OPTIMIZED SYSTEMS

IBM Takes Aim at 'Big Data' Analytics

Salvatore Salamone | Date: 10-20-11 | Comments

Taking dead aim at the challenges of "big data," IBM announced 55 new and updated server and storage solutions that can help companies gain actionable insights from data and increase IT capacity.

Yesterday, IBM announced preconfigured systems that bundle its analytics software on mainframe and Power-based servers. The new Smart Analytics System servers and storage solutions are aimed at helping businesses make faster and better decisions based on the enormous volumes of data they�re collecting.

Besides the business analytics systems, IBM also announced automated tools for implementing security and compliance standards, and starter kits for establishing private clouds.

Addressing "big data," the new solutions offer a wide range of performances and capacities to meet the specific needs of different organizations. On the high end, IBM announced the Smart Analytics System 9700 and 9710, which are zEnterprise mainframe systems that offer mainframe-based data-warehouse and business-intelligence (BI) software.

In addition, IBM unveiled the Smart Analytics System 7710, based on the IBM Power7 chips, and the x86-based Smart Analytics System 5710. Both systems are all-in-one offerings for handling business analytics and reporting services. According to IBM, these integrated solutions offer deployment times of days, rather than months, and support such capabilities as BI reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, and text analytics.

To keep up with the growing volume of data that companies are now storing, IBM introduced a number of storage solutions. They include the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified Disk System, which is a midrange disk system; IBM System Storage DS8000 Release 6.2, an enterprise disk system designed to deliver greater performance and improved capacity optimization capabilities to address the needs of today�s diverse compute workloads; and support for 3TB disk drives in the IBM XIV Storage System Gen3, an enterprise disk system introduced in July.

Among the other new solutions, several were systems optimized for specific tasks. These solutions include:

1. IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator, which incorporates the Netezza data warehouse appliance into the IBM zEnterprise System for faster analytic responses;

2. IBM z/VM 6.2, which supports multi-system virtualization capabilities to help companies avoid virtual machine sprawl;

3. IBM SmartCloud Entry solution, delivered by IBM Starter Kit for Cloud, which offers the building blocks to create private clouds on virtualized IBM System x and Power Systems hardware;

4. zEnterprise Starter Edition for Cloud, which allows an entry-level infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud delivery model for Linux on System z with Tivoli Provisioning Manager; and

5. IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud, which is a comprehensive, converged cloud-computing platform that combines server, storage, networking and management technology to quickly create an x86-based virtualization environment.

News stories about this large IBM rollout noted that the new solutions are designed to compete with Oracle offerings, including the Exadata Database Machine, a reconfigured data-warehousing system that combines Oracle software with Sun server and storage technology, and the Exalogic Elastic Compute Cloud, a cloud-in-a-box solution that includes Oracle�s virtual machine software and other applications in hardware that runs on either x86 or SPARC chips.