IBM has announced a new approach to designing and managing storage infrastructures with greater automation and intelligence, as well as significant performance enhancements to several key storage systems and the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center suite. At the same time, the company announced its first offerings that incorporate software from IBM’s acquisition of Platform Computing earlier this year. These offerings are intended to help a broader set of enterprise customers use technical computing to achieve faster results with applications that require substantial computing resources to process growing volumes of data.
“Enterprises are dealing with data that is increasing exponentially in both size and complexity,” said Rodney Adkins, Senior Vice President of IBM Systems and Technology Group. “The enhanced systems and storage solutions we’re announcing today have the performance, efficiency and intelligence to handle this Big Data. This is smarter computing that allows our clients to organize and analyze their data to better understand and serve their customers.”
Constructing and evolving storage infrastructures to better respond to constant social, economic, and business change is critical to the long-term viability of every organization. To do it right, they need a smarter approach to storage – an approach that exploits automated intelligence to increase the efficiency, utilization, and performance of storage systems while lowering costs.
According to a survey of more than 300 global CIOs conducted by IBM and IDC, the most efficient companies have been able to spend more than 50% on new projects that were transformative to their business. By implementing techniques such as virtualization, deduplication, automated tiering and cataloging, IT leaders are able to reduce the amount of time their architects spend provisioning storage by up to 50% as well as reduce the cost by up to 20%.
With more than 256 petabytes of client data managed, IBM has been building a portfolio of products and technologies for the past several years toward this end and today announced a formal approach behind it called IBM Smarter Storage. With this approach, customers are able to architect storage infrastructures that leverage such leading edge technologies as Real-time Compression and automated tiering to help get more performance out of their systems, faster and for less cost.
To drive this initiative further, IBM is announcing enhancements to a several key products. For example, it is adding Real-time Compression to IBM Storwize V7000, as well as to the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), the company’s industry-leading storage virtualization system.
Unlike traditional storage systems that compress only “low activity” data, or data not frequently accessed, Real-time Compression on the Storwize V7000 and SVC systems compresses active data by as much as 80%, increasing total effective storage capacity by up to five times (IBM Study). In addition to Real-time Compression, IBM also added four-way clustering support for Storwize V7000 block systems that can double the maximum system capacity to 960 drives or 1.4 petabytes.
“Smarter Storage is an approach to the design, deployment and management of storage infrastructures,” said Subroto Das, Vice President, Storage, IBM India South Asia. “It is a more intelligent, efficient and automated approach that fundamentally changes the way we think about storage. We will enable organizations to take control of their storage, gain more valuable insights from their data, and ultimately deliver more value to the business.”
