UPDATED 11:38 EDT / MAY 30 2014

Infrastructure innovation is critical to business success | #IBMEdge

Infrastructure MattersWe are now at a tipping point where massive amounts of data are defining the world around us, changing every business, organization and industry as well as the rules within.

“Infrastructure matters” was the main theme at IBM Edge earlier this month, and for the event’s opening session, the focus was all around what infrastructure is today and why it matters now more than ever.

The presentation also covered Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s x86 business. Keynote speakers for the session included IBM’s Tom Rosamilia, Senior VP, Jamie Thomas, GM, IBM Storage & Software Defined Systems and Adalio Sanchez, GM, System x and PureSystems Solutions.

Infrastructure Readiness

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“I will tell you that no matter what we do and no matter what you hear about the cloud, it’s running on hardware somewhere,” Rosamilia said in his opening remarks.

Increasingly complex workloads are putting infrastructures on overload, so it’s imperative to build an infrastructure that enables growth. An example is the movement from static infrastructures to dynamic, defined by software for speed, agility, flexibility and utilization. Rosamilia said that unless you can find the perfect workload for the perfect hardware and run it flat out, you’ll never be able to take advantage of those capabilities without software. He went on to explain that in all of IBM’s C-suite surveys, people consider technology as an enabler for growth.

An interesting statistic from an IBM study being released in July on the global infrastructure of 750 organizations found that 70 percent believe IT infrastructure optimized revenue and profit or was a key enabler to competitive advantage, but only 10 percent were ready to address Cloud, Big Data & Analytics, mobile and social. Visionaries who lead in readiness have higher profit margins, revenue growth and general earnings.

The Next Generation of Storage

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Slide - 70,10Existing storage environments today are somewhat parallel to the statistic that Rosamilia shared about infrastructure readiness. Most organizations are not ready for the new era, and less than 50 percent of business stakeholders believe that they have the infrastructure in place for the next agenda. Infrastructures that truly understand the applications and the workloads and respond dynamically to meet those needs achieve end business goals by capitalizing on commodity hardware to meet the economic equation.

Thomas stated that IBM believes there are three tenants for the next generation of storage: software-defined storage which allows flexibility for hardware deployment, infusion of Flash across product lines for improved performance and the next journey of storage virtualization for optimization of existing environments.

With that in mind, Thomas unveiled IBM’s refresh of its entire storage product line. The company is advancing storage virtualization in the context of Storwize and SVC product families to extend its reach to more than 260 IBM and non-IBM hardware devices.

Through the infusion of real-time compression, IBM now supports five times more data on the same hardware deployment. Thomas also announced the infusion of Flash across the product line, which is based on last year’s announcement of IBM’s $1 billion investment. Through Flash enclosures, IBM now achieves three and a half times the performance, decreases specialization by 50 percent and reduces power consumption by 12 percent.

Additionally, IBM is committed to opening up storage capabilities through open APIs, like OpenStack, Hadoop, POSIX and many others, while continuing to surface its capability as services, allowing organizations more flexibility to achieve economics and business insights.

Lenovo Acquisition

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Slide - IBM.LenovoFollowing Thomas, Sanchez took to the stage to discuss Lenovo acquiring IBM’s x86 business. He started his presentation with three elements necessary for a successful x86 strategy, which were innovation, having systems that are highly optimized to important workloads and having tremendous scale in order to compete effectively in the marketplace.

The last point is what led him to the topic of the Lenovo acquisition. He explained that scale means having the max procurement cost leverage in a world of rapid commoditization to provide clients the best possible costed solutions and nimble high volume manufacturing to meet the needs of clients wanting customized servers and to compete with ODMs emerging in the marketplace. Scale is what the planned acquisition of IBM’s x86 business by Lenovo is all about. Combining IBM’s heritage of x86 Systems innovation with Lenovo’s scale and supply chain efficiency equates to greater client value.

Sanchez went on to say that the transaction is not simply an acquisition by Lenovo. Rather, it’s the next phase in the strategic collaboration between these two companies, this time in the data center spanning servers, storage, software and maintenance. IBM and Lenovo will be strategic partners in the PureSystems journey going forward.

After the transaction closes, Lenovo will supply IBM x86 infrastructure components so that IBM can continue delivering PureSystems and Flex Systems families for power and hybrid systems for PureApplication and PureData. Also, IBM will authorize Lenovo to sell the v7000 Flex storage device and the smart cloud entry so the company can deliver x86 based Flex and integrated systems to the marketplace.

“Through it all, our focus and our determination is to innovate and redefine value targeted at you, our clients,” said Sanchez


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