News

• New technologies and services for businesses, governments designed to tackle massive growth and mobility of data; skyrocketing energy costs, security concerns and more demanding consumers;
• Largest information infrastructure launch ever for the company that invented the disk drive, relational database -- more than 30 new and upgraded information infrastructure technologies and services unveiled;
• $2 billion investment; three years and more than 2,500 IBM researchers and developers from nine different countries; key acquisitions in the last 24 months cement strategy.¹
• Average individual’s "information footprint" – the digitisation of entertainment, healthcare, security, retail preferences – will grow from 1 terabyte (about 50,000 trees cut and printed) per year to more than 16 terabytes by 2020, according to IBM.²
• Technologies incubating in IBM’s labs such as the long-term archiving project, solid state technologies, memory breakthroughs, real-time decision making to further enhance future storage offerings.

HONG KONG, November 13, 2008 – IBM China/Hong Kong Limited (NYSE: IBM) announced its largest launch ever of new storage hardware, software and services that are the building blocks for the world’s strongest information infrastructure portfolio. The new IBM offerings are designed to enable businesses, governments and other institutions to transform static data managed in silos into more dynamic information that is accessible by individuals wherever they go in a cloud computing environment.

As consumers now look to ”take their information” with them - improving their healthcare, security, entertainment, social life and consumer experience anytime, around the globe, in real time – businesses are struggling with outdated data centers, which are unable to handle the increased information management demands.

The proliferation of the mobile web, connected sensors everywhere, from cars to pipelines, online medical records, and the explosive growth of Web 2.0 data and social networking, are leading to 16-fold growth in each individual’s “information footprint” by 2020, according to IBM. Infrastructures need to adapt today to meet this demand.

In response, IBM delivered critical elements for an information infrastructure as part of its New Enterprise Data Center strategy. These elements focus on the availability, compliance and retention, and security pain points for clients as they re-design their data centers. More than 30 new and upgraded products and services are being introduced across the IBM portfolio to meet these critical needs:

Internet-Scale Availability: Today's infrastructure is not designed to efficiently manage the estimated two billion people who will be on the Web by 2011³ nor the expected one trillion connected objects – cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines – comprising “the Internet of things.” Cost-effective, scale-out technologies are needed as an essential element of a client’s information infrastructure to enable Internet scale and speed for the management of vast amounts of online information within an organisation and out to billions of individuals. Businesses must be prepared for this new phase of “cloud computing,” giving consumers access to data and systems remotely, from any device, anywhere. To meet these needs, IBM announced a series of products and offerings enabling Internet Scale Availability. Among the highlights:

• An entirely new low cost, highly scalable disk storage system designed to handle today’s diverse mix of information - from Web 2.0 to traditional applications such as financial services. Developed from the XIV acquisition in January, this new enterprise disk offering features a unique grid-based architecture that offers easier management, greater performance scalability, self-tuning/healing and thin provisioning to help reduce the cost and complexity of information storage while enabling consistently quick access of data for today’s dynamic range of workloads. More information can be found here: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/xiv/index.html
• Designed to meet demanding mid-range data center requirements, IBM is introducing a new disk storage system DS5000 which can add interfaces, increase performance, grow capacity as Internet scale demands, and be reconfigured on-the-fly. More information on the DS5000 can be found here: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/ds5000/index.html
• IBM is offering new storage virtualisation software SAN Volume Controller V4.3 that helps clients more efficiently manage and consolidate volumes of business data, providing clients with a storage solution designed to help improve utilisation rates, energy efficiency, availability, and scalability of critical applications. More information on SVC can be found here: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/software/virtualization/svc/index.html
• As a means to support storage optimisation, IBM is announcing new scale out file services (SOFS), flexible storage virtualisation services that will help alleviate data storage challenges by enabling quick implementation of highly scalable, global, clustered network attached storage systems. More information on SOFS can be found here: www.ibm.com/services/us/its/html/sofs-landing.html

Consolidation and Retention: Today's information infrastructure suffers from massive inefficiency in both duplicate sources of the same information and excessive energy costs. Leading analysts have stated that 50 percent of data centers will run out of power or space for their data centers sometime in 2008⁴ and the energy consumed by U.S. data centers will grow from 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent of the nation’s total energy consumption over the next five years.⁵ To meet these needs, IBM announced a series of products and offerings enabling data center consolidation and retention. Among the highlights:

• IBM is delivering new De-duplication and Virtual Tape Library Solution from the Diligent Technologies acquisition in April, which will help clients eliminate information clutter by reducing redundant data by a factor of up to 25:1⁶ More information on the ProtecTier offering can be found here: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts7650g/index.html
• To help clients retain and back-up copies of their critical data off-site, and ensure the continuous availability of e-mail and mission critical applications and data on site in the event of a disaster, IBM is introducing Onsite and Remote Data Protection offerings through its acquisition of Arsenal. More information can be found here: www.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offerfamily/bcrs/a1026934
• Physical space is a huge problem for data centers today as they look to consolidate, so a new high density tape storage library frame on TS3500 is being introduced that can hold up to three-times more cartridges in a 10 square foot footprint, providing nearly twice the storage density of Sun⁷. More information on the TS3500 can be found here: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts3500/index.html
• IBM is introducing an upgraded high end disk DS8000 offering that adds more IBM mainframe storage functionality for customers dealing with large database growth in their mainframes. The updated offering will also have RAID 6 protection - while delivering 50 percent more storage capacity⁸ in the same footprint with new, higher capacity, performance-optimised drives – allowing clients to keep data center costs and energy usage down. More information on the DS8000 can be found here: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/ds8000/index.html

Security: Ensuring that the information in a data center is secure and being accessed only by those authorised has become a top concern for all data centers – large and small. A recent data center hack cost one company more than $60 million dollars in damages through theft of data and unauthorised use of credit card information of consumers.⁹ Meanwhile, the availability and authentication of data -- from massive corporate and government databases to the 1 billion people expected to be using the mobile web¹⁰ this year – is a key priority.

• IBM is enhancing its leading DR550 compliance disk storage offering with enhanced drives that will enable 33 percent more disk capacity.¹¹ Unlike the EMC Centera¹², the IBM system allows partitioning to run third-party ISV applications and leverages both disk and tape, allowing clients to reduce their total cost of ownership and power consumption up to 50 percent.¹³ More information on the DR550 can be found here: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/dr/index.html
• IBM is offering clients the world’s fastest one terabyte storage tape drive TS1130 , far surpassing the current Sun offering¹⁴, to help them protect and archive more information with less cost and less energy usage. Storing up to one terabyte of uncompressed data per tape cartridge, storage backups can be completed up to 54 percent faster than the previous IBM generation drive. More information on the TS1130 can be found here: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts1130/index.html
• In the emerging area of information security and encryption key management for storage – where information is “locked” and can only be accessed by users who have “keys”, IBM will release new Tivoli Key Lifecycle Management software, which helps automate the management of keys where disk and tape storage devices cannot be compromised if lost or stolen. More information on TKLM can be found here: www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/security/
• To help client cost-effectively monitor, secure and manage their IT infrastructures while addressing increasing workloads, IBM is announcing new Remote Managed Infrastructure Services (RMIS). These services offer clients a new model for efficient IT management and security with minimal disruption to existing environments, allowing clients to maintain their existing assets on-site. More information on RMIS can be found here: IBM Remote Infrastructure Management Services

More than 30 new products and services from IBM Systems and Technology Group, IBM Software Group and IBM Research have been announced, supporting the information infrastructure pillar of IBM’s New Enterprise Data Center strategy. Coupled with new announcements from IBM’s Global Technology Services business, IBM aligns critical storage usage to a clients’ direct business priorities, helps them reduce the risk, cost, complexity and planning efforts required for large data migrations, and delivers strategic IBM design and implementation services to target client pain-points. For a full listing of all the products and services announced today, please visit www.ibm.com/systems/storage/products/showcase/index.html

Through home-grown innovation, development and acquisitions, today’s announcement marks a $2 billion investment, three years of research and development, and a global team of more than 2,500 storage technical professionals, engineers and researchers from nine different countries including France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, Switzerland, United States, and the United Kingdom. Key acquisitions of XIV, Diligent, Cognos, Arsenal, Optim, FilesX, Softek, and NovusCG over the last 24 months add strategic pieces to the strongest ever information infrastructure portfolio of offerings unveiled recently.

