IBM pushes for 21st century infrastructure

Peter Judge,

IBM has a set of new management functions and a “cloud czar”, in a bid to provide the management and control that virtualised data centres and outsourced IT will require.

IBM has promised to give CIOs control over virtualized data centres, and hybrid services that live on both their internal data centre and public clouds – and analysts have given it a cautious welcome.
The company has announced a “dynamic infrastructure” strategy at the Pulse 2009 service management event in Las Vegas, and appointed an executive, Erich Clementi, to manage the company’s cloud computing services, which offer outsourced web-based IT to customers. It has also demonstrated with Juniper Networks, the ability to move resources from an IT data centre to cloud based services.
The company announced new storage-related products, including the ProtecTier de-duplication appliance and a smaller version of the XIV storage system which starts at $500,000 (£337,000)designed to save storage space, and added full-disk encryption to the System Storage DS8000. There is also a new datawarehouse facility on the System z mainframe, called InfoSphere Warehouse, which supports third-party business-intelligence applications, such as Cognos 8 BI.
Finally, Erich Clementi, appointed as general manager of Enterprise Initiatives, or “cloud czar”, will have the job of persuading large enterprises to put their IT needs onto IBM’s dozen-or-so cloud centres round the world