Approximately 70 percent of organizations worldwide recognize IT as a source of competitive advantage, yet less than 10 percent are equipped to address the perfect storm of megatrends sweeping through the workplace, according to a study of 750 companies IBM published this morning for the opening of its Edge2014 storage conference in Las Vegas. The vendor is rolling out new and updated systems that it says can help CIOs catch up.

The  DS8870 Flash enclosure, one of the products making their debut at the event, is the most recent addition to Big Blue’s DS8000 line of high-end enterprise arrays and, despite the name, can be equipped with either disk, solid-state memory or a mix of both. It delivers sub-millisecond response times in the latter two configurations, the firm says, and ships with built-in management capabilities as well as automated performance optimization and data tiering features. It’s also half the size of the previous generation system and consumes 12 percent less energy.

The DS8870 is joined by the TS4500 tape library, which can store three times as much data as its predecessor in the same footprint and has been built with large-scale cloud environments in mind, just like the latest high-end XID disk system. The main advantage offered by XIV Cloud Storage for Service Providers is that it’s available under a pay-per-use pricing model that IBM claims can reduce acquisition costs by up to 40 percent. Plus, the platform supports multi-tenancy and provides extensive data security out-of-the-box.

The new systems are joined by a beefed up configuration of the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified virtualized disk appliance  that packs 4 petabytes, or twice as much as the original model, and introduces near-real-time compression and expanded clustering functionality. Most notably, it now works with the vendor’s Active Cloud Engine, which adds an extra set of local and remote data management capabilities.

Reaching out to SMBs

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Even as IBM continues courting large enterprises and cloud providers, it maintains a strong focus on small- and medium-sized businesses, which constitute among the fastest growing segments in the entire industry. The company is going after that market  with the new System x3100 M5, a single-socket tower server featuring the latest Intel Xeon E3-1200v3 processors that is available in both 4U and 5U configurations. It is set to hit the market on July 18 at a starting price of $755.

• Where storage meets compute

Over on the converged infrastructure front, Big Blue is expanding its PureFlex lineup with  a new purpose-built box for managed service providers designed to run Parallels virtualization software. The platform is joined by new Flex two-, four- and eight-socket X6 two-socket blade servers based on IBM’s X6 architecture, which was originally introduced in January. The machines run three times faster than the previous generation and  sport a modular design that makes it easier for customers to scale their environments. They will become generally available on June 12 beginning at $15,700.

image courtesy IBM