Hello, my name is Adalio Sanchez and I am the general manager of IBM’s System x and BladeCenter business. I want to welcome everyone that is here with us in person, as well as those who are watching via the IDG Webcast. I also want to welcome our client Doctor Herbert Huber from LRZ, Martina Koederitz our General Manager of IBM Germany, and Massimo Donati, our VP of System x Sales in Europe. Thank you for joining us today as I kick off our discussion with some interesting dynamics taking place in our industry today… and then I will turn this over to my colleague Bob Galush who will discuss some exciting new announcements we are making today in System x and BladeCenter. I’d like to start by providing some background on how we arrived where we are today with computing…. to give our conversation with you today greater context. If we think about what is considered the first era of computing, we often think of it as simple computation…..and the second era is from the 1960s when programmable systems were introduced. Today’s era centers around systems -- like those in IBM Smarter Planet solutions – that are literally transforming every major industry segment. And the reason is simple…data is the next great natural resource businesses must take advantage of. How that data is effectively analyzed and managed will determine the business winners and losers in every industry from here on out in this next era of computing.
To understand this next era of computing we are in today we have to think of it in a larger business context and the challenges clients face as they work towards building a Smarter Planet….and these are challenges really created by the last era of computing. On a Smarter Planet, entire industry ecosystems are becoming instrumented and interconnected. Which creates an opportunity to develop entirely new operating models as intelligence is infused into products, processes, and systems. Thanks to an instrumented and interconnected planet, we're capturing data in unprecedented volumes. But, it’s not about how much data there is, it’s about how enterprises can leverage these innovations to create new business revenue streams and business models. Still, enterprises have to address the challenges created by the prior era of IT….An entirely new set of requirements are being placed on what are in many cases inefficient IT infrastructures. Meanwhile, IT budgets over the last 6+ years have increased only slightly. This is what we call the IT conundrum. The need to do dramatically more without additional resources. Enterprises have to address the IT conundrum by thinking differently about how computing can help them meet the exploding demand for service on a flat budget. This conundrum traps IT organizations in a vicious cycle in which a rigid infrastructure and lack of trusted data lead to reactive decision-making. In addition, attempts to overcome these challenges through additional IT investments often result in greater server sprawl and more costly infrastructure demands. Also, an infrastructure where clients have to guess with incomplete data is not trustworthy. What happens is big ideas are perceived as risky… and small decisions aren’t effectively carried out. At the same time, the IT itself is inflexible, rigid and in a reactive kind of mode that really limits integration and the ability to respond to clients demands. It is a vicious cycle….
It is a vicious cycle that clients are struggling with every day…. To better understand exactly how they are struggling with this IT conundrum we undertook the largest CIO study ever. And the things from this study that came through loud and clear….regardless of industry…was the fact that clients need to get closer their customers, they need to reduce costs and they need to make IT an essential part of the business.
In particular, three main themes came through from the CIOs we talked within the study. Number one…they want to simplify deployment and management, which means they want an easy way to deploy new servers and manage the complexity in their IT environment; which ultimately leads to a desire for cloud infrastructure. Number two…they need to improve visibility for better decision making. In order to achieve this, they need to access data in the most efficient way and deliver it faster so that users can make decisions more quickly Number three….they must increase business agility and flexibility. Systems need to be optimized for specific workloads with bottlenecks removed. Clients want to make the most of the infrastructure they have rather than being expected to rip and replace every time we need to do more. These are real world challenges that have to be solved…
As we listened to clients and their top business imperatives it’s clear they need a new way IT model to support their business. The good news is any enterprise can reverse the IT conundrum and address their top challenges by designing, tuning, and managing their IT infrastructure in this new era we call Smarter Computing. This new era is made possible by the integration of big data, analyzed through optimized systems that are managed as a cloud. The combination of these capabilities can enable any enterprise to drive innovation while doubling IT capacity for the delivery of service on a flat IT budget. This new era is realized by designing IT as a system that incorporates big data for better decision making…Optimized Systems for superior economics…. and Cloud to reinvent business processes and drive innovation. Any enterprise can enter this new era by architecting an IT infrastructure that is designed for data, tuned to the task, and managed as a cloud. Big data is designed to remove barriers by harnessing all available information and unlocking insights to make informed choices. Optimized Systems remove financial barriers by driving greater efficiency and performance for each workload. By managing through a cloud clients can remove barriers to rapid delivery of new services and realize IT without boundaries to reinvent business processes and drive innovation. IBM can help any enterprise proceed with a strategic, staged approach to smarter computing. Each step leads to an IT infrastructure that is integrated, automated and secured. To get real business advantage, do all three things together and design your IT as a holistic system. And, finally, x86 systems are now a part of this conversation in designing holistic IT solutions. It wasn’t so long ago that they were not. With innovation like IBM X-Architecture and eX5 we have literally taken the PC out of the PC server. Today’s x86 systems have matured to sophisticated enterprise-class solutions. As you will hear from others, today, we are announcing new IBM System x and BladeCenter solutions that take x86 computing to the next level and are a key component of any business that is working towards becoming a winner in the next era of computing. Now, I’d like to introduce Bob Galush, our WW Vice President of IBM System x to talk about our new offerings in more detail.
