Las Vegas, 25 Feb 2010
IBM is set to enhance investments in virtualisation solutions, saying it is the foundation of visibility, control and automation for the business infrastructure necessary for the implementation of successful integrated service management (ISM) solutions.
Speaking this week at the IBM Pulse 2010 conference, in Las Vegas, Helene Armitage, GM of IBM System Software, said as the complexity of data centres grows, it becomes critical to establish ISM good practices.
“It allows improvements in service, a reduction in costs and the ability to better manage risks. By offering a cohesive portfolio to manage an infrastructure, IBM is helping clients create the infrastructure for smarter buildings, cities, utilities, offices, transportation systems and operations in every industry around the world,” noted Armitage.
She added that the data centre is becoming an organisation's command centre for increasingly complex IT and business issues as digital data continues to grow.
Traditional boundaries are expanding beyond traditional IT assets to include physical assets embedded with intelligent technology, such as building facilities, water mains and office equipment, she explained.
IBM sees the combination of virtualisation with integrated service management software as the means to provide visibility, control and automation of the data centre, IT design and delivery and physical assets.
“The combination enables business value of improved service, reduction in costs and the ability to manage risks.”
The company will focus on providing solutions for four key steps in the virtualisation process. Firstly, hypervisor software solutions, which allow for the consolidation of workloads from multiple smaller servers to fewer larger ones, would be enhanced.
The software includes both open source and proprietary offerings, and will reduce the overall number of servers, storage and network devices - minimising physical points of failure in the data centre.
Solutions, which help companies to manage their entire virtualised infrastructure, including servers, storage and networking technologies, make up the range of solutions in the second step.
Automation solutions make up the next step, which allow systems, storage and networking technologies to sense and respond to peaks and other shifts in workload demands. Automation can also reduce the time it takes to deploy a new application, or make changes to existing applications from days or weeks, to hours or minutes.
The company will also focus on solutions designed to take advantage of emerging delivery models, including cloud computing, which are unconstrained by physical barriers or location.
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