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August 13, 2007
IBM Tackles Data Overload With Information Server Blade
IBM announced the industry's first integrated, blade
server-based data virtualization offering that allows companies to
quickly gain more intelligence from massive volumes of complex
information spread across businesses of all sizes.
The new IBM
Information Server Blade is a completely integrated offering comprised
of IBM blade hardware, the IBM Information Server data integration
software platform, and implementation services, including financing. It
consolidates and moves massive amounts of data to increase business
insight and manage growing information overload problems.
Designed
for all types of challenging data integration projects, including
consolidations, mergers and acquisitions, business intelligence or data
warehousing, IBM Information Server Blade leverages the dynamic nature
of grid computing with the flexibility of blade computing and
virtualization technologies to access and translate large quantities of
information stored across an enterprise.
Unlike traditional
approaches to large-scale data integration projects that typically
consume significant system resources and require multiple software
programs and countless hours of processing time, the IBM Information
Server Blade supports rapid data movement to deliver a consolidated,
enterprise-wide view of information. Information can be delivered on
demand to any person, application or business process. The new offering
also furthers IBM’s global, cross-company Information on Demand
initiative, which is enabling clients to gain a competitive business
advantage through new and innovative uses of information.
IBM
Information Server has long been implemented in grid deployments. These
deployments have demonstrated significant performance improvements and
cost savings. For example, a major corporation used a cluster of
Information Server Blades at a cost around $300,000 running 24 Intel
microprocessors to crunch through a massive data warehousing job in 45
minutes. Previously, when the job was run on a $3 million Sun server,
the data integration job took them five and a half hours.
“This
first-of-a-kind solution illustrates how technology from different
parts of IBM’s business can be combined and applied to create new
innovations for solving customer problems,” said Alex Yost, vice
president and business line executive for IBM BladeCenter. “By
leveraging IBM’s leadership in blade server design and our data
integration software platform, combined with high-performance Intel
processors, the new Information Server Blade will help clients better
manage and exploit data for business advantage.”
The system runs
on Red Hat Linux and is built on IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers with
Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors. Based on low-voltage industry standard
processors, the energy-efficient system also uses less power and
requires less cooling than larger systems.
To ease management
and enhance grid and virtualization capabilities, the Information
Server Blade uses the IBM Systems Director portfolio to provide users
with a centralized dashboard to discover and manage all workloads and
physical and virtual machines within the pooled environment. It also
provides seamless, integrated grid management with Tivoli Workload
Scheduler LoadLeveler so workloads can be easily managed across blades.
Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler provides high workload throughput
and efficient utilization of resources within grid clusters. New blades
can be simply snapped into a grid to add more processing power as
needed, or Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler can be used to
coordinate workload dispatching across multiple grids.
“As
customers seek to minimize datacenter complexity and power consumption
without sacrificing capacity or performance, they are turning more and
more to integrated blade server solutions built on Intel Xeon
processors to balance these needs,” said Elliot Garbus, general manager
of developer relations for the Intel Software and Solutions Group.
“Together, IBM and Intel have enabled a power-friendly,
highly-scalable, turn-key solution to help customers more quickly and
easily modernize their information management infrastructure.”
IBM
Lab Services and IBM Global Business Services offer professional
services to support IBM Information Server Blade. In addition, the IBM
Information Server software platform helps accelerate information
integration initiatives by leveraging IBM Industry Models for banking,
retail, telecommunications and insurance. These models incorporate best
practices in data, process and services templates along with
business-ready blueprints proven with more than 400 customers.
IBM’s
Information Server Blade will be available worldwide from IBM and IBM
Business Partners in October. For more information, visit www.ibm.com/software/data/integration/info_server/blade/.
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Source: IBM-----
Source: IBM
