What does it mean to be tomorrow ready? In the past few years, we have seen many clients embrace the opportunities created by a smarter planet—the world is undeniably instrumented, intelligent and interconnected—and this is changing how the systems of the world work. In IT, we have seen this translate into a phenomenal advancement in the need to produce, transport and process information in real time. On a smarter planet, the more we know, the more we want to know. And, the opportunity exists to do so much more. With Smarter Computing, businesses can be tomorrow-ready today, with the infrastructure that allows them to master big data, social, mobile, analytics and flow of critical information. It’s scalable and flexible because it uses patterns to predict what you’ll need next. Smarter Computing helps make the right decisions today, ensuring a smarter tomorrow. This is IBM’s unique point of view on what it means to be tomorrow ready. TRANSITION: Let’s begin by exploring the evolving role of IT.
But while we know organizations recognize the strategic importance of technology to their organization’s success….the question is whether the underlying IT is capable to adapt to these technology forces and be ready for the challenge… Research from IDC has shown that one of the main challenges IT organizations face today is around the deployment, management, and administration of servers – which is consuming a larger portion of the overall IT budget and consequently leaving fewer resources to spend on new projects. Sixteen years ago, the bulk of IT budgets was spent on hardware and less than 30% on management and administration. By next year, that relationship will have completely flipped and management now will drive nearly 70% percent of all expenditures Our IBM global technology services group did some further research into the effectiveness of IT datacenters. Not surprisingly, they discovered that only 1 in 5 organizations are able to invest greater than 50 percent of their budget on new projects. This puts a very real limit on what IT shops can accomplish as their businesses strive to embrace the technology that is having such an impact on business. So the question is how can we IBM help clients deal with this conundrum of spending too much “to keep the lights” on vs. investing in new projects to help the business?
Well, that is what IBM PureSystems is all about… The IBM Pure Systems family have integrated expertise, are built for the cloud,and combine the flexibility of general purpose systems with the simplicity of an appliance. These expert integrated systems fundamentally change both the experience and economics of IT. These systems are integrated from the ground up and have three truly unique attributes. The first is built-in expertise. Think of this bottling up the collective knowledge of thousands of deployments, established best practices, and innovative thinking into a set of patterns that automate otherwise manual functions to dramatically reduce time to value. The second is integrated by design. These systems are deeply integrated from the CPU to the app layer, tuned in the lab, and packaged in the factory into a single ready-to-go system that is optimized for the workloads it will be running… All of the integration is done for you, by experts. The third is that the entire experience is much more simple – from the set up of the system…to operating, maintaining and upgrading it over time….Management of the entire system of physical and virtual resources is integrated. And all this is accomplished in an open manner that enables participation by a broad ecosystem of partners to bring their industry optimized solutions to market…
To understand the thinking behind and value of PureSystems, let’s dig a bit further into the challenges clients face today. In particular let’s focus on the fact that clients are simply spending too much time and effort tuning general purpose servers, storage, and the like… Yes, the individual component prices may be right, but the amount of time and cost spent on designing, deploying, and implementing a solution into production is unacceptable. For a custom built system or solution, the issue is one of flexibility and how effectively a client can manage and maintain that environment. In both of these cases the math just doesn’t add up for most clients….it takes way too much time, too many people, and too much money. In this sense, clients have been pushed into a corner …. BUT there is a way out…. there is a solution.
And this is what we are trying to solve with IBM PureSystems -- simplify the entire IT project lifecycle…from design and deployment…to management and maintenance…with the goal of reducing cycle time, cost, and of course risk. The Pure Systems design integrates compute, networking, and storage into a highly automated, simple to use system with integrated management. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not packaging…this is hard core design from the ground up. These systems have cloud functionality built in, and patterns of expertise to simplify and automate key functions. These systems also feature a scale-in design that provides increased density. IBM made the strategic investments in PureSystems to deliver innovations that – through deep integration by design – transform end-to-end management of IT in the data center.
IBM Flex System solutions are built-to-order offerings for clients who want to custom build and tune configurations to their specific requirements, selecting exactly the specific compute, systems networking and optional storage and management required to support their specific workloads. The Flex System chassis is designed to support multiple generations of technology we foresee for the next decade – being the first chassis to support 40Gb Ethernet bandwidths today. With a clean slate design it allows new levels of integration, particularly with the management integration of the Flex System Manager across all physical and virtual resources. Flex System is designed to support the largest memory configurations with up to 50% more memory for denser virtualization, higher networking bandwidths up 2X with half the latency, and more dedicated storage in each compute node – up to 3X the competition. Flex System supports a broad range of hypervisors and environments enabling choice of tens of thousands of applications. Our guest from New Breed Logistics will discuss their experience with Flex System in a few minutes.