IBM is hosting its annual conference Edge at The Venetian in Las Vegas, where it is aiming at pushing more clients to hybrid cloud environments.
CBR has compiled a list of the key first-day takeaways from the event.
1. Power Systems
The E850, a 4-socket system which offers a flexible capacity and up to 70% guaranteed utilisations, is first on the list. Big Blue states that this is a solution for cloud service providers or medium and large enterprises that are looking to deploy multi-tenancy workloads. It offers up to 4TB of installed memory to help deal with access to data.
The E880 offers a scale up to 192 cores and the company states that critical data-intensive business workloads such as IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration exhibit ideal linear scaling all the way up to this scaling.
The result is that cloud deployments would experience a reduction in loss of efficiency when scaled to this level.
The PurePower System offers compute, networking and storage coverged infrastructure with advanced security capabilities. This is managed with OpenStack and offers a virtualisation hypervisor.
2. Spectrum Storage Insights
This comes as part of the $1 billion investment that Big Blue has made into its Spectrum Storage System. A SaaS solution that provides data management as a hybrid cloud services to help optimise on-premise storage infrastructure.
The insights will show consumption amounts at department or application level and can be deployed in 30 minutes. This solution is designed to improve storage visibility and also applies analytics to easy capacity planning.
3. XIV GEN 3
This system is designed for cloud with the use of the company’s Real-time Compression with the goal of reducing the cost of ownership.
The grid architecture can store 50-80% more data without impacting application performance and IBM is making big claims about its cost saving capabilities.
IBM, said: "IBM XIV Gen3 has shown in large deployments an average of 42 percent lower total cost of ownership over three years than HP 3PAR.100000 equivalents."
4. Big Data storage and Flexible Software Licensing
A preview of a recently developed active cloud archive service for clients has been teased to attendees. The company says that it will help clients to store large amounts of data and to retrieve it on demand at a low cost.
It is currently being piloted with Iron Mountain along with design partner clients.
As part of an ongoing drive to draw more customers in the company is also offering try-before-you-buy access to key middleware software products such as hybrid cloud computing. This will only be for a limited time and will be available through WebSphere.
5. z Systems
The Rocket Mainframe Data Access Service on Bluemix is designed to provide clients with an easy and secure connection to the data on the z Systems mainframe. This is for the development of mobile and hybrid cloud apps through Bluemix and will start in June on a no-charge trial.
The trial will provide access to the data regardless of location interface or format, it also allows access to data through other methods such as MongoDB API’s, web services, SQL and others.
