IBM’s Cloud Announcements – Not Just Fluff

The company announced several new storage-related products, including the ProtecTier de-duplication appliance and a smaller version of the XIV storage system which starts at $500,000 (£337,000)designed to save storage space, and added full-disk encryption to the System Storage DS8000. There is also a new datawarehouse facility on the System z mainframe, called InfoSphere Warehouse, which supports third-party business-intelligence applications, such as Cognos 8 BI.

Meanwhile, IBM and Juniper Networks demonstrated a way to drag and drop resources between datacentres and the cloud. The demonstration marked the first time IBM showed such a hybrid IT set-up, by extending its Cloud Management Console to include remote clouds as well as the private cloud in the data centre. The approach allows an IT manager to drag and drop less critical loads from the private cloud out ot the public one, for instance.

The service uses Juniper APIs on the network, and marks a significant win for Juniper over arch-rival Cisco Systems, although executives pointed out that Juniper uses standards including MPLS, so the system should work on multi-vendor networks.

Finally, Erich Clementi, appointed as general manager of Enterprise Initiatives, or “cloud czar”, will have the job of persuading large enterprises to put their IT needs onto IBM’s dozen-or-so cloud centres round the world.

All these moves have one main selling point to end users – reducing cost – according to Drabble: “While the cost of servers has remained constant, and the cost of storage has come down, the cost of management has increased dramatically. IT departments are spending 70 to 75 percent of their budget just managing the infrastructure.”

“IT organisations have never been asked to run efficiently, they have only been asked to perform,” said Drabble. “But now there is a big focus on doing things efficiently.” Features that will help this include the ability to monitor the physical performance of servers, so that less efficient ones can be turned off and their work migrated to better ones.

How is IBM Tivoli doing with all this, in comparison with its big rivals, HP OpenView and CA Unicenter?

“It’s difficult to take a position on which major systems management vendor has a lead on the others,” said Atherton. “IBM’s vision is the broadest, CA is making good inroads with its portfolio view of the world, and HP is generally good at hiding its light under a bushel – for instance, only last week, it actually started articulating its cloud computing vision.”