Satyen Vyas, Country Manager, System x, STG, IBM India/ South Asia talks to KTP Radhika about IBM’s architecture excellence of System x servers, market scenario and company’s plans on the innovation front. Excerpts…
How has been System x server’s adoption in the mid- market segment?
SMBs are now competing globally and need to gain a competitive edge to win amidst stiff competition even as they continue to offer varied solutions and technologies that are critical in the challenging Indian market.
This segment will see increased adoption of System x servers.
We are offering high-performance systems, networking and software products. These solutions include new category rack server, the IBM System x3750 — a streamlined, entry four processor offering created for technical computing and other floating-point intensive workloads. It also has IBM BladeCenter HS23E, an affordable, energy-efficient platform for small to mid-sized organizations, offering networking flexibility with built-in support for multiple networking technologies and IBM PureSystems — a new range of expert integrated systems.
How are you addressing virtualization and cloud customers through System x?
With virtualization, new workloads do not have to mean new servers. IBM virtualization keeps the IT infrastructure dynamic. Our System and BladeCenter virtualization solutions can help meet dynamic business needs with increased server utilization, reduced system management complexity. Building on the benefits of server virtualization, cloud computing can improve resource utilization. . Our System x and BladeCenter x86 systems provide robust platforms for cloud computing. We offer X-architecture technology, including MAX5 memory expansion, simple-swap drives, predictive failure analysis, eXFlash SSD technology and light path diagnostics on x86 servers.
How much manageability and performance have been incorporated into System x?
IBM System x servers’ next generation is built on the latest Intel processors that makes it possible to roll out new platforms and new servers that we design for higher capacity. Almost over 80% performance, primarily comes from better design of the server and Intel’s core design. Other benefits of the design includes three times higher capacity, two times bigger storage capacity or four times more bandwidth. As the demand in the market grows and aligns to more intensive server performance, we design our servers to meet those requirements. And this is part of IBM’s product design perspective. We would like to say that we are making sure that our current servers are easily and better managed with our existing software.
IBM remains a key player in the high end server market. But what is the scenario with the low end server market and what are your plans on the mass market?
For IBM, the low end server market is targeted at the SMB market primarily. Their server deployment is relatively easy. The mass market has always been our forte. IBM India is the fastest growing market for PureSystems and we will remain focused on that for the mass market. The IBM PureSystems was designed to help businesses address the complexity of enterprise IT. The reason behind these systems is the $2 billion investment made in R&D and acquisitions over four years, which is an extraordinary move by IBM to integrate all IT elements, both physical and virtual.
What all are your next innovation plans around System x servers? And what are your growth objectives for 2013?
Some of the new servers added to System x family are the System x3620 M3, which will lower your IT risk with the resiliency that comes from having no single point of failure.
We will continue our focus on SMBs. SMB market need local expertise and access to smart solutions to help them do more with less. We are providing special offerings, tools, education and incentives to our partners to help sell products, solutions and services to mid-sized clients – faster and more profitably.
Can you brief about the salient features of System x servers against x 86 servers from the competitors?
System x business is principally built on Intel technology There’s a technology called xFlash technology, which was only available on IBM’s high end servers running on core processors, servers with four processors or eight processors. Now we are bringing this technology to the mainstream servers which are the two-way rack servers.
