jeudi 30 octobre 2014
mardi 10 juin 2014
IDC Data Shows IBM Security Outpacing the Market
With
the massive media coverage of today’s advanced threats, customers and
thought leaders are recognizing that a comprehensive, integrated approach
rather than a proliferation of point products is necessary. IDC
recently released its 2013 security software market share data, which
showed that IBM Security gained share, maintained leadership positions
and dramatically outpaced the market. This is substantive support for
our value proposition.
“According to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker analysis
for calendar year 2013, IBM Security Systems maintained its number one
position in identity and access management (IAM) and security
vulnerability management (SVM), which includes security information and event management (SIEM), and improved its share in endpoint security and network security,”
IDC said in a statement on the findings, which have not yet been
released to the public. “IBM significantly outpaced overall security
software market growth and remained the number three security software
vendor in 2013.”
IDC Reports What Our Customers Already Know
This
data from IDC is solid evidence that customers and partners support IBM
Security’s value proposition, products, support, engagements and all
the investments we’ve made to grow the business; further evidenced by
the division’s consistent double-digit growth, as pointed out during our
earnings calls.
A steady supply of media coverage regarding the latest advanced persistent threats (APTs),
cyber attacks and breaches have elevated the need for advanced security
solutions to a boardroom priority. This constant buzz also raises the
stakes: CISOs and partners demand the best security products and
services from their chosen vendors and will quickly find alternatives
whenever necessary. The competition is fierce and will only ramp up as
startups enter the fray and established vendors consolidate in order to
enter this market. But the trend is towards integration, collecting
massive amounts of data, applying analytics against the data to identify
prioritized offenses and taking action. A collection of disparate
security products puts the burden on the customer or partner, neither of
whom have the budget nor the advanced skills necessary to act
effectively.
Our
relentless pursuit of product excellence clearly demonstrates to our
customers and partners that we intend to lead this market through
innovation by executing our strategy and, most of all, by partnering
with them to solve the problems they face constantly.
We offer a clear distinction: Customers all over the world can choose
to acquire a best-in-class product or an integrated and open security
intelligence system from a single vendor.
By: John Burnham
mardi 29 avril 2014
IBM announces IBM i 7.2
Today, IBM announces the release of IBM i 7.2, the first
new IBM i release in four years. This release provides significant new
function in DB2 for i, systems management and security as well as
enhancing many other integrated components and licensed programs. IBM i
7.2 includes support for and takes advantage of the latest Power Systems
server family running on new POWER8 technology.
IBM i 7.2 new enhancements include:
- Enhanced security options in DB2 for i
- Many new functions for programmer productivity and expanded function in DB2 for i
- Improved ease of use with IBM Navigator for i
- Enhancements to iAccess Client Solutions
- Extension of security to more applications through new single sign-on (SSO) environments
- Liberty Core as the base for Integrated Application Server
- Support for Zend Server 6.0 on IBM i 7.2
- Performance improvements for the IFS
- Extensions to the printing environments
- Expanded Hub functions for Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS)
- PowerHA SystemMirror for i Express Edition with new HyperSwap capability
- Support for new Power Systems built with POWER8 architecture and processor
- Additional I/O capabilities including support for WAN over LAN
- Rational tools enhancements to support Free Format RPG
- Support for the open-source file-serving solution Samba
IBM i 7.2 is supported on Power Systems servers and PureFlex systems
with POWER8 processors, Power Systems servers and blades and PureFlex
systems with POWER7/7+ processors, and Power Systems servers and blades
with POWER6/6+ processors. Clients using POWER5/5+ servers or earlier
servers must move to newer systems to take advantage of the new features
in IBM i 7.2.
Clients running IBM i 7.1 or IBM i 6.1 can easily upgrade to IBM i
7.2, which will be available May 2, 2014, to benefit from the additional
features and performance provided with the latest technologies included
in the operating system.
To learn more, visit the IBM i 7.2 Knowledge Center website, and look
for the May issue of IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems edition, where
IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will shares his thoughts on the new
release.
By: Tami Deedrick
lundi 14 avril 2014
IBM FlashSystem 840 for Legacy-free Flash
Flash storage is at an interesting place and it’s worth taking the
time to understand IBM’s new FlashSystem 840 and how it might be useful.
A traditional approach to flash is to treat it like a fast disk drive
with a SAS interface, and assume that a faster version of traditional
systems are the way of the future. This is not a bad idea, and with
auto-tiering technologies this kind of approach was mastered by the big
vendors some time ago, and can be seen for example in IBM’s Storwize
family and DS8000, and as a cache layer in the XIV. Using auto-tiering
we can perhaps expect large quantities of storage to deliver latencies
around 5 millseconds, rather than a more traditional 10 ms or higher
(e.g. MS Exchange’s jetstress test only fails when you get to 20 ms).
Some players want to use all SSDs in their disk systems, which you
can do with Storwize for example, but this is again really just a
variation on a fairly traditional approach and you’re generally looking
at storage latencies down around one or two millseconds. That sounds
pretty good compared to 10 ms, but there are ways to do better and I
suspect that SSD-based systems will not be where it’s at in 5 years
time.
The IBM FlashSystem 840 is a little different and it uses flash
chips, not SSDs. It’s primary purpose is to be very very low latency.
We’re talking as low as 90 microseconds write, and 135 microseconds
read. This is not a traditional system with a soup-to-nuts software
stack. FlashSystem has a new Storwize GUI, but it is stripped back to
keep it simple and to avoid anything that would impact latency.
This extreme low latency is a unique IBM proposition, since it turns
out that even when other vendors use MLC flash chips instead of SSDs, by
their own admission they generally still end up with latency close to 1
ms, presumably because of their controller and code-path overheads.
- 2u appliance with hot swap modules, power and cooling, controllers etc
- Concurrent firmware upgrade and call-home support
- Encryption is standard
- Choice of 16G FC, 8G FC, 40G IB and 10G FCoE interfaces
- Choice of upgradeable capacity
| Nett of 2-D RAID5 | 4 modules | 8 modules | 12 modules |
| 2GB modules | 4 TB | 12 TB | 20 TB |
| 4GB modules | 8 TB | 24 TB | 40 TB |
- Also a 2 TB starter option with RAID0
- Each module has 10 flash chips and each chip has 16 planes
- RAID5 is applied both across modules and within modules
- Variable stripe RAID within modules is self-healing
I’m thinking that prime targets for these systems include Databases
and VDI, but also folks looking to future-proof their general
performance. If you’re making a 5 year purchase, not everyone will want
to buy a ‘mature’ SSD legacy-style flash solution, when they could
instead buy into a disk-free architecture of the future.