Andy Monshaw, General Manager, IBM System Storage stated that the world is re-tooling its underlying IT infrastructure in a dramatic shift away from a decades-old client/server model to a radically more efficient Internet-style architecture. He added that this requires different thinking and new capabilities, which IBM addressed in this information infrastructure launch, with its investments going forward, and how it will do business with its clients.

In addition, Mr Monshaw pointed out that there is no bigger opportunity for IBM’s clients than to unlock the value they have in their data centers and help them create smart, innovative offerings to their end users – the consumer. He concluded that IBM is the only company in the world – not HP, not EMC, not Sun – with decades of research, industry knowledge and market leadership to make this a reality for its clients.

To help clients accelerate their data center transformation initiatives and integrate these new IBM information infrastructure offerings into their data centers, IBM also announced the global opening of the New Enterprise Data Center Leadership Centers. At these new centers, more than 500 IBM engineers and experts across locations in the U.S. and Europe will work with clients and focus on solutions and best practices around energy efficiency, consolidation and virtualisation, business resiliency and security and service management and information infrastructure. More information can be found here: www.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/web/leadershipcenters

These new tools and offerings for the IBM information infrastructure will allow clients to streamline their data centers with highly integrated storage offerings focused around archive, compliance, retention, and security pain points to help clients deliver information as a service to their customers – the consumers, who are looking for access to information at any time from any device. These tools and technology resources which IBM has been developing and amassing, open doors to new industry collaborations, and on demand storage technologies – a key pillar in the emergence of cloud computing.
For more information about IBM, IBM System Storage and the IBM Information Infrastructure, visit
www.ibm.com/information_infrastructure

About IBM
For more information about IBM Hong Kong, go to: www.ibm.com/hk

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IBM, System Storage, and the IBM logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. For a list of additional IBM trademarks, see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

1. Source: IBM internal
2. Source: IBM internal
3. Source: "Worldwide Internet Users Top 1 Billion in 2005." Computer Industry Almanac. 4 Jan. 2006. 30 July 2008, www.c-i-a.com/pr0106.htm (link resides outside of ibm.com)
4. Source: EPA Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Efficiency, presented on August 2, 2007
5. Source: November 29, 2006 press release: Gartner Says 50 Percent of Data Centers Will Have Insufficient Power and Cooling Capacity by 2008: www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=499090 (link resides outside of ibm.com)
6. Source: Gartner’s “Cool Vendors In Data Protection, 2008. ID Number: G00155726
7. Source: as of September 3, 2008. Comparisons are based on published data when comparing maximum tape cartridge slots per square foot. The IBM TS3500 with LTO can hold 125. www.ibm.com/jct03004c/systems/storage/tape/ts3500/specifications.html The Sun SL8500 can hold 72. www.sun.com/storagetek/tape_storage/tape_libraries/sl8500/specs.xml (link resides outside of ibm.com).
8. Source: As of September 3, 2008. IBM compares. The previous DS8000 release supported "performance-optimised" fibre channel drives of 73, 146, and 300GB capacities. The new DS8000 R4 adds 450GB fibre channel drives.
9. Source: www.technewsworld.com/story/64072.html?welcome=1218640804 (link resides outside of ibm.com)
10. Source: Underwood, Lee. "Getting in on the 'Mobile' Internet." Webreference.com. 8 Aug. 2008 www.webreference.com/programming/mobile/intro (link resides outside of ibm.com)
11. Source: New IBM DR550 now has 1TB drives compared to previous generation of IBM DR550 which has 750GB drives, thus increasing capacity 33 percent.
12. Source: comparisons based on published specifications, features and benefits. Comparing the offering of the IBM DR550 vs. the EMC Centera based on specs published at www.emc.com/products/detail/hardware/centera.htm (link resides outside of ibm.com).
13. Source: results from IBM TCO Study for System Storage DR550, 2007. Cuts total cost of ownership by 50% with blended tape and disk offering.
14. Source: as of September 3, 2008. Comparisons are based on published data. The IBM TS1130 native sustained data rate (uncompressed) of 160 MBps www.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts1130/specifications.html vs Sun T10000 native sustained data rate (uncompressed) of 120 MBps www.sun.com/storagetek/tape_storage/tape_drives/t10000/specs.xml (link resides outside of ibm.com)