IBM has announced its new strategic approach to designing and managing storage infrastructures with greater automation and intelligence, along with 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. This expansion as part of its Smart Cloud Initiative, is planned primarily across Smarter Storage solution, data processing for big data loads for small to large enterprises and key performance enhancements to its critical workload management systems within the offering.
The Smarter Storage Solution
With more than 256 petabytes of client data managed over time, IBM has formally announced its storage ecosystem approach and called it IBM Smarter Storage. Real-time compression, automated tiering are few notable features with which enterprises can design their storage infrastructure to leverage power of its smart storage initiative.
To boost its initiative further IBM has also added Real-time Compression to IBM Storwize V7000, as well as to the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), the company’s storage virtualization system. The company also claims the new four-way clustering support for Storwize V7000 block systems that can double the maximum system capacity to 960 drives or 1.4 petabytes.
The Big Data Computing Boosters
Enhancing the power of computing for big data requirements the company has said, the IBM Platform Symphony family, a grid manager is now integrated with the MapReduce software framework to provide faster throughput and performance for demanding analytics and big data workloads in a single grid environment. Platform Symphony’s resource sharing model makes it cost-efficient for clients to expand their analytics environment as needed.
The Platform Enhancements
The enhancements also included a new Active File Management (AFM) software within its General Parallel File System (GPFS) to provide fast and trust access to unstructured data. Its new iDataPlex system is now powerful enough to double the performance of workloads with latest graphical processing units meeting the modern age requirements.
The key boost though is in storage space with its small business storage offering, IBM System Storage DS3500 now capable of speeding up backups, optimize storage utilization and thereby reduce costs. It has also launched two new products to enhance lifecycle management of multimedia files and providing a simplified use and consolidated view of multiple tape libraries. The two products are launched by names Linear Tape File System (LTFS) and Tape System Library Manager (TSLM).
Founder and chief editor of this website and a keen technology journalist. A programme manager by profession and likes to network with people around. Sudheer is also Director of ITWings Ltd the parent company of BigDataDiary.