But, as mentioned, FlashSystem does not have a full traditional
software stack, so let’s consider the options if you need some of that
stuff:
- IMHO, when it comes to replication, databases are usually best replicated using log shipping, Oracle Data Guard etc.
- VMware volumes can be replicated with native VMware server-based tools.
- AIX volumes can be replicated using AIX Geographic Mirroring.
- On AIX and some other systems you can use logical volume mirroring to set up a mirror of your volumes with preferred read set to the FlashSystem 840, and writes mirrored to a V7000 or (DS8000 or XIV etc), thereby allowing full software stack functions on the volumes (on the V7000) without slowing down the reads off the FlashSystem.
- You can also virtualize FlashSystem behind SVC or V7000
- Consider using Tivoli Storage Manager dedup disk to disk to create a DR environment
Right now, FlashSystem 840 is mainly about screamingly low latency
and high performance, with some reasonable data center class
credentials, and all at a pretty good price. If you have a data
warehouse, or a database that wants that kind of I/O performance, or a
VDI implementation that you want to de-risk, or a general workload that
you want to future-proof, then maybe you should talk to IBM about
FlashSystem 840.
By: Jim
Made in IBM Labs: Enabling dynamic prioritization of data in the Cloud
As more and more companies take advantage of applications, processes
and services delivered via the cloud, vendors are struggling with
increased complexity and challenges associated with ensuring
uninterrupted data availability. IBM's patented technique creates a
cloud environment in which Quality of Service priorities can be modified
according to real-time or expected conditions, to reduce data
bottlenecks in the cloud, thereby ensuring that clients receive the
level and quality of service they expect.
The new invention will
help alleviate problems that cloud providers face when they need to
provide simultaneous, efficient and uninterrupted service to a range of
clients for applications, including online banking and shopping,
real-time video, supply-chain management, enterprise resources planning
and more.
"Since companies are relying upon the cloud to manage
and process critical business data and interactions, guaranteeing and
delivering quality, reliable service is an imperative for cloud
vendors," said IBM Cloud Offering Evangelist Rick Hamilton.
"This patented invention will enable cloud service providers to
dynamically respond to potential data choke points by changing quality
of service priorities to ensure the free flow of data for their
clients."
IBM received U.S Patent #8,631,154 "Dynamically modifying quality of service levels for resources in a networked computing environment," for the invention.
Since beginning work with clients and partners around cloud computing
in 2007, IBM continues to focus building clouds for enterprise clients.
IBM provides cloud services and collaborates with clients to create new
opportunities to reach more of the market or extend their services
leveraging cloud delivery.
For 21 consecutive years,
IBM has been the leading recipient of U.S. patents. IBM inventors have
patented thousands of inventions that will enable significant
innovations that will position IBM to compete and lead in strategic
areas, such as IBM Watson, cloud computing, Big Data analytics – and
advance the new era of cognitive systems where machines will learn,
reason and interact with people in more natural ways.
About IBM Cloud Computing
IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more the 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud.
By: Pr Newswire
Link: http://cloudcomputing.ulitzer.com/node/3054837
mercredi 26 mars 2014
IBM Power8 rollout to start with scale out clusters
Officially, IBM has said that would be launching its twelve-core
Power8 processors in new Power Systems servers and PureSystems converged
systems sometime around the middle of the year. But as EnterpriseTech has previously reported,
the word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to get the first
Power8 machines into the field sometime around the end of April or early
May. If the latest scuttlebutt is right, then it looks like the first
Power8 systems will be entry machines that can be clustered up to run
supercomputing simulations, Hadoop analytics, parallel databases, and
similar modern distributed workloads.
Or, as the case may turn out, homemade Power8 systems that might possibly be used by Google in its vast infrastructure or souped up boxes aimed at high frequency traders, as EnterpriseTech has previously told you about.
A late April or early May launch
would coincide with the Impact2014 event that Big Blue is hosting for
customers and partners in Las Vegas from April 27 through May 1. The
company is also participating in the annual COMMON conference for
customers of its IBM i (formerly OS/400) midrange system, which runs
from May 4 through 7. While the IBM i server business is considerably
smaller than it was 15 years ago at its peak, Power Systems machines
running IBM i are still used by around 150,000 customers worldwide and
that operating system is only available on Power-based servers from IBM.
Significantly, most of those customers tend to buy entry-level machines
because their workloads are fairly modest by modern standards, and this
is also the same class of machine you might use if you wanted to build a
Hadoop cluster running atop Linux on Power chips. Doing one big push to
cover many different markets make sense, particularly with IBM trimming
costs as Power Systems revenues have been on the decline.
Just like other chip makers – notably
Intel, AMD, Oracle, and Fujitsu in the enterprise space – IBM staggers
its chip launches, although in this case it controls both the chips and
the systems unlike Intel and, for the most part, AMD. For the past
several processor generations, IBM has started the Power chip launch in
the middle of its line, with machines that have from 4 to 16 sockets in a
single system image. These are relatively low volume products, so it
gave IBM time to ramp up its 45 nanometer process for eight-core Power7
chips and 32 nanometer process for eight-core Power7+ chips. The Power7+
had some microarchitecture improvements to boost per-core performance
and a whole lot more cache per core to push the performance up even
further. Then IBM launched entry machines using the chip, and in the
case of the Power7, finished up with a 32-socket box that has a
specially packaged version of the Power7 that allows it to clock higher
than in the entry and midrange machines. The high-end machine in the
Power Systems line does not get an upgrade to the “plus” variants of any
processor, by the way. Whether or not IBM maintains this practice
remains to be seen.
If history is any guide, IBM will
have a high-end Power machine with 16 or 32 sockets available by the
fall, for the big year-end sales push.
Starting at the bottom of the line this time around makes sense given that Intel refreshed its Xeon E5 processor lineup back in September
with variants with six, ten, and twelve cores. If IBM wants to sell
scale-out clusters based on Power8 chips against Intel, systems based on
Xeon E5 v2 processors are the ones Big Blue has to beat.
The mantra coming out of IBM’s
Systems and Technology Group about the Power8 launch is cloud, big data,
open, and scale out. The open part means linking the Power8 launch to
the OpenPower Consortium, which IBM started last year with Google,
Nvidia, Tyan, and Mellanox Technologies. The consortium now has 14 paid
members who are contributing to firmware, hypervisor, motherboard, and
other parts of the Power8 system design, and one company, a startup
called Suzhou PowerCore, licensing the Power8 chip to create its own variants of the processor for the Chinese server, storage, and switching markets. Sources at IBM tell EnterpriseTech that there are more than 100 other companies that have expressed interest in joining the OpenPower Consortium.
