The FINANCIAL — IBM on February 9 announced new services and products to help clients build a new, more dynamic infrastructure that 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.
According to IBM, the new products and services enable clients to use powerful computing systems to manage and gain insight from an increasing number of things in their physical infrastructure that are being instrumented with intelligent sensors. For example, a utility could build a smart grid to eliminate wasted power, delivering power to where it is needed most, in real time. A smart grid also helps a utilities' customers to monitor their energy consumption in real time and view stresses in its electrical grid instantly to schedule pre-emptive maintenance.
Key requirements for the new dynamic infrastructure are:
• 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.
• 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%.
In response, IBM announced products and services to address these requirements. IDC estimates the market opportunity for the software, servers, technologies, and services to manage the world's converged IT and physical infrastructure to be $122 billion by 2012.
The Integration and Management of Digital and Physical Worlds
Today's physical infrastructure is becoming instrumented. Sensors are being embedded everywhere: In bridges and roads, cars, appliances, cameras, pipelines, even in medicine and livestock. At the same time, the Internet is allowing all of this embedded computing to be interconnected, leading to a trillion connected and intelligent things, and the massive volumes of data they will produce.
IBM is working with thousands of clients around the world, applying its deep industry expertise and experience, to link these increasingly more intelligent things to powerful new backend systems that can process all that data, and applying advanced analytics capable of turning it into real insight, in real time.
Building on that expertise, IBM today announced new industry-specific services and software to help clients integrate their digital and physical infrastructure. Through the new services, IBM will help clients map and integrate intelligent things with backend systems, enabling them to gain new insight into their operations and provide better services as a result. The new offerings include:
A new software and services offering, IBM Service Management Industry Solutions, that is customized for seven industries: Utilities, chemicals & petroleum, telecommunications retail, banking, electronics and manufacturing. The new offering includes IBM service management software and services from IBM Global Business Services, IBM Global Technology Services and specialized IBM Business Partner capabilities. Together, they enable organizations to design and implement IT systems that centrally manage and monitor an entire industry infrastructure, enabling greater performance of both traditional assets such as manufacturing robotic equipment as well as emerging technologies like "smart meters" and RFID.
New services to help clients design and implement service management strategies. IBM's Service Management Implementation Enhancements & Accelerators design services and deployment planning. Through these services, IBM helps clients streamline the implementation of Tivoli software components so businesses can realize faster returns. These new services complement the IBM Service Management Industry Solutions.
A new governance consulting practice. Through the practice, IBM works with clients to design governance systems to help mitigate risks related to business changes, changing market conditions and regulatory requirements. By providing clients with greater visibility into the performance of their businesses and control over the management of business processes, IBM helps them improve their ability to respond to changes, and gain greater command over their hardware, software, people and information assets.
New Tivoli Service Automation Manager software, which automates the design, deployment and management of services such as middleware, applications, hardware and networks, tasks that today are largely done manually and thus subject to error, time constraints and other human limitations. For example, the new software would enable a manufacturer to deploy a new quality assurance application in dramatically less time than it takes today and with far less disruption to the operation.
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.
Managing Staggering Amounts of Information
IBM is announcing new technologies to help clients more securely and efficiently manage skyrocketing data:
To reduce data proliferation, IBM today announced an integrated appliance, including a server, storage, and "data deduplication" software. The new IBM "ProtecTIER®" Deduplication Appliance helps eliminates redundant copies of the same data, reducing it to a single instance of the data and eliminating duplicative copies. This is a critical capability as information needs continue to escalate, making data deduplication one of the hottest areas in Storage. The offering is a result of IBM’s acquisition of Diligent Technologies in 2008.
IBM announced enhancements to the IBM XIV Storage System, including a new lower point of entry and interoperability enhancements. The new, 65 percent smaller minimum capacity configuration is designed for mid-range customers and enterprise organizations with initial smaller capacity needs. XIV’s design provides fast access to information even as data grows across traditional applications, such as financial services or health care, or new workloads, such as digital media and Web 2.0.
IBM is announcing Full-Disk Encryption on its IBM System Storage DS8000, which can help increase security and reduce costs and complexity through innovative self-encrypting drives. Data breaches and new regulations have fueled an interest in IBM’s industry-leading self-encrypting storage solutions. 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 the flexible Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager, the DS8000 security solution can not only secure data at rest but can also offer a simple, cost-effective solution for “securely erasing” disk drives that are being retired or used for a different purpose.
IBM Internet Security System’s new data security services are designed with next-generation security technology to help clients secure their sensitive information from the enterprise to the edge of a network. With these new security offerings, IBM can help prevent information loss via: Network extrusion prevention; implementing and managing encryption solutions to help protect data even when an endpoint device is lost or stolen; securing data more effectively while it’s in use on an endpoint device; monitoring and controlling the use of external storage devices for storing and transporting data; and enhancing the security of inbound and outbound email.
New InfoSphere Warehouse for System z beta software, designed to help clients make real-time decisions based on core business data for driving better customer management. System z customers can use this new software to more easily and cost effectively design and run a data warehouse that supports business intelligence applications, such as Cognos 8 BI.
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.
A key element of a more efficient infrastructure is previously announced IBM Systems Director software, which can bring order to the jumble of physical and virtual assets that characterize today’s data center. The Systems Director software can enable customers to realize major increases in the efficiency of UNIX, Windows, and Linux server platforms. The software’s advanced tools can help IT managers control and automate large numbers of physical and virtual servers across the full range of IBM hardware (and non-IBM platforms as well) including AIX, Windows, Linux, Power, VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Xen, and z/VM. Through a single Systems Director interface, users can map virtual resources to physical servers; throttle energy consumption up or down as needed; and collect data on hardware temperatures and data center energy use. Systems Director can automatically monitor remote hardware operations and take proper action based on alerts.
Building on the benefits of IBM Systems Director, IBM announced new offerings.
New IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management software, which brings automation to the management and reporting of energy consumption by non-IT assets — an office building air conditioning system, for example, or streetlights in a city. With the new software, organizations can now generate a variety of configurable reports to help them track and visualize energy dynamics — and take appropriate action as a result, while extrapolating how changes will yield different business outcomes using sophisticated "what if" calculations.
New IBM Resiliency Consulting Services, which provide assessment, planning and business-impact analysis to identify the critical business processes that most impact a client's revenue and assets, and help them prioritize the recovery strategies that might be needed during business disruption.
As part of today’s news, IBM also introduced a new initiative to help Business Partners develop and deepen their competencies and skills that can enable them to better respond to clients’ business and IT transformational needs. The new “Dynamic Infrastructure Specialty Program” provides education, sales, marketing and technical guidance to advance Business Partners’ skills in key business challenge areas such as virtualization, information management and energy efficiency. Business Partners can also qualify to receive as much as 100 thousand dollars in business development funds. The first wave of Business Partners is already gaining certification, including Sirius, Mainline, Vicom, MicroStrategies, Agilysis and Computer Integrated Engineering System – who are now in a strengthened position to go to market with a consultative, solutions-led approach.
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