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

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 morning.

Leadership and Innovation on a Smarter Planet

Todd Kirtley, IBM General Manager of the western United States, kicked off the day. He explained that we are now entering the Decade of Smart: smarter healthcare, smarter energy, smarter traffic systems, and smarter cities, to name a few. One of those smarter cities is Dubuque, Iowa, nicknamed the Masterpiece of the Mississippi river. Mayor Roy Boul of Dubuque spoke next on his testimonial on working with IBM. I have never been to Dubuque, but it looks and sounds like a fun place to visit. Here is the [press release] and a two-minute [video].

Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet

Tom Rosamillia, IBM General Manager of the System z mainframe platform, presented on smarter systems. IBM is intentionally designing integrated systems to redefine performance and deliver the highest possible value for the least amount of resource. The five key focus areas were:

1. Enabling massive scale
2. Organizing vast amounts of data
3. Turning information into insight
4. Increasing business agility
5. Managing risk, security and compliance

The Future of Systems

Ambuj Goyal, IBM General Manager of Development and Manufacturing, presented the future of systems. For example, reading 10 million electricity meters monthly is only 120 million transactions per year, but reading them daily is 3.65 billion, and reading them every 15 minutes will result in over 350 billion transactions per year. What would it take to handle this? Beyond just faster speeds and feeds, beyond consolidation through virtualization and multi-core systems, beyond pre-configured fit-for-purpose appliances, there will be a new level for integrated systems. Imagine a highly dense integration with over 3000 processors per frame, over 400 Petabytes (PB) of storage, and 1.3 PB/sec bandwidth. Integrating software, servers and storage will make this big jump in value possible.

POWERing your Planet

Ross Mauri, IBM General Manager of Power Systems, presented the latest POWER7 processor server product line. The IBM POWER-based servers can run any mix of AIX, Linux and IBM i (formerly i5/OS) operating system images. Compared to the previous POWER6 generation, POWER7 are four times more energy efficient, twice the performance, at about the same price. For example, an 8-socket p780 with 64 cores (eight per socket) and 256 threads (4 threads per core) had a record-breaking 37,000 SAP users in a standard SD 2-tier benchmark, beating out 32-socket and 64-socket M9000 SPARC systems from Oracle/Sun and 8-socket Nehalem-EX Fujitsu 1800E systems. See the [SAP benchmark results] for full details. With more TPC-C performance per core, the POWER7 is 4.6 times faster than HP Itanium and 7.5 times faster than Oracle Sun T5440.

This performance can be combined with incredible scalability. IBM's PowerVM outperforms VMware by 65 percent and provides features like "Live Partition Mobility" that is similar to VMware's VMotion capability. IBM's PureScale allows DB2 to scale out across 128 POWER servers, beating out Oracle RAC clusters.

IBM AIX on POWER sytsems is also the most reliable UNIX operating system, which is 2.3 times more reliable than Oracle Sun Solaris on SPARC, HP-UX or Apple MacOS, and 10 times more reliable than Windows 2008 Server on x86 platforms. See the [ITIC 2009 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey].

Analytics and Information

The final speaker in the morning was Greg Lotko, IBM Vice President of Information Management Warehouse solutions. Analytics are required to gain greater insight from information, and this can result in better business outcomes. The [IBM Global CFO Study 2010] shows that companies that invest in business insight consistently outperform all other enterprises, with 33 percent more revenue growth, 32 percent more return on invested (ROI) capital, and 12 times more earnings (EBITDA). Business Analytics is more than just traditional business intelligence (BI). It tries to answer three critical questions for decision makers:

1. What is happening?
2. Why is it happening?
3. What is likely to happen in the future?

The IBM Smart Analytics System is a pre-configured integrated system appliance that combines text analytics, data mining and OLAP cubing software on a powerful data warehouse platform. It comes in three flavors: Model 5600 is based on System x servers, Model 7600 based on POWER7 servers, and Model 9600 on System z mainframe servers.

IBM has over 6000 business analytics and optimization consultants to help clients with their deployments.

While this might appear as "Death by Powerpoint", I think the panel of presenters did a good job providing real examples to emphasize their key points.

technorati tags: IBM, dyninfra, summit, Scottsdale, Dubuque, Iowa, Smarter City, Smarter Energy, POWER7, AIX, PowerVM, PureScale, DB2, Oracle, Sun, Solaris, SPARC, HP-UX, Apple, MacOS, Windows, ROI, EBITDA, OLAP, Nehalem-EX