hefty rental fees to exchanges to allow their hardware to be located next to the servers that house market and trading data, mainly to shave critical milliseconds from the time it takes them to order and execute a trade.

With IBM’s new analytics systems, clients can now more effectively manage analytics and transactional workloads and extract data insight up to twenty times faster compared to competitive piece parts, for improved business outcomes.

These systems can also reduce storage space for structured and unstructured data by up to eighty percent with deep compression capabilities that shrink the data on disk, translating into significant energy-related cost savings for clients.

According to recent analyst reports, enterprise data growth over the next five years is estimated at 650 percent. Eighty percent of this data will be unstructured, generated from a variety of sources such as blogs, web content, email, etc.

In fact, seventy percent of this unstructured data is stale after ninety days.

With this ongoing shift in the market, companies and governments need to be able to analyze and extract intelligence from information, irrespective of where data resides, in real time — without being bound by a particular system or platform.

IBM pureScale Application System with POWER7 technology
The new IBM pureScale Application System combines POWER7-based servers with WebSphere Application Server and DB2 pureScale software  to handle  heavy transactional workloads, such as smart utility grids.

As the amount of data continues to grow, organizations in all industry segments are poised to take advantage of IBM’s economical and efficient approach to scaling capacity — without forcing clients to overspend on excess hardware and software.

For utility companies, a smart electrical grid requires up-to-the-minute data to deliver electricity in real-time, where it is needed most. It helps customers monitor their energy consumption to avoid or reduce usage during the most expensive peak times.

To handle the volume of data and transactions generated by this workload, companies require an application system that ensures continuous availability and virtually unlimited computing power required to meet changing business demands.

IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 with System z, and model 5600 with System x
The new IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 with System z, and model 5600 with System x, join the Power Systems based 7600 with attractively-priced integrated server, storage, software and services.

These analytics workload optimized systems include pre-tuned components to speed deployment of  powerful business analytics solutions in days.

Integrated Cognos and InfoSphere Warehouse software capabilities include reporting, analysis and dashboarding; ability to analyze multiple business variables to uncover unseen relationships; and ability to mine both structured data and unstructured information such as email, websites and blogs, to uncover hidden opportunities or provide customer behavioral analysis.

You can read about a number of IBM clients already adopting these new technologies in the full press release.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 5600 (with System x) is immediately available.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 (with System z) and the IBM pureScale Application System will be available later this quarter