IBM Information Infrastructure launches today

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Earlier this year, IBM launched its[New Enterprise Data Center vision]. The average data center was built 10-15 years ago,at a time when the World Wide Web was still in its infancy, some companies were deploying their first storage areanetwork (SAN) and email system, and if you asked anyone what "Google" was, they might tell you it was ["a one followed by a hundred zeros"]!

Full disclosure: Google, the company, justcelebrated its [10th anniversary] yesterday, and IBM has partnered with Google on a varietyof exciting projects. I am employed by IBM, and own stock in both companies.

In just the last five years, we saw a rapid growth in information, fueled by Web 2.0 social media, email, mobile hand-held devices, and the convergenceof digital technologies that blurs the lines between communications, entertainment and business information. This explosion in information is not just "more of the same", but rather a dramatic shift from predominantly databases for online transaction processing to mostly unstructured content. IT departments are no longer just the"back office" recording financial transactions for accountants, but now also take on a more active "front office" role. For a growing number of industries, information technology plays a pivotal role in generating revenue, making smarter business decisions, and providing better customer service.

IBM felt a new IT model was needed to address this changing landscape, so IBM's New Enterprise Data Center vision has these five key strategic initiatives:

1. Highly virtualized resources
2. Business Resilience
3. Business-driven Service Management
4. Green, Efficient, Optimized facilities
5. Information Infrastructure

In May, IBM launched its Service Management strategic initiative at the Pulse 2008 conference. I was there in Orlando, Florida at the Swan and Dolphin resort to present to clients. You can read my three posts:[Day 1; Day 2 Main Tent; Day 2 Breakout sessions].

In June, IBM launched its fourth strategic initiative "Green, Efficient and Optimized Facilities" with [Project BigGreen 2.0], which included the Space-Efficient Volume (SEV) and Space-Efficient FlashCopy (SEFC) capabilitiesof the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) 4.3 release. Fellow blogger and IBM master inventor Barry Whyte (BarryW) has three posts on his blog about this:[SVC 4.3.0Overview; SEV and SEFCdetail; Virtual Disk Mirroring and More]

Some have speculated that the IBM System Storage team seemed to be on vacation the past two months, with few pressreleases and little or no fanfare about our July and August announcements, and not responding directly to critics and FUD in the blogosphere.It was because we were holding them all for today's launch, taking our cue from a famous perfume commercial:

"If you want to capture someone's attention -- whisper."

My team and I were actually quite busy at the [IBM Tucson Executive Briefing Center]. In between doing our regular job talking to excited prospects and clients,we trained sales reps and IBM Business Partners, wrote certification exams, and updated marketing collateral. Fortunately, competitors stopped promotingtheir own products to discuss and demonstrate why they are so scared of what IBM is planning.The fear was well justified. Even a few journalists helped raise the word-of-mouth buzz and excitement level. A big kiss to Beth Pariseau for her article in [SearchStorage.com]!

(Last week we broke radio silence to promote our technology demonstration of 1 million IOPS using Solid StateDisk, just to get the huge IBM marketing machine oiled up and ready for today)

Today, IBM General Manager Andy Monshaw launchedthe fifth strategic initiative, [IBM Information Infrastructure], at the[IBM Storage and Storage Networking Symposium] in Montpellier, France. Montpellier is one of the six locations of our New Enterprise Data Center Leadership Centers launched today. The other five are Poughkeepsie, Gaithersburg, Dallas, Mainz and Boebligen, with more planned for 2009.

Although IBM has been using the term "information infrastructure" for more than 30 years, it might be helpful to define it for you readers:

“An information infrastructure comprises the storage, networks, software, and servers integrated and optimized to securely deliver information to the business.”

In other words, it's all the "stuff" that delivers information from the magnetic surface recording of the disk ortape media to the eyes and ears of the end user. Everybody has an information infrastructure already, some are just more effective than others. For those of you not happy with yours, IBM hasthe products, services and expertise to help with your data center transformation.

Over the next four days, I plan to cover each of these solution areas in more detail. More than 30 new or enhanced products and services were included with this launch, including the [IBM XIV Storage System], the [TS7650G ProtecTIER deduplication gateway], the new [DS5000] and[N series N6000] disk systems,enhanced[Scale-Out File Services (SoFS)], and the new "deep archive" [S24 and S54 high-density HD frames] for the IBM 3584 and TS3500 tape libraries. It will probably take me the rest of this quarter to cover them all in this blog and to set the record straight on some of the more outrageous andfactually inaccurate statements made by the competitors most threatened by today's announcements.

Last, but not least, I would like to welcome to the blogosphere IBM's newest blogger, Moshe Yanai, formerly the father of the EMC Symmetrix and now leading the IBM XIV team. Already from his first poston his new [ThinkStorage blog], I can tell he is not going to pullany punches either.

To learn more, here is the[IBM Press Release]

technorati tags: IBM, New Enterprise Data Center, Google, z10, mainframe, DS8000, Turbo, disk, system, Web2.0, service management, green, Project Big Green, energy efficient, SVC, SEV, SEFC, BarryW, Beth Pariseau, Searchstorage.com, IOPS, SSD, Information Infrastructure, Andy Monshaw, storage, symposium, Montpellier, France, Leadership Centers, XIV, TS7650G, ProtecTIER, deduplication, DS5000, N6000, S24, S54, high-density, frame, 3584, TS3500, tape+library, Moshe Yanai, ThinkStorage, EMC, Symmetrix