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Tag: ibm

  • Sun Microsystems and The World's First Open Storage Appliance


    Just a few months ago, Sun Microsystems revealed the availability of its new Unified Storage System – the Sun Storage 7000 family.

    Described as the world’s first Open Storage Appliance, Sun claims the Storage 7000 family is the "biggest thing to happen to storage in decades", writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz-news.

    Quite a brag – though the product’s creativity and innovation speaks volumes for Sun’s group of engineers.

    The Storage 7000 family has three different versions – the 7110, 7210, and 7410 – which have an overall capacity ranging from 2 Tbytes to 288 Tbytes.

    However, the 7410 offers a collected configuration (for advanced accessibility) and is typically aimed for enterprise class configurations, whereas the 7110 and 7210 are better designed for less significant fittings.

    The Sun Storage Unified system can run both NAS and SAN solutions, and Sun pulls seriously on its well-respected ZFS (Zettabyte File System) in the Storage 7000 family.

    Unified storage space rivals EMC Corp, NetApp Inc and IBM Corp have so far focused their attention on IT environments that have a strong NAS presence – but they would very much like to manage SAN as well.

    Sun, meanwhile, has put a major emphasis on facilitating the Storage 7000 family to provide universal function storage requirements.
    The major thrust of Sun’s message for the Storage 7000 is that it makes life a lot easier for storage administrators.

    Sun caims the installations process only takes a few minutes, but persists with key courses of action such as thin provisioning, a function which is embedded in ZFS (as logical storage pools can be enlarged or diminished transparently as long as there is sufficient physical storage to carry them).

    Another feature of the Storage 7000 technology that is of benefit to administration is the concept of DTrace, a collection of analysis that permits real-time system diagnostics.

    Engineers at Sun feel that DTrace can significantly advance storage system troubleshooting to a level never seen before in the industry.

    Another aspect of the Sun Storage 7000 is its performance.

    The company appropriately calls it Hybrid Storage Pools, which shares DRAM, read, and write optimized flash devices that work in working in combination with hard disc drives.

    Sun maintains that the innovative use of SSD technology can help flash memory combine with disc technology resulting in a mega performance that is very cost effective.

    While all that is great, Sun Microsystems continues to show a financial downturn having lost more than USD $1.7 billion in the first quarter of 2009 that ended in Sept 2008.

    With the ongoing financial crises and global recession, the question remains – how well does the Storage 7000 system fit in with other Sun storage products and how does the company plan to market and sell them in a cost efficient method?

    Only time will tell.

  • Skype and IBM collaborate on LotusLive


    Skype has announced that it is to integrate Skype functionality with IBM’s LotusLive.

    The new cloud services from IBM are designed to help individuals build communities to work more effectively and efficiently across and beyond their own companies.

    Effectively, Skype’s voice and video calling adds real-time communications capabilities to LotusLive.

    Employees of companies using LotusLive will be able to use Skype to initiate voice and video calls by clicking on their contacts’ Skype names or phone numbers within LotusLive.

    Future possibilities include the ability to import Skype contact information into IBM cloud services to enhance online collaboration.

    Scott Durchslag, Skype’s chief operating officer, said the collaboration showed how serious Skype is about bringing the benefits of ‘anytime, anywhere, any mode’ Internet communications to the enterprise environment.

  • Digital Realty Wins Datacentre Leaders' Award


    Digital Realty Trust, the world’s largest wholesale datacentre provider, has been recognised for "Innovation in an Outsourced Environment" by the prestigious Datacentre Leaders’ 2008 Awards.

    Digital Realty Trust received the honor for a Turn-Key Datacentre that Digital Realty Trust delivered to IBM to support growth of the company’s hosting business in France.

    The Datacentre Leaders’ Awards recognise innovation and reward excellence in facility design and operations in the UK and across Europe.

    Bernard Geoghegan, senior vice president at Digital Realty Trust, said it was an honor to receive the award, particularly for the IBM project.

    "By establishing its new datacentre in our Turn-Key Datacentre facility in Paris, IBM was able to eliminate capital requirements and meet all of its rigorous technical and financial objectives for the project," he said.

    The Turn-Key Datacentre facilities provide state-of-the-art environments for supporting mission critical infrastructure, with advanced cooling, power, redundancy, and sustainability features to ensure that critical applications are available while optimising energy efficiency.

  • IBM Buys Transitive To Cut Customer Costs


    IBM is to to buy Transitive in an acquisition intended to help its customers cut costs.

    Once the deal is completed, IBM is expected to move the virtualization software company’s California personnel to one of IBM’s local sites.

    Research and development staff located in Manchester, UK, will remain at their current facilities.

    IBM has been using Transitive’s technology in its IBM PowerVMTM software, which consolidates customers’ Linux workloads onto IBM systems, since January .

    Transitive has sold more than 10 million copies of its cross-platform virtualization technology and has 48 patents.

    Its product, QuickTransit, allows software applications that have been compiled for one operating system run on systems with different processors or operating systems without modifications.

    Transitive’s technology is based on research developed at Manchester University in 1992. The company was founded five years later by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer-science lecturer, and a team of his graduate students to bring QuickTransit to market.

    In 2005 the company signed Apple as its first major customer.

    Apple and Silicon Graphics, along with IBM, are Transitive’s OEM customers. The company has been providing QuickTransit technology to run Apple’s Rosetta translation software and the product is shipped on all of Apple’s Intel-based computers.

    No price has been released for the purchase.

  • IBM Expands Storage Virtualization for SMBs


    IBM is to introduce a cheaper and less powerful version of it storage virtualization software for use by small and medium sized (SMB) businesses.

    The System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software is designed to help improve storage utilization rates, energy efficiency, administrator productivity, availability, and scalability of critical applications.

    It is intended to significantly improve the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information.

    This is seen as a key issue for SMBs with exploding volumes of data that are looking to control costs while also responding to the changing business environment.

    Barry Rudolph, vice president, IBM System Storage, said the company had been the leader in storage virtualization since SVC was introduced five years ago.

    “By incorporating a more accessible and affordable product through our IBM Business Partners we are giving clients what they have been asking for – a way to incorporate green and efficient technologies into their information infrastructures to manage the data center crisis of today."

    SVC Entry Edition is planned to be generally available on November 21.