The Power8 chip, like its
predecessors, is probably relatively large compared to a Xeon E5 part
and will probably consume more electricity and dissipate more heat, even
though it uses a 22 nanometer process that puts it on par with what
Intel can deliver at the moment. IBM’s 64-bit Power chips have always
been larger and hotter than their Intel equivalents, but they make up
for it with more throughput, enabled by radically higher I/O and memory
bandwidth. The twelve-core Power8 chip will sport 96 MB of L3 cache on
the die and will have an additional 16 MB of L4 cache on each “Centaur”
buffer chip embedded on the memory cards used with Power8 systems. (On a
16-core system linked gluelessly by the NUMA interconnect on each
Power8 chip, that is a total of 128 MB of L4 cache on a system that can
have 16 TB of main memory across those sockets. That machine will have
192 cores, and the interconnect has an extra link in it now so any
socket can get to any other socket in one or two hops instead of a
maximum of three.)
The interesting thing to consider as we head out to the GPU Technical
Conference hosted by Nvidia is precisely how Big Blue and the graphics
chip maker are going to collaborate on ceepie-geepie systems starting with the Power8 generation and moving forward from there. Back in november at the SC13 supercomputing conference, Brad McCredie, vice president of Power Systems development within IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, told EnterpriseTech
that the two companies were in the process of modifying the Power8
systems to better accommodate Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs and would be tweaking
the IBM software stack to accelerate it with those GPUs. The Power8
chips have on-die PCI-Express 3.0 peripheral controllers. The jump to
PCI-Express 3.0 is necessary to quickly move data back and forth between
the CPU and GPU as they share work; the PCI-Express 2.0 used on Power7
and Power7+ chips was too slow to push these accelerators or high-speed
InfiniBand and Ethernet cards.
To simplify the programing model for
hybrid systems and speed up the data transfers between the CPUs and
GPUs, IBM created what it calls the Coherent Accelerator Processor
Interface, or CAPI, which will be first implemented on the Power8 chip.
This is an overlay for the PCI protocol that creates a virtual memory
space comprised of the CPU main memory and any memory used by any kind
of accelerator that plugs into the PCI bus – GPU, FPGA, DSP, whatever
have you.
The CAPI interface will work with the
Tesla GPU accelerators and the virtual memory in the CUDA environment
to manage the movement of data between main and frame buffer memory,
transparent to the application. Nvidia announced unified memory between
the X86 CPUs and Tesla GPUs with CUDA 6 last fall ahead of the SC13
event. (It is probably not a coincidence that the accelerator side of
the chart above is in two shades of green and black. The nearly
unreadable print in the light green box says “Custom Hardware
Application, FPGA or ASIC” in case you can’t read it.)
IBM has been very clear that it wants to accelerate Java workloads with GPUs,
and work is progressing to get such acceleration into the field perhaps
by 2015 or so. That is also, perhaps not coincidentally, when IBM
expects to have a clean-slate system design based on Power chips and
future Nvidia GPU coprocessors in the field that more tightly links the
two together. Java, of course, is the language of choice for a lot of
enterprise applications, mainly because it is easier to work with than C
or C++ and more widely known than any of the legacy programming
languages on IBM systems.
The thing to remember, as we have
pointed out before, is that IBM can have a much tighter partnership with
Nvidia than either Intel or AMD can. It is reasonable to expect for the
two companies to work more closely together on traditional
supercomputing systems as well as other kinds of clustered and
accelerated systems used throughout enterprises. Hopefully, the two
companies will make some of their long-term plans clear at the GPU
Technology Conference.
By: Timothy Prickett Morgan
Link: http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/03/24/ibm-power8-rollout-start-scale-clusters/
mercredi 26 février 2014
IBM BlueMix: PaaS Play, explained
With BlueMix, IBM gives customers a cloud path for legacy apps. Here's how SoftLayer, Cloud Foundry, and WebSphere tools fit in.
IBM is putting together a PaaS platform that it has dubbed BlueMix,
which is a combination of open source code, IBM software tools, and Big
Blue's tried and true WebSphere middleware used by many of its oldest
customers. In effect, it's investing $1 billion to give enterprise
customers a path to move legacy systems into the cloud.
For enterprise users who want to move an application into IBM's
SoftLayer unit's public cloud, the many components of IBM WebSphere
middleware will be there and waiting as callable services through a
SoftLayer API. IBM acquired SoftLayer and its 700 employees last July
and made its provisioning, management, and chargeback systems the core
of its future cloud services.
Not so fast, you say. IBM's Blu Acceleration for DB2, Watson advanced
analytics, Cognos business intelligence, and many versions of WebSphere
run on IBM Power Systems servers, not the cloud's ubiquitous x86
servers.
Lance Crosby, CEO of IBM's SoftLayer unit, agrees that's the case.
And that's why Power servers are now being incorporated into the
SoftLayer cloud. It will be one of the few public clouds with a paired
hardware architecture approach. Crosby declined to predict how many
Power servers may be added or what percentage they would become.
SoftLayer currently has about 150,000 x86 servers. IBM is adding 4,000
to 5,000 x86 servers to that number a month, and x86 will remain the
majority by a wide margin, Crosby told InformationWeek.
"Power servers were never about volume. They're about more memory
capacity and processing power" to handle enterprise ERP and database
applications, which require large amounts of both, Crosby said.
In addition, IBM is making a broad set of its data analytics,
Rational development tools and applications, such as Q9 security and
Maximo inventory management, available on SoftLayer as
software-as-a-service. Developers producing next-generation applications
will have the option of using services from IBM's software portfolio
that they're already familiar with, Crosby added. IBM Tivoli systems
management software will also be made available, though no date was
announced. Crosby said IBM will seek to get the bulk of its portfolio
into the BlueMix PaaS by the end of the year.
Although there's a strong legacy component, IBM claims the $1 billion
figure comes into play because that's the amount it's spending to break
Rational tools, WebSphere middleware, and IBM applications down into
services and make them available via SoftLayer. It's also using part of
that figure to acquire the database-as-a-service firm, Cloudant.
About two dozen tools and pieces of middleware are available for the
beta release of BlueMix, with 150 to 200 products to become available
when the cloud-enablement conversion process is done.
Much of the $1 billion will be needed to convert IBM's huge, software
portfolio currently sold under the packaged and licensed model into a
set of "composable services," employed by developers to become parts of
new applications. Only a fraction of that portfolio is ready with
BlueMix's beta launch on Feb.24. Crosby said the way IBM would have
handled such an announcement in the past was to wait until it was
finished converting distinct products or product sets before going
public. But that's the old enterprise way of doing things.
IBM is trying to adopt more of "born on the web" or agile development
approach, where software gets changed as soon as one update is ready
and production systems have short upgrade cycles. "Our goal is to follow
the mantra of the agile development approach as soon as we can," said
Crosby.
