Continuing my coverage of the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a day full main-tent sessions. Here is a quick recap of the sessions presented in the afternoon.

Taming the Information Explosion

Doug Balog, IBM Vice President and Disk Storage Business Line Executive, presented on the information explosion. Storage Admins are focused on managing storage growth and the related costs and complexity, proper forecasting and capacity planning, and backup administration. IBM's strategy is to help clients in the following areas:

1. Storage Efficiency - getting the most use out of the resources you invest
2. Service Delivery - ensuring that information gets to the right people at the right time
3. Data Protection - protecting data against unethical tampering, unauthorized access, and unexpected loss and corruption

Cory Vokey, Senior Manager of IT Systems Operations at Research in Motion, Ltd., the people who bring you BlackBerry phone service, provided a client testimonial for the XIV storage system. Before the XIV, RIM suffered high storage costs and per-volume software licensing. Over the past 15 months, RIM deployed XIV as a corporate standard. With the XIV, they have had 100 percent up-time, and enjoyed 50 percent costs savings compared to their previous storage systems. They have increased capacity 300 percent, without any increase to their storage admin staff. XIV has greatly improved their procurement process, as they no longer need to "true up" their software licenses to the volume of data managed, a sore point with their previous storage vendor.

Mainframe Innovations and Integration

Tom Rosamillia, IBM General Manager of the System z mainframe platform, presented on mainframe servers. After 40 years, IBM's mainframe remains the gold standard, able to handle hundreds of workloads on a single server, facilitating immediate growth with scalability. The key values of the System z mainframe are:

• Industry leading virtualization, management and qualities of service
• A comprehensive portfolio for business intelligence and data warehousing
• The premier platform for modernizing the enterprise
• A large and growing portfolio of leading-applications ISV support

Steve Phillips, CIO of Avnet, presented the client testimonial for their use of a System z10 mainframe. Last year, Avnet was ranked Fortune's Number One "Most admired" for Technology distribution. Avnet distributes technology from 300 suppliers to over 100,000 resellers, ISVs and end users. They have modernized their system running SAP on System z with DB2 as the database management system, using Hypersockets virtual LAN inside the server to communicate between logical partitions (LPARs). The folks at Avnet especially like the ability for on-the-fly re-assignment of capacity. This is used for end-of-quarter peak processing, and to adjust between test and development workloads. They also like the various special purpose engines available:

• z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) for DB2 workloads
• z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) for Java processing under WebSphere
• Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) for Linux applications

Cloud Computing: Real Capabilities, Real Stories

Mike Hill, IBM Vice President of Enterprise Initiatives, presented on IBM's leadership in cloud computing. He covered three trends that are driving IT today. First, there is a consumerization and industrialization of IT interfaces. Second, a convergence of the infrastructure that is driving a new focus on standards. Third, delivering IT as a service has brought about new delivery choices. The result is cloud computing, with on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access, location-independent resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and flexible pricing models. Government agencies and businesses in Retail, Manufacturing and Utilities are leading the charge to cloud computing.

Mike covered IBM's five cloud computing deployment models, and shared his views on which workloads might be ready for cloud, and which may not be there yet. Organizations are certainly seeing significant results: reduced labor costs, improved capital utilization, reduced provisioning cycle times, improved quality through reduced software defects, and reduced end user IT support costs.

Mitch Daniels, Director of Technology at ManTech International Corporation, presented the customer testimonial for an IBM private cloud for Development and Test. Mantech chose a private cloud as they work with US Federal agencies like Department of Defense, Homeland Security and the Intelligence community. The private cloud was built from:

• IBM Cloudburst virtualized server environment
• Tivoli Unified Process to document process and workflow
• Tivoli Service Automation Manager to request, deliver and manage IT services
• Tivoli Self-Service Portal and Service Catalog to allow developers and testers to request resources as needed

The result: Mantech saved 50 percent in labor costs, and can now provision development and test resources in minutes instead of weeks.

The IBM Transformation Story

Leslie Gordon, IBM Vice President of Application and Infrastructure Services Management, presented IBM's own transformation story, becoming the premier "Globally Integrated Enterprise". Based on IBM's 2009 CIO study, CIOs must balance three roles with seemingly contradictory demands:

1. Make innovations real, be both an insightful visionary but also an able pragmatist
2. Raise the Return on Investment (ROI) of IT, determine savvy ways to create value but also be ruthless at cutting costs
3. Expanding the business impact of IT, be a collaborative business leader with the other C-level executives, but also be an inspiring manager for the IT staff.

In this case, IBM drinks its own champagne, using its own solutions to help run its internal operations. In 1997, IBM used over 15,000 applications, but this has been simplified down to 4500 applications today. Thousands of servers were consolidated to Linux on System z mainframes. The applications workloads were categorized as Blue, Bronze, Silver, and Gold to help prioritize the consolidation. IBM's key lessons from all this were:

• Gather data at the business unit level, but build the business case from an enterprise view.
• Start small and monitor progress continually, run operations concurrently with transformational projects
• Address cultural and organizational changes by deploying transformation in waves

I found the client testimonials insightful. It is always good to hear that IBM's solutions work "as advertised" right out of the box.

technorati tags: IBM, dyninfra, summit, Scottsdale, RIM, XIV, zIIP, zAAP, IFL, Avnet, LPAR, ManTech, ROI, CIO

Tags:  mantech zaap rim ifl ibm cio ziip lpar roi avnet dyninfra summit xiv scottsdale