IBM unveils new storage technologies

CEBU, Philippines - IBM yesterday announced its new and updated storage technologies that can help clients gain actional insights that could improve the delivery of new services and spur profitable business opportunities.

The introduction of the new set of updated technologies, is part of the company’s stance to accelerate the implementation of Smarter Computing.

As the world’s increasing demand for data and services puts a strain on IT resources, organizations experience a vicious cycle in which a rigid IT infrastructure and lack of trusted data leads to reactive or risky decision making.

According to IBM, attempts to overcome these challenges through additional IT investments often result in a more sprawling and costly infrastructure.

Smarter Computing was introduced to help address these challenges and through it, will result in efficient and innovative IT for dramatically improved economics.

Smarter Computing is realized through an IT infrastructure that is ‘Designed for Data” where data is harnessed for better insight (via analytics) from this available information to use this intelligence for strategic advantage; Tuned to the Task is an integrated IT system tuned to help address the unique needs and system architecture of any workload requirement to yield the best performance which will drive greater performance, efficiency and workload flexibility; and Managed in the Cloud, which simplifies access to information in a cost-effective manner through cloud computing to reinvent business and drive business transformation.  

Based on recent reports from reputable analyst firms, 2011 has seen an exponential growth in the storage business. This growth has been attributed to key influencing factors such as cloud computing, storage efficiency and the era of 'Big Data', where companies have to deal with huge and growing volumes of information, both structured and unstructured.

In order to manage this large expanse of data, an efficient storage infrastructure must be developed and implemented, whilst ensuring maximum protection and management of this data. It is this fine balance of up-to-date security measures, with efficient management of their expanding data while allowing for a proper analysis of the data that companies require assistance.  

IBM is delivering new entry-level business analytics systems, accelerated database analytics and expanded data storage options to meet the needs of these companies looking to gain valuable insight from their data and have announced three new offerings to meet this requirement.

The IBM Storwise V700 Unified, is a midrange disk system brings efficiency and simplicity to data storage with file and block storage located on the same system with a world-class graphical user interface. By enabling vitalization, consolidation, and tiering in mid-sized organizations, it is designed to improve application availability and resource utilization and offers easy-to-use, efficient and cost-effective management capabilities for both new and existing storage resources in your IT infrastructure.

Also, the company introduced the IBM XIV storage system Gen3, an enterprise disk system with an advanced hardware upgrade that can improve performance for the most demanding application workloads such as virtualization, analytics and cloud computing and is a versatile, high-end disk storage solution featuring a new grid architecture that offers clients high performance and scalability besides making it cost effective and simple.

IBM System Storage DS8000 Release 6.2 enterprise disk system is another new offering which will introduce greater performance and improved capacity optimization capabilities that allow organizations to manage diverse workloads efficiently and automatically without administrator involvement.

"IBM’s continued leadership in delivering innovative storage offerings to our clients reaffirms our strategy to provide the most comprehensive tiered portfolio of storage offerings, ranging from software and services to disk and tape storage solutions. With these new offerings announced today, IBM's leadership position in the storage space for managing Big Data, especially for the mid-market segment, as well as in storage efficiency that is Tuned to the Task and Managing storage in the cloud is further solidified, as these offerings under the theme of Smarter Computing, will enable the next generation of storage solutions which are cost-efficient and reliable, so as to help customers increase overall productivity and maximize storage," said Sang Yoon Yi, country manager for systems and technology group of IBM Philippines. (FREEMAN)