Real Clouds

I’ve seen some increased social media activity around the subject of cloud computing from here in Istanbul this week, so I thought I would pass along some recent news on the cloud front at IBM.

Did you know that the average enterprise devotes up to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and testing, but typically up to 90 percent of it remains idle?

Idle processors are the IT devil’s workshop!

What IBM has found is that taking advantage of cloud computing within development and testing environments can help reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent, and can improve quality and drastically reduce time to market for new applications.

IBM has certainly not been idle on the cloud front of late, ramping up its cloud focus with continued customer wins.

One such deal was in partnership with NISSAY Information Technology in Japan, which has partnered with IBM Japan to jointly build a cloud-based development and test environment to provide mission critical Web systems for Nippon Life Insurance.

The new cloud environment will allow NISSAY developers to procure new test and development environments in hours — a process that previously could take up to a month.

To prevent any impact on ongoing development projects and maintain test quality, NISSAY will maintain a traditional test environment that allocates resources in a fixed format. The new development and test environment uses IBM’s high performance UNIX server IBM Power Systems and the operational management software Tivoli Service Automation Manager.

The other was with the University of Bari (Universita di Bari) in Italy, which has selected an IBM System z mainframe as part of a cloud computing project to help local businesses, including fishermen, winemakers and trucking companies, adopt new business models.

The University of Bari is using an IBM System z mainframe and cloud approach as a test-bed for software, devices, services, laboratories and other technical instrumentation. 

This will allow multiple entities to tap into heavy-duty computing power at minimal cost and will lower the barrier to entry and help local businesses to benefit from this technology.

As an example, using a touch screen installed on fishing boats, local fishermen can immediately determine demand in local fish markets that on average handle 100 thousand tons of fish per year.

Directly from the boats, using simple touch screen systems, fisherman enter the type of fish caught just minutes ago and instantaneously start a virtual auction with wholesalers on the docks. 

If the auction price for a specific type of fish is too low, the fish can be thrown back or redirected to a nonprofit organization such as a soup kitchen. If the price is acceptable, the system automatically provides the necessary distribution between boxes to allow the fish to be packed before the boat arrives at the pier.

The University of Bari has also developed systems running on the IBM System z mainframe focused on wine production. 

Winemakers at up to 60 cooperative wineries are able to determine market demand for various types of wines by accessing the cloud computing-based systems, then package and ship wines demanding the highest price. 

The University of Bari is developing cloud-based solutions for southern Italy as part of the Daisy-Net consortium, which includes companies and universities from five regions of southern Italy. Daisy-Net researches, develops and provides transfer and training activities for new technologies in the information and communication technology sector and beyond.

The University of Bari cloud solution is built on an IBM System z9 Business Class mainframe running the Linux operating system, and includes DB2, WebSphere and Tivoli middleware from IBM.

You can visit here to learn more about IBM cloud computing.

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

New Mainframe Products

While Google introduces their new Chrome OS (which I’m hearing will be widely available in one year?  Did I mishear that?), IBM announced 10 new products today to help companies using IBM System z mainframe technology.

The new software products help companies lower their application management costs by optimizing their System z mainframes to handle more workloads (vis a vis server consolidation).

One of the unique capabilities of mainframes are they can host many application services on one system, which has helped System z achieve one of the industry’s lowest application costs per user.

Minimal application costs are muy importante for companies which rely on multiple applications to run their business.

The new products include IMS 11, several new products from WebSphere, as well as IBM Problem Determination tools and Rational development tools.

You can visit the IBM Mainframe Web site to learn more.

 

http://www.ibm.com/mainframe