IBM middleware will often appear through BlueMix incorporated into a
predefined "pattern" created by IBM. BlueMix on SoftLayer will give
developers the ability to capture a snapshot of a pattern with each
application, so that it "can be deployed to 10 datacenters in an
identical fashion at the click of a button," said Crosby. The capability
is called "patterns," often consisting of an application, a Web server,
IBM middleware, and a database service.
BlueMix will run in SoftLayer on top of the open source platform,
Cloud Foundry, originally sponsored as a project by VMware. Cloud
Foundry became the charge of the Pivotal subsidiary, as it was spun out
of VMware and EMC. Now its organizers say they are moving the PaaS
project out into its own foundation and governing board. The Apache
Software Foundation, OpenStack, and other key open source code projects
have followed a similar route to gain the broadest possible backing.
There are 20 million developers in the world, and three-quarters of
them have yet to develop a cloud application or work with a cloud-based
platform as a service, according to Evans Data, which regularly surveys
developers' attitudes and skills around the world. IBM is launching
BlueMix as a combination of open source code and proprietary software to
capture its share of their future work in the cloud.
IBM announced in January that it was expanding the SoftLayer chain of
datacenters from 13 to 40 locations around the world to give SoftLayer a
competitive global reach. It is spending $1.2 billion this year on that
initiative.
By: Charles Babcock
Link: http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/ibm-bluemix-paas-play-explained/d/d-id/1113979
vendredi 21 février 2014
Knock out your mobile development deadlines with IBM Worklight
Have you been asked to deliver new
functionality or a new application with an impossible deadline? How
about deliver a fully featured and integrated mobile application for
multiple platforms in five weeks? Yes, I know that is a ridiculous
timeline. However, is it possible? With the help of an IBM Premier
Business Partner (Avnet Technology Solutions) and IBM Worklight, we were able to deliver an application on time and on budget.
In a recent blog post, “ IBM Worklight to the rescue: Saving your company's reputation,”
I discussed how the remote disable function of IBM Worklight could
provide significant value to a company that needed to deny access to a
specific version of their application. I recently completed a mobile
application project with an IBM client that was successful in part
because of the remote disable and direct update features of IBM
Worklight.
So what did we really deliver?
We delivered a hybrid application built using JavaScript, HTML5 and
CSS that would be approved by and available in iOS and Android app
stores with custom phone and tablet versions. The application was tested
on multiple devices, operating systems and form factors. I won’t bore
you with all of the details, but here is a high-level list of the
functional requirements that were delivered.
- Push notifications
- Remote database integration for lead and data collection
- Device calendar integration (add events to personal calendars)
- Custom Twitter integration
- Custom RSS feed
- Worklight analytics
How did Worklight help make this possible?
We were able to ensure that this project was delivered as promised
with several easy-to-use features that are included with IBM Worklight:
- Adapters– secure integration with remote resources
- Automated mobile functional testing– same test runs across multiple devices and mobile operating systems
- Unified push notification APIs– polled server-side apps to dispatch notifications, uniform access to push notification providers and the ability to monitor and control notification delivery
- Direct update– web resources pushed to app when application connects to the Worklight Server
The application used SQL and HTTP adapters to store customer
information and to insert push notification messages into a database
that was polled regularly. When a new entry was found in the push
notification table, the polling process would create and send a new push
notification through the unified push notification APIs. The direct update feature
was used after the basic application structure had been created and
accepted by the app stores. We finished the basic application structure,
and it was accepted in the app stores about three weeks into the
project. This provided the team with two weeks to make content changes
and correct any defects that were found during testing.
In the end, the project was successful and the application was very well received by its users.
By: Drew Douglass
Link: http://asmarterplanet.com/mobile-enterprise/blog/2014/02/knock-mobile-development-deadlines-ibm-worklight.html
mercredi 19 février 2014
What can GPFS on Hadoop do for you ?
The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is considered a core
component of Hadoop, but it’s not an essential one. Lately, IBM has been
talking up the benefits of hooking Hadoop up to the General Parallel
File System (GPFS). IBM has done the work of integrating GPFS with
Hadoop. The big question is, What can GPFS on Hadoop do for you?
IBM
developed GPFS in 1998 as a SAN file system for use in HPC applications
and IBM’s biggest supercomputers, such as Blue Gene, ASCI Purple,
Watson, Sequoia, and MIRA. In 2009, IBM hooked GPFS to Hadoop, and today
IBM is running GPFS, which scales into the petabyte range and has more
advanced data management capabilities than HDFS, on InfoSphere
BigInsights, its collection of Hadoop-related offerings, as well as
Platform Symphony.
GPFS was originally developed as a SAN file system. That would
normally prevent it from being used in Hadoop and the direct-attach
disks that make up a cluster. This is where an IBM GPFS feature called
File Placement Optimization (FPO) comes into play.
Phil Horwitz, a senior engineer at IBM’s Systems Optimization Competency Center, recently discussed
how IBM is using GPFS with BigInsights and System x servers, and in
particular how FPO has is helping GPFS to make inroads in a Hadoop
cluster. (IBM has since sold off the System x business to Lenovo, which IBM now must work closely with for GPFS-based solutions, but the points are still valid).
According to Horwitz, FPO essentially emulates a key component of
HDFS: moving the application workload to the data. “Basically, it moves
the job to the data as opposed to moving data to the job,” he says in
the interview. “Say I have 20 servers in a rack and three racks. GPFS
FPO knows a copy of the data I need is located on the 60th server and it
can send the job right to that server. This reduces network traffic
since GPFS- FPO does not need to move the data. It also improves
performance and efficiency.”
Last month, IBM published an in-depth technical white paper titled “Deploying a Big Data Solution using IBM GPFS-FPO”
that explains how to roll out GPFS on Hadoop. It also explains some of
the benefits users will see from using the technology. For starters,
GPFS is POSIX compliant, which enables any other applications running
atop the Hadoop cluster to access data stored in the file system in a
straightforward manner. With HDFS, only Hadoop applications can access
the data, and they must go through the Java-based HDFS API.
The flexibility to access GPFS-resident data from Hadoop and
non-Hadoop applications frees users to build more flexible big data
workflows. For example, a customer may analyze a piece of data with SAS.
As part of that workflow, they may use a series of ETL steps to
manipulate data. Those ETL processes may be best executed by a MapReduce
program. Trying to build this workflow on HDFS would require additional
steps, as well as moving data in and out of HDFS. Using GPFS simplifies
the architecture and minimizes the data movement, IBM says.
There are many other general IT housekeeping-type benefits to using GPFS. According to IBM’s "Harness the Power of Big Data"
publication, POSIX compliance also allows users to manage their Hadoop
storage “just as you would any other computer in your IT environment.”
