IBM Migration FactoryWell, I'm back from my exhausting trip in New York City. I had to rub my eyes when I saw the headlines about [HP accusing Oracle] of harassing their new CEO with a [subpoena in Oracle's suit against HP]. One thing perhaps can be said about this circus -- it may be more preferable for Oracle to talk about than the continued decline of the hardware business that it [acquired from Sun Microsystems] earlier this year. Each quarter since 2006, the [IBM Migration Factory] team has tallied the number of clients who have moved to IBM severs and storage systems from competitive hardware. We'll I've just seen the latest numbers, for the third quarter of 2010, and it looks like we set a new quarterly record with nearly 400 total migrations to IBM from Oracle/Sun and HP. It's clear that companies and governments worldwide are seeing greater value in IBM systems, while Oracle and HP watch their customer bases erode. In just this past 3Q 2010, nearly 400 clients have moved over to IBM -- almost all of them from Oracle/Sun and HP. Of these, 286 clients migrated to IBM Power Systems, running AIX, Linux and IBM i operating systems, from competitors alone -- nearly 175 from Oracle/Sun and nearly 100 from HP. The number of migrations to IBM Power Systems through the first three quarters of 2010 is nearly 800, already exceeding the total for all of last year by more than 200. Let's do the math.... Since IBM established its Migration Factory program in 2006, more than 4,500 clients have switched to IBM. More than 1,000 from Oracle/Sun and HP joined the exodus this year alone. In less than five years, almost 3,000 of these clients -- including more than 1,500 from Oracle/Sun and more than 1,000 from HP -- have chosen to run their businesses on IBM's Power Systems. That's more than a client per day making the move to IBM! And as the servers go, so goes the storage. Clients are re-discovering IBM as a server and storage powerhouse, offering a strong portfolio in servers, disk and tape systems, and how synergies between servers and storage can provide them real business benefits. Adding it all up, it's clear that IBM's multi-billion dollar investment in helping to build a smarter planet with workload-optimized systems is paying off -- and that, more and more, clients are selecting IBM over the competition to help them meet their business needs.
Tags:  ibm sun migration+factory subpoena lawsuit hp oracle |
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Apples and OrangesOn Wikibon, David Floyer has an article titled [SAS Drives Tier 1 to New Levels of Green] that focuses on the energy efficiency benefits of newer Serial-Attach SCSI (SAS) drives over older Fibre Channel (FC) drives. This makes sense, as R&D budgets have been spent on making newer technologies more "green". Fellow blogger Hu Yoshida (HDS) encourages people to [Invest in the Future with SAS, SATA and SFF], referring to Figure 1. Of course, people might consider this an [apples-to-oranges] comparison. Not only are we changing from FC to SAS technology, we are also changing from 3.5-inch drives to small form factor (SFF) 2.5-inch drives. It seems odd to specify 2000 drives, when only two of the five scale up to that level. Few systems in production, from any vendor, have more than 1000 drives, so it would have seemed that would have been a fairer comparison. However, Hu's conclusion that the combination of SAS and SFF provides better performance and energy efficiency for both IBM DS8800 and HDS VSP than FC-based alternatives from any vendor seems reasonably supported by the data.
Meanwhile, fellow blogger David Merrill (HDS) pokes fun at IBM DS8800 in Figure 2 in his post [Winner o’ the green]. This second comparison was for 4PB of raw capacity, which 4 of the 5 can handle easily using 2TB SATA drives, but the DS8800 is based on SAS technology and does not support 2TB SATA drives. A perf
The main take-away here is that IBM offers both the DS8700 for capacity-optimized workloads, and the DS8800 for perf
Tags:  ibm ds8800 wikibon hu+yoshida ds8700 david+merrill davud+floyer |
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IBM Expert Network on SlideShare.Net
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Visits (11575)
![]() This week, IBM launched the new [IBM Expert Network] that provides presentation materials from subject matter experts. I am honored to be one of the 20-plus experts selected for PRO accounts on SlideShare.Net to help seed this with initial materials. I have a bit of behind-the-scenes history to share on this. Back in 2008, I first discovered SlideShare.net as an excellent resource to get ideas for presentations. Much like YouTube is for videos and FlickR is for photos, SlideShare.Net is for presentations. In my June 2008 post, [Summer Jobs and the Singularity], I embedded someone's presentation from SlideShare. Earlier this year, I uploaded a presentation on [IBM Solid State Disk in eX5 servers], and a presentation that I gave publicly to the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), which I embedded in my post [Cloud Computing for Accountants].
This latter one got me in a bit of trouble internally. Neither presentation had anything secret or controversial, so I didn't see the issue. Several other bloggers had asked how I got "permission" to use an external Soft The result? IBM communications decided to make an official list, it's actually three lists. A "white list" of services that we are allowed to use, a "grey list" of services under evaluation or negotiation, and a "black list" of services we are not allowed to use, and sadly Slideshare.Net was on the black list. I protested, argued that unless IBM offered something to replace it, to re-evaluate this external service. I got it back on the "grey list" and now, this week, it is officially on the "white list". Of course, this probably involved negotiation on EULA terms and conditions, but I am not a lawyer and have no idea what went on behind closed doors to make this happen. I am just glad it did. So please, check out the new IBM Expert Network at: [htt
Tags:  ima ppt cloud+computing ibm slideshare singularity expert+network odp |
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IBM Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary for LTO Tape
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This year marks the 10 year anniversary of IBM's introduction of LTO tape technology. IBM is a member of the Linear Tape Open consortium which consists of IBM, HP and Quantum, referred to as "Technology Provider Companies" or TPCs. In an earlier job role, I was the "portfolio manager" for both LTO and Enterprise tape product lines. In honor of this event, I decided to interview Bruce Master, IBM Senior Program Manager for Data Protection Systems, about this 10 year anniversary.
Of course, LTO tape is just one of the many reasons IBM is a successful and profitable leader in the IT storage industry. Doug Balog talked about his experiences in London for the [October 7th launch] of IBM DS8800, Storwize V7000 and SAN Volume Controller 6.1. Sanjay Tripathi showed recent successes with IBM's ProtecTIER Data Deduplication Solution and Information Archive products. I would like to thank Bruce Master for his time in completing this interview. To learn more about IBM tape and storage offerings, visit [ibm.com/storage].
Tags:  lto-4 sanjay+tripathi lto-1 linear+tape+open lto-2 ibm lto-5 lto-3 worm doug+balog lto nenr bruce+master |
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IBM Named Innovator of the Year
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Visits (10681)
Governor's Celebration of Innovation [GCOI] is an annual awards gala, with attendees who include technologists, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers. Last week, IBM was awarded "Innovator of the Year" in the Large Company category for its Easy Tier feature of the IBM DS8700 that allows optimal use of Solid-State Drives through sub-LUN automatic movement of data. IBM's Long Term File System (LTFS) was also a finalist under consideration. The award was presented to Cindy Grossman, IBM VP and Senior Location Executive for Tucson. Joining her were Dr. Krishna Nathan, Ed Childers, Glen Jaquette, Vincent Hsu, Rick Krebsbach, Gene Leo, Denise Lopez, Hironobu Nagura, Calline Sanchez, Johnny Smith, and Dr. Cheng-Chung Song. To learn more, read the articles in the [Arizona Business & Money] and [Phoenix Business Journal] And for my readers in the United States, Happy Thanksgiving!
Tags:  cindy+grossman ds8700 easy+tier ds8800 ltfs gcoi ibm |