Information Infrastructure

 

IBM Corp. held its Information on Demand (IoD) conference and announced a bevy of software offerings while Teradata Corp. used its partner conference to announce a new appliance. Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems Inc. unveiled new quad-core SPARC processors and storage arrays.

Focal Points:

• IBM made a number of data management, enterprise content management, InfoSphere and Mashup Center announcements at its IoD conference. The data management announcements included clustered configurations for Informix Dynamic Server on BladeCenter, solidDB enhancements and universal cache, IMS 11, IMS Enterprise Suite and tools, and DB2 tools for z/OS. The enterprise content management announcements included Cognos Content Analytics, an enhanced FileNet Business Process Manager, InfoSphere Content Assessment and Content Collector additions, data discovery, records management enhancements and information archive cloud services. The InfoSphere announcements included InfoSphere Streams, InfoSphere Identity Insight, InfoSphere MDM, Master Information Hub, MDM with Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint, InfoSphere Discovery and Foundation Tools. IBM also revealed its new Mashup Center 2.0, which now interoperates with a number of IBM products such as WebSphere portal and the WebSphere BPM suite of products using a common widget model. The new release has new capabilities that enable mashup information to be accessed from FileNet p8, IBM Content Manager, Microsoft Corp.'s Sharepoint, and Web services secured by WS-Security. The new release also has improved security and allows for rapid creation of widgets with new Widget Factory capabilities, including drag and drop widget creation and new interactive user interface controls.
• Teradata previewed a concept appliance based on solid state disks (SSDs) and codenamed Blurr to partners. The first of its kind, which will be known as Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance, will be at a customer site in two weeks. Teradata claims it is getting 55,000 IOPS (Input/Outputs per second) per SSD, which multiplies up to four million IOPS per rack. The company says these are real, measured IOPS not theoretical ones. This is twice the price performance of its conventional devices. The appliance will scale from seven to 200 TB of user data and use multi-core Intel Corp. processors running 64-bit Linux SLES 10. The vendor also states Blurr is 50 percent more energy efficient than traditional drives and requires seven percent of the floor space of an equivalently performing data warehouse.
• Sun and Fujitsu Ltd. announced new quad-core SPARC64 VII processors that offer 25 percent better performance than the previous version and an enhanced memory controller for the SPARC Enterprise server line. The new processors – the SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 processors, which run at 2.53GHz, and the M8000 and M9000, which run at 2.88GHz – are available as an in-box upgrade option for existing SPARC Enterprise servers. Sun unveiled the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, a fully-integrated flash-based storage with flash-optimized software. It features up to two terabytes of solid-state flash capacity, 1.6 million read and 1.2 million write IOPS performance. Each Sun F5100 array is one rack-unit in height and can be zoned and connected to up to 16 separate hosts. Sun also announced the Sun Storage 6180 Array, which is a high-performance, enterprise-class, full eight GB per second (GB/sec) I/O Fibre Channel (FC) solution with backend loop speeds of two or four GB/sec. It is modular, rack-mountable, and scalable, according to Sun, and provides the ability to combine FC and SATA disk drives.

Experton Group believes the focus of new vendor offerings will be appliances, cloud services, and improved integrated offerings, along with gains in feeds and speeds. While all this is good and enhances IT's ability to be more agile and do more for less, few new disruptive technology changes will come on the scene. IT executives should consider investing in new products and services that can demonstrate a clear return on investment within their fiscal year. Additionally, IT executives should work with corporate financial staff to determine the value of using vendor – or third party – leasing or lending packages, principally checking to see if the packages make the transaction affordable.