This allows customers to use traditional backup and restore utilities
with their Hadoop clusters, as opposed to using the “copy” command in
HDFS. What’s more, GPFS supports point-in-time snapshots and off-site
replication capabilities, which aren't available in plain-vanilla HDFS.
The size of data blocks is also an issue with HDFS. In IBM's June 2013 whitepaper "Extending IBM InfoSphere BigInsights with GPFS FPO and IBM Platform Symphony" IBM makes the case that, because Hadoop MapReduce is optimized for
blocks that are around 64MB in size, HDFS is inefficient at dealing with
smaller data sizes. In the world of big data, it's not always the size
of the data that matters; the number of data points and the frequency at
which the data changes is important too.
GPFS also brings benefits in the area of data de-duplication, because
it does not tend to duplicate data as HDFS does, IBM says. However, if
users prefer to have copies of their data spread out in multiple places
on their cluster, they can use the Write-affinity depth (WAD) feature
that debuted with the introduction of FPO. The GPFS quote system also
helps to control the number of files and the amount of file data in the
file system, which helps to manage storage.
Capacity planning of Hadoop clusters is easier when the data stored
in GPFS, IBM says. In HDFS, administrators need to carefully design the
disk space dedicated to the Hadoop cluster, including dedicating space
for the output of MapReduce jobs and log files. “With GPFS-FPO,” IBM
says, “you only need to worry about the disks themselves filling up;
there’s no need to dedicate storage for Hadoop.”
Other
benefits include the capability to used policy-based information
lifecycle management functions. That means third-part management tools,
such as IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager software, can manage the data
storage for internal storage pools. The hierarchical storage management
(HSM) capabilities that are built into GPFS mean you can keep the
“hottest” data on the fastest disks. That feature is not available in
plan-vanilla Hadoop running HDFS.
The shared-nothing architecture used by GPFS-FPO also provides
greater resilience than HDFS by allowing each node to operate
independently, reducing the impact of failure events across multiple
nodes. The elimination of the HDFS NameNode also eliminates the
single-point-of-failure problem that shadows enterprise Hadoop
deployments. “By storing your data in GPFS-FPO you are freed from the
architectural restrictions of HDFS,” IBM says.
The Active File Management (AFM) feature of GPFS also boosts
resiliency by caching datasets in different places on the cluster,
thereby ensuring applications access to data even when the remote
storage cluster is unavailable. AFM also effectively masks wide-area
network latencies and outages. Customers can either use AFM to maintain
an asynchronous copy of the data at a separate physical location or use
GPFS synchronous replication, which are used by FPO replicas.
Security is also bolstered with GPFS. Customers can use either
traditional ACLs based on the POSIX model, or network file system (NFS)
version 4 ACLs. IBM says NFS ACLs provide much more control of file and
directory access. GPFS also includes immutability and appendOnly
restriction capabilities, which can be used to protect data and prevent
it from being modified or deleted.
You don’t have to be using IBM’s BigInsights (or its Platform
Symphony offering) to take advantage of GPFS. The company will sell the
file system to do-it-yourself Hadoopers, as well as those who are
running distributions from other companies. And using GPFS allows you to
use the wide array of Hadoop tools in the big data stack, such as
Flume, Sqoop, Hive, Pig, Hbase, Lucene, Oozie, and of course MapReduce
itself.
IBM added the FPO capabilities to GPFS version 3.5 in December 2012.
Although it's POSIX compliant, GPFS-FPO is only available on Linux at
this point. IBM says GPFS is currently being used in a variety of big
data applications in the areas of bioinformatics, operational analytics,
digital media, engineering design, financial analytics, seismic data
processing, and geographic information systems.
By : Alex Woodie
Link :http://www.datanami.com/datanami/2014-02-18/what_can_gpfs_on_hadoop_do_for_you_.html
lundi 17 février 2014
This tiny chip makes the Internet four times faster
The race is on to build a faster, better Internet. While Google is
working on bringing super-high-speed connections to homes in select
cities, IBM is working on a technology that could make the Internet all around faster everywhere.
It has created a new chip that beefs up Internet speeds to 200 to 400 gigabits per second, about four times faster than today's speeds, IBM says. Plus it sucks up hardly any power.
At this speed, a 2-hour ultra-high-definition movie (about 160
gigabytes) would download in a few seconds. It would only take a few
seconds to download 40,000 songs, IBM says.
The chip fits into a part of the Internet that runs between data centers, not your computer or home router.
The latest version of the chip is only a prototype right now,
so it will be a while before it gets installed and the Internet gets
better.
However, IBM says it has already signed on a customer for an earlier version of the technology, a company called Semtech. Semtech makes a device that converts analog signals (like radio signals) to digital signals that can be piped across the Internet.
Equally interesting is that IBM says it will manufacturer the chip for the Semtech deal in the U.S. at its semiconductor fab in East Fishkill, N.Y.
That's of note because there's been speculation that IBM
may be looking for a buyer for its semiconductor manufacturing unit.
Breakthrough technology like this could either help the unit grow
revenues, allowing IBM to keep it, or allow IBM to sell it for a higher
price.
By: Julie Bort
Link: http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-chip-makes-the-internet-faster-2014-2
Up Close and Personal With IBM PureApplication PaaS
The converged infrastructure value proposition, by now, is pretty evident
to everyone in the industry. Whether that proposition can be realized,
is highly dependent on your particular organization, and specific use
case.
Over the past several months, I have had an opportunity to be
involved with a very high-profile pilot, with immovable, over-the-top
deadlines. In addition, the security requirements were downright
oppressive, and necessitated a completely isolated, separate
environment. Multi-tenancy was not an option.
With all this in mind, a pre-built, converged infrastructure package
became the obvious choice. Since the solution would be built upon a
suite of IBM software, they pitched their new PureApplication system. My
first reaction was to look at it as an obvious IBM competitor to the
venerable vBlock. But I quickly dismissed that, as I learned more.
The PureApplication platform is quite a bit more than a vBlock
competitor. It leverages IBM’s services expertise to provide a giant
catalog of pre-configured multi-tiered applications that have been
essentially captured, and turned into what IBM calls a “pattern”. The
simplest way I can think of to describe a pattern is like the
application blueprint
that Aaron Sweemer was talking about a few months back. The pattern
consists of all tiers of an application, which are deployed and
configured simultaneously, and on-demand.
As an example, if one needs a message broker app, there’s a pattern
for it. After it is deployed (usually within 20-30 mins.), what’s
sitting there is a DataPower appliance, web services, message broker,
and database. It’s all configured, and ready to run. Once you load up
your specific BAR files, and configure the specifics of how inbound
connections and messages will be handled, you can patternize all that
with script packages, so that next time you deploy, you’re ready to
process messages in 20 minutes. If you want to create your own
patterns, there’s a pretty simple drag and drop interface for doing so.
