IBM yesterday boosted its smarter computing initiative with the rollout of a number of performance and efficiency enhancements to its storage and technical computing systems.
The company unveiled a new strategic approach to designing and managing storage infrastructures with greater automation and intelligence, as well as significant performance enhancements to several key storage systems.
IBM also released its first offerings that incorporate software from its acquisition of Platform Computing earlier this year.
According to IBM, these offerings are intended to help a broader set of enterprise businesses 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,” says Gary Carroll, director of general business at IBM. “The enhanced systems and storage solutions we're announcing have the performance, efficiency and intelligence to handle this big data.
“This is smarter computing that allows our clients to organise and analyse their data to better understand and serve their customers.”
In a statement, IBM says constructing and evolving storage infrastructures to better respond to constant social, economic and business change is critical to the long-term viability of every organisation.
To do it right, it adds, a smarter approach to storage is needed - one that exploits automated intelligence to increase the efficiency, utilisation and performance of storage systems while lowering costs.
The company has been building a portfolio of products and technologies for the past several years towards this end and has unveiled a formal approach behind it, called IBM Smarter Storage.
With this approach, IBM explains, organisations are able to architect storage infrastructures that leverage such 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, IBM is unveiling enhancements to several key products. For example, it is adding real-time compression to IBM Storwize V7000 and to the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), the company's storage virtualisation system.
Unlike traditional storage systems that compress only 'low activity' data, or data not frequently accessed, says IBM, real-time compression on the Storwize V7000 and SVC systems compresses active data by as much as 80%, increasing total effective storage capacity up to five-fold.
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.
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