Additional Products, Services to Build a More Dynamic Infrastructure
DUBAI & ARMONK, April 29, 2009: IBM today announced that its clients around the world such as Kroger Foods and the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation are building new, more dynamic infrastructures to help reduce costs, improve service, and manage risk. The company also announced additional new dynamic infrastructure products and services. As a result, clients can better respond to and manage challenges presented by today's globally integrated world.
"The current global economic downturn along with rapidly increasing levels of information across the enterprise has been the catalyst for many organizations to review their current operating infrastructure with the intent of gaining more insight into their business and becoming more efficient," said Takreem El Tohamy, general manager, IBM Middle East and North Africa. "The Dynamic Infrastructure offerings enable organisations not only to reduce costs but also to leverage innovation in-house and deliver value to their business, becoming smarter organisations that can better service their customers."
Clients including Kroger Foods and the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp. are working with IBM to develop smarter, more intelligent infrastructures that help reduce costs and improve services they provide to their customers.
The infrastructure technology helps clients manage and gain insight from an increasing number of things in their physical infrastructure that are being instrumented with intelligent sensors; analyze vast amounts of information; and become more "green" and cost efficient.
IDC estimates the market opportunity for the software, servers, technologies, and services to manage the world's converged IT and physical infrastructure to be $122 billion by 2012.
New dynamic infrastructure clients:
The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation (THSRC) is using IBM software connected to intelligent sensors to manage maintenance and logistics data from for the revolutionary high-speed rail network that runs along the west coast of Taiwan. These sensors identify maintenance issues and track train locations to make sure hundreds of trains carrying passengers between the south and the north are safe and on time. As a result, THSRC is able to greatly improve their customer service. The express trains are capable of traveling at up to 186 miles per hour (300 km/hr) meaning travel between Taipei City and Kaohsiung City is only roughly 90 minutes as opposed to the 4.5 hours by conventional rail. Using IBM software for insight into assets, their conditions and work processes, and for better planning and control, has helped THSRC maintain an average punctuality rate of 99.15 percent.
Kroger Foods is using IBM systems as the underpinnings of its innovative "Customer First" loyalty program, which collects checkout data from shoppers to analyze buying patterns and allows Kroger to personally target individual shoppers. This technology also allows Kroger to better plan store assortments based on the surrounding demographics and customer base. As a result, Kroger, can provide better service to its clients. In addition, Kroger's infrastructure is radically less costly and more energy efficient. Its new environmentally friendly data center in Hamilton, Ohio it built on top of an aquifer, which reduces the cost of water cooling technology for the latest, energy efficient IBM systems, including Systems z enterprise servers that run Kroger's data warehouse and distribution systems applications; Power Systems for pharmacy and transportation route management applications; and System x servers for e-commerce and web-based applications.
New dynamic infrastructure products and services
To help clients build and manage more dynamic infrastructures, IBM is further expanding its portfolio of offerings by introducing a range of new products and services for mid-size and enterprise clients.
New offerings designed to help clients build more flexible and dynamic infrastructures
A new consulting service the IT Optimization Business Value Roadmap to help clients with multiple information technology (IT) projects planned to re-evaluate priorities and shift resources to fewer projects in today's existing economic environment.
The service helps clients execute a targeted optimization plan that can save between 20-40 percent in costs, and prioritize and map future IT projects based on key business priorities.
The IBM Service Management Center for Cloud Computing, which now includes new IBM Tivoli Identity and Access Assurance, IBM Tivoli Data and Application Security, and IBM Tivoli Security Management for z/OS, for Cloud environments.
Two new System x appliances for system and application monitoring and service request management.
New infrastructure offerings designed to help clients reduce costs; become more green
A new IBM Business Partner program - Ready for Energy and Environment that certifies partners' solutions to help clients reduce cost and become more green.