I know what you’re thinking. . . There are plenty of other ways to
capture images, vApps, etc. to make application deployment fast. But
what PureApp brings to the table is the (and I hate using this phrase)
best-practices from IBM’s years of consulting and building these
solutions for thousands of customers. There’s no ground-up installation
of each tier, with the tedious hours of configuration, and the cost
associated with those hours. That’s what you are paying for when you buy
PureApp.
Don’t have anyone in house with years of experience deploying
SugarCRM, Business Intelligence, Message Broker, SAP, or BPM from the
ground up? No problem. There are patterns for all of them. There are
hundreds of patterns so far, and many more are in the pipeline from a
growing list of global partners.
The PureApplication platform uses IBM blades, IBM switching, and IBM
V7000 storage. The hypervisor is VMware, and they even run vCenter.
Problem is, you can’t access vCenter, or install any add-on features.
They’ve written their own algorithms for HA, and some of the other
things that you’d expect vCenter to handle. The reasoning for this,
ostensibly, is so they can support other hypervisors in the future.
For someone accustomed to running VMware and vCenter, it can be quite
difficult to get your head around having NO access to the hosts, or
vCenter to do any troubleshooting, monitoring, or configuration. But the
IBM answer is, this is supposed to be a cloud in a box, and the
underlying infrastructure is irrelevant. Still, going from a provider
mentality, to an infrastructure consumer one, is a difficult transition,
and one that I am still struggling with personally.
The way licensing is handled on this system is, you can use all the
licenses for Message Broker, DB2, Red Hat, and the other IBM software
pieces that you can possibly consume with the box. It’s a smart way to
implement licensing. You’re never going to be able to run more licenses
than you “pay for” with the finite resources included with each system.
It’s extremely convenient for the end user, as there is no need to keep
up with licensing for the patternized software.
Access to the PureApp platform is via the PureApp console, or CLI.
It’s a good interface, but it’s also definitely a 1.x interface. There
is very extensive scripting support for adding to patterns, and
individual virtual machines. There are also multi-tenancy capabilities
by creating multiple “cloud groups” to carve up resources. There are
things that need to be improved, like refresh, and access to more
in-depth monitoring of the system. Having said that, even in the past
six months, the improvements made have been quite significant. IBM is
obviously throwing incredible amounts of resources at this platform.
Deploying patterns is quite easy, and there is an IBM Image Capture
pattern that will hook into existing ESXi hosts to pull off VM’s to use
in Pure, and prepare them for patternization.
Having used the platform for a while now, I like it more every day. A
couple weeks ago, we were able to press a single button, and upgrade
firmware on the switches, blades, ESXi, and the v7000 storage with no
input from us. My biggest complaint so far is that I have no access to
vCenter to install things like vShield, backup software, monitoring
software, etc.. But again, it’s just getting used to a new paradigm
that’s hard for me. IBM does have a monitoring pattern that deploys
Tivoli, which helps with monitoring, but it’s one more thing to learn
and administer. That said, I do understand why they don’t want people
looking into the guts on a true PaaS.
Overall, I can say that I am impressed with the amount of work that
has gone into building the PureApplication platform, and am looking
forward to the features they have in the pipeline. The support has been
great so far as well, but I do hope the support organization can keep up
with the exponential sales growth. I have a feeling there will be
plenty more growth in 2014.
By: Brandon Riley
Link: http://www.virtualinsanity.com/index.php/2014/02/10/up-close-and-personal-with-ibm-pureapplication-paas/
Server market realignment
The
server market is in the midst of a radical realignment, the likes of
which have not been seen since the shakeout of the 1980s that saw most
of the minicomputer makers, including Prime Computer, Data General and
Digital Equipment Corp., disappear, devastating the Boston high tech
corridor. And while the writing has been on the wall for some time, this
major industry shift promises to happen much faster than that one.
IBM System x General Manager Adalio Sanchez speaking at an IBM event in
Beijing on January 16, 2014 to debut the company’s latest x86-based
servers. Today IBM announced plans for Lenovo to acquire IBM’s x86
server business for $2.3 billion.
The first major shock came to the market last month, when IBM announced an agreement to sell its System x servers, x86 network switches and other x86-based products
to Lenovo, continuing IBM’s transition into a software and services
provider. While internal sources say that the sale, which includes the
transfer of up to 6,700 IBM employees to the commodity system maker,
will take several months to complete, this announcement definitely
points to the future of x86 hardware.
Actually the commodization of x86 has been ongoing for several years and is well under way. It started with the invention of hyperscale
by the big Web service companies including Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and
Facebook. These companies buy huge quantities of standardized white box
servers direct from Taiwan and China for their mega-data centers, run
them hard in highly automated environments and, when something breaks,
throw it away and replace it with a new box. But even before that the
seeds of commodization were sown by the major traditional players
themselves when they handed manufacturing of their servers over to the
Taiwanese. Essentially they created their own replacements.
That arrangement worked for them as long as the hardware
still required lots of attention, expensive built-in management
software, and constant optimization fine tuning to handle the compute
loads. But in the last decade three things have changed. First, Moore’s
Law has driven compute power and network speed to the point that
detailed optimization is no longer necessary for most compute loads.
Second, the management software has moved to the virtualization layer.
The result of these two trends is that increasingly the focus of IT
organization attention is moving up the stack to software, and hardware
is taken for granted. After 67 years, the techies are finally tiring of
fiddling constantly with the hardware.
Third, increasing amounts of the compute load is moving
steadily to the cloud. Companies that always had to buy extra compute to
support peak loads now can move those applications into a hybrid cloud,
size their hardware for the average load and burst the peaks to their
public cloud partner. As those companies gain a comfort level with their
public cloud service providers, they will start moving entire compute
loads, particularly new Web-based applications such as big data analysis
that have a strong affinity to the public cloud, entirely to those
providers, in many cases by subscribing to SaaS services.
Trend toward standardization
The result of this is that the underlying hardware is becoming highly standardized,
and the focus of computing is moving to software and services. Under
the onslaught of hyperscale and cloud computing, the market for the
traditional vendors is decreasing, a trend that will accelerate through
this decade. And the market is shifting from piece-parts to converged systems as customers seek to simplify their supply chains and save money. As Wikibon CTO David Floyer points out,
the more of the system that can be covered by a single SKU, the more
customers can save. The hardware growth for both IBM and HP is clearly
in their converged systems, and their differentiation increasingly comes
from what they provide above the virtualization layer in middleware and
applications. The expansion of virtualization from servers to the
software-led data center will only drive this trend faster.
Open source hardware
is beginning to appear in the market and can be expected to become
commonplace over the next five years as the big Asian white box makers
adopt them as the next step in driving cost out of the server
manufacturing process.
