IBM says new technologies boost security, cloud and analytics capabilities

• New offerings include enterprise Power Systems, high-end disk storage and key mainframe software updates
• Part of IBM’s focus on Smarter Computing systems aimed at solving varied and intensifying challenges

IBM has unveiled new technologies it says are designed to help organizations with today’s greatest challenges, including the need for improved security, the ability to take advantage of cloud computing, and the requirement to manage and analyze vast amounts of data.
 
The new offerings include what it claims is the most powerful enterprise Power Systems to date, a new high-end disk storage system and key software updates for IBM’s newest mainframe computer.
 
The announcement is part of IBM’s continued focus on Smarter Computing systems aimed at solving the varied and intensifying challenges organizations are facing, from security vulnerabilities to managing ballooning data volumes that are expanding through social and mobile technologies, the company said in a statement.
 
IBM announced its enterprise Power Systems with new hardware and software innovations designed to help customers gain business insights fast and securely, a result of more than US$1.4 billion in R&D investment.
 
IBM Power 770 (pic) and Power 780 servers now feature the new POWER7+ microprocessor, a technology that offers a performance boosts of 30% to 40% on application workloads compared with previous versions.
 
In addition, IBM has added several new capabilities to its family of Power Systems servers to help customers build virtualized private cloud or managed service cloud infrastructures, and respond dynamically to changes in application and workload requirements.
 
Elastic Capacity on Demand for Power Systems Pools, for example, enables the sharing of resources across multiple servers, which can improve the availability and enhace the access to resources during planned and unplanned maintenance activities, the company said.
 
When managing a cloud-based infrastructure with IBM PowerVM virtualization software, customers can now more easily move individual server partitions to quickly balance resources in reaction to changing business needs.
 
Single virtual machines can be moved three times faster and concurrent migrations can occur up to 4.7 times faster than with previous versions, IBM claimed.
 
The average corporate IT infrastructure is cyber-attacked nearly 60,000 times every day, citing its IBM Managed Security Services, 2010 report, and the average total organizational cost of a data breach is US$5.5 million, making security one of the top priorities of enterprise organizations.
 
To enhance data security and regulatory compliance, IBM PowerSC security and compliance software along with Trusted Surveyor has been updated and now provides real-time security alerts and delivers improved compliance reporting.
 
The deluge of information organizations continue to grapple with is posing increasingly dynamic challenges for IT administrators. Mounting data volumes are not only stressing system performance and manageability, but security as well. To help customers respond to these challenges, IBM said it has solidified two of its high-end storage systems with dramatic performance and security updates.
 
The IBM System Storage DS8870 is the newest and most powerful member of the company’s DS8000 family of “high-density” enterprise class storage systems. Upgraded with the advanced IBM POWER7 processors and up to 1TB of system cache, the DS8870 delivers up to three times more performance for transaction processing applications than the current DS8800 model.
 
On the tape storage front, IBM updated the IBM Virtualization Engine TS7700 Release 3, a system that melds virtualization with magnetic tape. The system is an update of the TS7700 Enterprise Virtual Tape Library System, which is typically used in enterprises powered by mainframes and is designed to help administrators virtualize their existing tape storage systems for improved manageability, capacity and security.