IBM unveils Software, Hardware and Financing Offerings
The month of October has witnessed new offerings from the world of IBM, the global technology giant. Jidaw notes that the new releases are in line with the organization’s aim of always being at the forefront of IT innovation.
The release states that “latest offerings from the leading technology company continue to advance the cutting edge ethos and reputation of the company globally and in the Nigerian environment” The new helps sustain leadership status when new translates to tangible benefits for the provider and the client – win-win. Jidaw assumes that this is the aim of IBM’s Smarter computing approach to IT innovation.
So what’s new?
The release describes the new as “software, hardware and global financing products/services”. Latest releases appear to be a researched and planned responses to challenges faced in industry in data management, data storage, analytics, IT security and financing of the tech giant’s products, services and solutions.
PowerSC security and compliance software along with Trusted Surveyor has been updated to provide real-time security information for improved compliance reporting. In addition two high-end storage systems have been strengthened with improved performance and security updates to address the big data management challenges of performance and security. System Storage DS8870 which the release dubs “the newest and most powerful member of the company’s DS8000 family of “high-density” enterprise class storage systems” has been upgraded with advanced POWER7 processors and up to 1TB of system cache.
To improve tape storage efficiencies typically required in the mainframe environment, the Virtualization Engine TS7700 virtual tape solution has been updated. Jidaw notes that it is designed to help administrators virtualize their existing tape storage systems for improved manageability, capacity and security. According to the release the Virtualization Engine now reaches new levels of performance “with end-to-end encryption and the ability to connect up to six systems in a grid architecture for greater access to information, as well as redundancy”.
There has also been an upgrade of General Parallel File System (GPFS), an advanced file management platform, which is another Big Data solution often used in high performance computing environments for storing and delivering large volumes of data for weather modeling, oil exploration and digital media production.
Latest Mainframe Software, Networking and Global Financing
IBM has in addition announced software offerings for its newest mainframe — the zEnterprise EC12, which was launched in August 2012. Hardware is great but it is software that enables the full exploitation of infrastructure features. Ingenuity through software benefits clients through improvements in business intelligence, service delivery and overall performance.
zEC12 is one of the first systems to run transaction processing applications and analytics applications on one machine. The tech giant reports that its new DB2 Analytics Accelerator V3 makes running analytics on System z simpler, faster and more affordable. It also reduces the need to store data on disk drives in the mainframe by 95 percent resulting in significantly lower storage costs.
CICS (Customer Information Control System) the popular and long established transaction processor workhorse has been enhanced with cloud computing capabilities. zEnterprise clients can now build private cloud environments for high volume and interactive customer applications such as ATM systems, bank-teller and insurance.
The new Security zSecure Suite V1.31.1 enhances security intelligence by spotting unusual activity before the system is compromised, monitoring for threats with real-time alerts and network behavior analytics, and managing security audits. Integration with QRadar SIEM (security information and event management) provides enterprise-wide security monitoring.
The company has also released a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller for its enterprise networking portfolio. The new Programmable Network Controller provides intelligent software for RackSwitch and other OpenFlow-enabled switches. Through OpenFlow, people can create virtual networks with the scalability and flexibility required to respond to business changes in cloud and mobile services environments.
The tech giant goes past hardware and software offerings with the IBM’s Global Financing (IGF) scheme. Jidaw observes that finance can be a major hurdle and so this initiative appears designed to assist clients in closing the financing gap in the acquisition of IBM systems.
Enterprise Power Systems
New offerings include what this global technology company dubs “the most powerful enterprise Power Systems to date”. Enterprise Power Systems, the Power7+ series, is designed to help customers gain business insights fast and securely. The tech giant reports that the Power7+ microprocessors are a result of more than $1.4 billion in R&D investment. Power 770 and Power 780 servers now feature the new POWER7+ microprocessor reporting performance boosts of 30 to 40 percent on application workloads compared with previous versions.
Additionally, POWER7+ offers an expanded 2.5x L3 cache memory, greater security with faster file encryption for the AIX operating system, and memory compression that results in no increased energy usage over previous generation POWER7 chips.
The top player in the Power line series, Power 795 server has been enhanced to enable customers run very demanding applications, such as business analytics, fast by utilizing up to 16 terabytes of memory with new 64GB Dual In Line Memory Modules (DIMM).
Also when managing a cloud-based infrastructure with PowerVM virtualization software, customers can now more easily move individual server partitions to quickly balance resources in reaction to changing business needs.
Win-Win
It’s certainly a wide range of offerings from the tech leading company. In the opinion of Jidaw, the innovative releases appear geared towards overcoming the diverse and great “Big Computing” challenges organizations face in IT security, cloud computing, data management and analytics. The concerns are unquestionably real. Ensuring these new offerings deliver promotes IBM’s reputation. Progress comes from both cutting edge advancement and win-win IT partnerships with clients.
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