The clear message for x86 server vendors is either to drive
cost out of their hardware business and become commodity providers on
the level of the Taiwanese while developing differentiation through
higher level software running on top of those commoditized boxes or get
out of the x86 hardware business entirely and source their servers from a
commodity provider. IBM has clearly chosen the latter course with its sales of System x to Lenovo along with the creation of a close partnership with the Chinese commodity hardware manufacturer.
IBM’s strategy — partner with Lenovo
This is the right strategy for both companies. Since buying
IBM’s PC manufacturing business a decade ago, Lenovo has proven itself
as a quality commodity electronics maker, and in the process passing HP last year
to become the number one PC vendor in worldwide sales. IBM, meanwhile,
is a highly creative company with a huge R & D budget that is
betting its future on leading edge areas including big data processing
and analysis, business cloud services worldwide, and Watson.
The close partnership should leverage the very different
strengths of both companies to create products that benefit from both,
particularly in the IBM PureSystems line of integrated systems.
Meanwhile Lenovo is likely to enter the hyperscale market once it has
brought its manufacturing and marketing to bear on the IBM System x
line. It also will certainly continue to sell its rebranded System x
servers into the traditional business and governmental markets and can
be expected to field its own x86-based converged system line probably in
partnership with IBM. Since both companies will be profiting from the
relationship, regardless of whose brand is on the box, they both will
have strong business reasons to maintain a close partnership into the
future.
IBM is in the market position it is in today in large part
because of the visionary leadership of CEO Louis V. Gerstner Jr., IBM’s
head for a decade through much of the 1990s and early 2000s. He foresaw
the industry changes we are experiencing today, at least in their
general form, and espoused the strategy of transforming IBM from a
hardware giant to a software and services company. In retrospect this
was prophetic, and while obviously nobody in 1993 could have anticipated
the impact of cloud computing and in Gerstner’s time “services” mostly
meant consulting, he moved IBM in a direction that puts it in a strong
position today to capitalize on the burgeoning cloud services market.
And his successors, Samuel J. Palmisano and Virginia M. Rometty, have
continued to move IBM forward and make the hard decisions sometimes
necessary for IBM’s transformation.
HP at the crossroads
But what about the other big x86 server vendors, who did
not have the good fortune to have a visionary at their helm in the
1990s? HP in particular seems to have been searching for a path forward
in recent years with its parade of short-lived CIOs. Carley Fiorina
certainly had a strong vision, but unfortunately it proved to be the
wrong one for the company.
After she left, HP suffered from a revolving door at the top.
Michael Hurd was the only CEO to last long enough to create a vision
for the company’s future, but he seemed mainly to see “more of the
same”. Meg Whitman has been in charge for nearly two-and-half-years now
and seems to have stabilized the company, but it is also suffering from
market shrinkage. Its answer so far has been to bring forward some
innovative hardware, but large parts of the company outside converged
systems, Moonshot and storage seem to be going forward blindly,
producing more of the same with no regard for the reefs ahead, and HPs
financial results in recent quarters have shown the result.
HP needs to make up its mind, and fast. In its first two
decades it was a highly creative, if sometimes chaotic, company
producing leading edge products including some of the first servers and
desktop printers. It really was the Apple Computer of its day. But it
seems to have lost much of that, and today it buys more innovation than
it produces in house, Moonshot not withstanding.
The problem is that while it has some very innovative
products, they are all one-offs, and large parts of the company appear
to be drifting. Decisions seem to be tactical rather than strategic. The
PC group, for instance, is obviously floundering. At one time HP was
almost as much a consumer company, with its desktop printers and PCs, as
it was a business-to-business vendor. It has neglected that part of its
business, which is a mistake.
HP seems to be moving in the direction of becoming a
U.S.-based commodity hardware supplier. If that is what its leadership
wants, then it should embrace that completely and start competing on
price in all its markets while driving cost out its processes at all
levels. If it wants to return to its roots as a highly creative company
then it should start building on products like Moonshot and revitalize
its consumer and business market mindshare with new, creative electronic
products that can create new markets. It cannot do both — no company
can.
By: Bert Latamore
IBM successfully transmits text using graphene-based circuit
Big Blue confident it can use fragile material within smartphones and tablets.
mardi 28 janvier 2014
New IBM Kenexa talent suite taps Big Data to energize today's workforce
IBM today announced the software-as-service (SaaS)-based IBM Kenexa Talent
Suite that allows Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) and C-Suite
executives to gain actionable insights into the deluge of data shared
every day by their workforce. As a result, organizations can now
streamline, modernize and add precision to hiring practices, increase
workforce productivity and connect employees in ways that impact
business results.
Organizations around the world today are on a mission to identify and
hire top talent. By hiring precisely the right employees and then
arming them with powerful social tools, businesses can more effectively
manage and develop their workforce and put them into the position to
succeed.
With the IBM Kenexa Talent Suite, HR professionals can
look at large volumes of employee data – such as work experience, social
engagement, skills development and individual interests – to identify
the qualities that make top performers successful. Organizations and
teams can then use those models to pursue candidates through additional
targeted social marketing on social recruiting sites, where job seekers
matching the profile are automatically connected with opportunities
matching their skills.
Customers can accelerate the onboarding
and the integration of new hires through IBM Connections capabilities.
This helps employees share information and find the right experts to
accelerate learning and increase productivity and engagement, while at
the same time providing a way for leaders to more effectively manage
their teams. Through analytics and reporting, line of business leaders
can better understand emerging employee trends and more effectively
manage each individual's career path in areas like skill attainment,
performance appraisals, compensation, succession planning and more.
"We
know people are the lifeblood of an organization, and business success
on today's stage requires not just talent but social capabilities that
can energize, empower and nurture each team member so they can reach
their full potential," said Craig Hayman,
General Manager, Industry Cloud Solutions, IBM. "By combining social,
behavioral science and analytics in the cloud, we give businesses a
clear path to empower their most valued asset – employees."
Interested customers can complement the Suite with Watson Foundations, a comprehensive, integrated set of Big Data and Analytics
capabilities that enable clients to find and capitalize on actionable
insights. Watson Foundations provides the tools and capabilities to tap
into relevant data – regardless of source or type – and apply a full
range of analytics to gain fresh insights in real-time, securely across
an enterprise.
Using Watson Foundations customers will be able to
conduct a deeper level of analysis on key workforce-related data,
identify trends within the workforce, predict future trends and
proactively take action. Executives can also look at the profiles and
work performance of their top employees and determine the appropriate
type of rewards needed to keep them engaged.