New Power Systems with IBM's POWER6+ microprocessor technology, which provides 10 percent performance boost over previous systems and can reduce power consumption by up to 30 percent. Embedded in POWER6+ are features that make software applications more reliable and prevent downtime. New Systems include the IBM Power 520 and 550 Express servers, that use 4.7GHz and the world's fastest 5.0GHz POWER6+ processor respectively -- allowing companies to reduce floor space by 92 percent.
IBM also announced industry first virtualization software capabilities - IBM PowerVM Active Memory Sharing, allows memory to automatically flow from one virtual server -- or "logical partition" -- to another for increased utilization and flexibility of memory usage. Using this software, memory can be pooled and automatically adjusted to meet fluctuating workload demands.
Continuing IBM's commitment to a new generation of leadership x86 technology built on the 4th generation IBM X-Architecture™ , and building on the recently announced System x racks, blades and iDataPlex products, today's announcement include two new 2-socket tower servers, System x3400 M2 and x3500 M2. These offerings aid clients to significantly reduce cost with energy efficiency, including all new thermal designs, new voltage regulators and higher integration on the board to simplify power distribution and reduce distribution loss. This includes new, greater than 92 percent efficiency power and provide up to 60 percent reduction in power when idle and up to 25 percent reduction when fully utilized vs. the previous generation. As a result energy savings can reach up to 95 percent compared to previous generations of x86 servers.
The new technology found in both servers feature new systems management tools like Integrated Management Module, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), Systems Director and Tools Center, helping customers establishes a virtual infrastructure with less hardware.
In fact, clients can reach greater than 11:1 consolidation from 2005 generation x86 servers when transitioning to IBM HS22 blades and an estimated 9:1 consolidation when transitioning to x3650 M2 servers.
Also debuting is the Cluster 1350, a fully integrated solution designed to increase high-performance computing needs in a broad-range of application areas, while reducing overall power and cooling cost by up to 50 percent.
New offerings to help manage, analyze, store, secure staggering amounts of information.
New risk management and business intelligence software for System z, ACI Proactive Risk Manager (PRM) for System z is designed to handle high-volume fraud assessments as part of the authorization process to detect whether a transaction is approved or denied, without impacting legitimate credit card, check or debit card transactions.
IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence for Linux on System z provides fast and easy access to the most up-to-date business information from any location on handheld devices such as BlackBerries.
A new version of the IBM System Storage DS5000 that will include self-encrypting disk technology for midmarket clients. Data is automatically protected against unauthorized access, eliminating the costs associated with data exposure, while helping clients address regulatory requirements. Other enhancements include faster, 8-Gbps adapters to improve efficiency and increase performance; and greater capacity of up to 448 disk drives in a single system to provide lower total cost of ownership.
A new version of Tivoli Storage Productivity Center delivers new performance analytics technology and customization features that enable IT administrators to manage large-scale storage environments while increasing overall system performance, reducing management complexities, and improving system availability. The new analytics technology helps identify hot spots for problem determination and quick tuning to improve performance and storage utilization in order to help clients increase service levels and improve efficiency.
Tivoli Storage Productivity Center also delivers expanded heterogeneous platform support, advanced reporting, and security features for multi-vendor storage environments.
New networking offerings
IBM today announced new hardware, software and services to help improve networking connectivity for greater infrastructure efficiency. Building on its extensive experience in networking, IBM is introducing a new service offering, IBM Networking, Strategy, Optimization and Implementation Services for consolidation and virtualization.
Also as part of today's networking news, IBM is increasing the range of the choices if offers for network connectivity, beginning with an expansion of its OEM agreement with Brocade to introduce a family of IBM-branded Ethernet switches and routers. These complement IBM's current offerings, such as those from long-time networking partner Cisco. IBM has also strengthened its collaboration with Juniper. In February, the two companies demonstrated hybrid public-private cloud capabilities.
As part of today's announcement IBM also introduced new financing options to help enterprises specifically acquire IBM's new line of dynamic infrastructure products and services..
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© Press Release 2009
