IBM Unleashes Raft of Storage Hardware, Software and Services
IBM Unleashes Raft of Storage Hardware, Software and Services
September 10, 2008: With the amount of data growing exponentially and becoming more mobile and dynamic every day, IBM has announced a sweeping new storage initiative, aimed at addressing the major shift currently occurring in the flow of the world’s data.
The company has announced its largest launch of new storage hardware, software and services to date, with more than 30 new and upgraded information infrastructure technologies and services to be rolled out.
The new offerings designed to help businesses, governments and other institutions transform static data managed in silos into more dynamic information accessible anywhere in a cloud computing environment.
Next to this, IBM says the new technologies and services also seek to tackle the massive growth and mobility of data, skyrocketing energy costs, security concerns and more.
“The world is re-tooling its underlying IT infrastructure in a dramatic shift away from a decades-old client/server model to a radically more efficient Internet-style architecture,” says Andy Monshaw, General Manager, IBM System Storage. “This requires different thinking and new capabilities, which we are addressing in this information infrastructure launch.”
IBM says that an average individual's "information footprint" – that is the digitisation of entertainment, healthcare, security, retail preferences and more - will grow from 1 terabyte (about 50,000 trees cut and printed) per year to more than 16 terabytes by 2020.
The 30-plus new offerings IBM is rolling out to tackle the ongoing explosion of data include an upgraded high end disk offering for more mainframe storage, new data de-duplication software and hardware and is enhancing its compliance disk storage offerings with new drives for 33 percent more capacity.
It is also introducing new backup hardware including what it has dubbed “the world’s fastest one terabyte storage tape drive”, a broad swathe of security offerings including new Tivoli Key Lifecycle Management software, and new Remote Managed Infrastructure Services (RMIS).
The announcement marks the end of a three-year, US$2 (AU$2.44) billion investment in research and development that has involved more than 2,500 IBM researchers and developers from nine different countries and seen it make a number of key acquisitions in the last 24 months.
IBM says that as consumers increasingly look to "take their information" with them, businesses are struggling with outdated data centres, which are unable to handle the increased information management demands. It says that this new portfolio of products and services will help its clients keep up with the changing face of data storage.
“There is no bigger opportunity for our clients than to unlock the value they have in their data centres and help them create smart, innovative offerings for their end users - the consumer,” says Monshaw. “IBM is the only company in the world - not HP, not EMC, not Sun - with decades of research, industry knowledge, market leadership and the end-to-end capabilities to make this a reality for our clients.”
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