According to an upcoming IBM C-Suite study
that surveyed 342 CHROs representing 18 industries, many businesses are
not taking full advantage of the insights delivered by workforce big
data and analytics. The study found that just over half of organizations
are using workforce analytics, with far fewer applying predictive analytics
to optimize decision making and outcomes in areas such as sourcing and
recruiting (7 percent), employee engagement and commitment (9 percent)
and talent development (10 percent), retention (13 percent).
The
CHRO study also found that human resources executives are in the early
stages of applying social approaches within the organization. Currently,
66 percent are regularly using social for their recruiting efforts, but
only 41 percent are using it for learning 31 percent for knowledge
sharing.
Today leading businesses such as AMC
are benefiting from IBM talent management software. AMC, one of the
world's premier entertainment companies, uses recruitment technologies
from IBM to gain a deep understanding through data analytics of what it
takes to succeed at the organization. AMC then uses that knowledge to
attract candidates who are more likely to succeed once they're hired.
"Harnessing
the power of data gives us a better picture of what top talent looks
like in our industry. IBM's talent management solutions allow us to use
data in new ways so we can make better informed decisions that have a
greater impact on our business," said Heather Jacox, Director, Diversity, Recruitment & Development at AMC.
The IBM Kenexa Talent Suite includes the following:
- Talent Acquisition: Includes recruitment, skill and behavioral science-based assessments and onboarding. These integrated functions are designed to provide a deep understanding of what the best talent looks like and then how to attract, hire and engage them.
- Talent Optimization: Includes performance management, succession planning and compensation planning to empower and get the most out of employees.
- Social Networking: Increases productivity with expertise identification and knowledge discovery – connecting employees and accelerating the time to productivity.
By: PR Newswire
Link: http://cloudcomputing.ulitzer.com/node/2942997
lundi 20 janvier 2014
IBM announces revolutionary System x generation with modular design, 12 TB flash on memory bus
IBM today announced a complete redesign of its System x x86
server family, featuring up to 12.8 Tbytes of NAND flash directly on
the memory bus of the server and a modular design that allows users to
upgrade the server by simply replacing plug-in “Compute Books”. This
sixth generation of System x has six core reference architectures
including one for SAP HANA and is designed to facilitate the
virtualization of ERP and other large, core enterprise-level
applications for delivery through private and hybrid clouds. The
scalable design can also reduce acquisition costs up to 28 percent in
comparison to competitive Xeon x86 systems, IBM says.
The announcement includes a new System x3850 M4 BD storage
server, a two-socket rack server supporting up to 14 flash and/or disk
drives delivering up to 56 Tbytes of high-density storage. This server,
which combines compute with storage, is specifically designed for large
build-out architectures such as Hadoop big data installations, says Stuart McRae, IBM System x high-end business line manager.
It also includes the new IBM FlashSystem 840, providing double the
bandwidth and performance – 1.1M IOPS – of its predecessor, the
FlashSystem 820. It supports up to 48 Tbytes of usable capacity in a 2U
unit with IBM Microlatency
technology that cuts data access times to microseconds. Designed to
support big data, it provides actionable insights from real-time data
analytics faster than its predecessors. It also features a new
management GUI and datacenter-optimized features such as hot-swap
components and concurrent code load, enabling fast installation and
easier management.
Virtualize your ERP for the cloud
“The System x6 is the first server family that’s been
effectively designed from the ground up to incorporate flash storage,”
McRae said. “Until now, flash storage has been kind of an add-on – you
add on a PCI card to the server. This is integrating flash storage on
the memory bus, the highest speed bus in the system, and making that
available as a block storage device, that looks like any other block
storage device to the application.”
By putting the flash on the memory bus, it becomes the
fastest flash storage on the market. And these new systems can support a
lot of it.
“It looks exactly like a DDR3 DIMM,” he said. “These
systems are going to have 92 DIMM sockets in a four-way, so it can
support up to 6 terabytes of system memory on a four-way, or 12
terabytes in an eight-way. That’s three times as much memory as is
available in a standard eight-way server today.”
This has major implications both for big data analytics and
for virtualization of very large enterprise applications such as ERP.
“If you wanted to cache a five terabyte database in the server for
analytics applications, you can configure that as a cache.” So for
instance, in the SAP HANA
appliance, a large amount of that space is used for RAM, allowing users
to have a very large data set in HANA while still providing large
amounts of flash for staging data. And by spreading a HANA or similar
installation across several servers, it can support very large databases
on the memory bus while providing resilience and redundancy in case of a
hardware or power failure in any one server.
Before the x6 generation, users were memory-constrained in
what they could virtualize. “If you had a four-way server only
supporting one or two Tbytes of memory, it’s hard to virtualize a
terabyte application,” McRae said. “Now they can do that on these new
platforms.” This opens the way for virtualization of ERP systems, even
Oracle Red Stacks, that today run on bare metal, allowing customers to
realize the advantages of server virtualization and deliver services
based on their ERP and other core systems to users via their private
clouds.
“I want to move my large databases to a cloud model. I want
to move my SAP HANA to a cloud model. I want to move my big ERP
applications. I don’t want to have to re-architect it to a new
architecture, I want to move it now, and this provides the
infrastructure to do that,” MacRae said.
“Booking” your memory, flash, CPUs
The
other part of the x6 revolution is the new parallel modular design that
IBM calls “Compute Books”. Each server is made up of these
plug-and-play modules, each with its own processor and memory. These
plug into a backplane that provides power and IO.
This means that upgrading a server or replacing a failing
unit is simply a matter of unplugging one or more modules and plugging
in replacements. Then a simple restart implements the new hardware
without requiring a forklift replacement and all the management that
goes along with that. MacRae says IBM estimates that the core server
will support at least the next three generations of processor and
memory/flash technology.
“Once you’ve architected the server and put your big
applications on it, two years from now, when you say ‘Scotty, I need
more power,’ you just pull the Compute Books out and plug the latest,
greatest ones in. It’s all transparent to the back-end IO.” That
provides a great deal of investment protection across generations.
And while it does require a reboot of the upgraded server,
“because it’s a virtualized environment, and now we’ve virtualized these
large applications, you have no application downtime.”
Six reference architectures
As part of the announcement, IBM also announced six
pre-architected versions that come with software installed: an SQL data
Warehouse, a Hyper-V appliance running on Windows Server, an SAP HANA
version, an SAP Business Suite version, a VMware vCloud, and finally a
version running DB2 with BLU acceleration on Linux. The servers come
with either SUSI or Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Server. While IBM does
not have a reference architecture for it, Oracle has System x on its
compatibility list, so users can also run an Oracle Red Stack on the new
System x. And because of the higher end processors and the large
amounts of memory and flash storage that the new generation supports,
they can decrease the number of licenses they need, saving significant
cost, particularly with Oracle. And System x also runs IBM Watson for
users who want that in-house rather than using it from IBM’s cloud.
By: Bert Latamore
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