Thank you Adalio, I’m excited to speak with you today. I’d like to talk about innovation first. When clients are able to manage their IT infrastructure in a more cloud-like fashion, optimize systems for their workloads and can leverage all of the data in their enterprise, they can achieve dramatically improved economics and performance. IBM is continuing to drive innovation to enable smarter computing solutions in cloud, optimized systems, and analytics, and we’re going to talk in more detail about each of the areas today.
Let’s start with cloud. Cloud has become a big buzzword lately and with good reason. IBM has invested heavily in cloud technologies and we know that these types of deployments have several things in common. For cloud technologies you need several things: 1. You need to enable self service automation. That’s why we’ve introduced the IBM SmartCloud portfolio to provide on demand access to shared computing resources. 2. If you are working with cloud technologies, you are virtualizing. Clients have had tremendous success with IBM Virtual Fabric delivering dedicated bandwidth for virtual machines for faster networking, and today we are announcing that 10GbE Virtual Fabric is now available integrated across a number of our 2 socket systems that will reduce the cost of adopting this technology. 3. One of the things that has frustrated clients is the lack of an industry standard solution for how to manage networking at the virtualization layer. With the recently announced IBM Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V, clients can now use industry standard technology for advanced control and automation of virtual servers. 4. IBM has a number of exclusive tools for cloud environments notably VMControl and VMready, that can discover and manage physical and virtual resources and traffic to simplify management of the overall network. If you can deliver on all of these areas, then you have a very powerful, innovative set of cloud capabilities that will simplify your deployment and management. From BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud, to SmartCloud Entry on BladeCenter or System x, to advanced cloud we can deliver the solution you need depending on where your needs are.
Now I want to talk about a great, unique example of how one of our clients is enabling the cloud for remote users all across the globe. If you have ever used a Smartphone to watch a video or deal with any type of multimedia, chances are you have utilized Bytemobile technology without even realizing it. Bytemobile helps service providers improve the utilization and performance of their existing network capacity so that end clients get an optimized experience. And they are building it all on IBM BladeCenter. Using our brand new IBM BladeCenter HS23 server with enhancements to their software, Bytemobile has been able to achieve 2.5 times the performance boost over the previous generation. They did this through their own expertise and the help of IBM innovation, including double the 10GbE capacity on their blades, as well as our iFlow network load balancing software.
Now, optimized systems. One of the things we hear over and over is that clients want to get up and running quickly. So we’ve developed IBM FastSetup to automate deployment tasks on IBM BladeCenter. From now on, clients will be able to use a wizard to deploy new systems and cut their deployment time dramatically . This feature will be available across a host of our Blade servers and clients that have tested it have really loved it. Networking is continuing to become a more critical piece of the IT infrastructure, so we’ve worked hard to ensure that IBM clients can deploy the right network infrastructure for their needs. 10Gb Ethernet is here today, so all of our new systems have the ability to ship with integrated 10GbE for the high bandwidth. By the same token , we know that many clients have invested a lot in their 1GbE infrastructure, and they are not going to rip that out immediately and go to 10GbE. So these new systems support 1GbE as well and in most cases with double the ports. Warm water cooling innovation with improved efficiency and performance at the same time, and we’ll talk about this more in a minute. Lastly, management tools are critical to optimized systems. We’ve invested a lot in continuing our leadership in this area with things like IMM2 and UEFI to enable easier and better tools for clients to manage their systems optimally.
We are very proud to have with us representatives from LRZ at Cebit. We’ve been working with LRZ in Germany to design their new SuperMUC supercomputer on our iDataPlex platform. The SuperMUC is going to have a really unique warm water cooling innovation deployment. Using warm water enables the SuperMUC to do a number of things: Increase performance by direct cooling of the processor Improve energy efficiency by eliminating the need to cool the datacenter or the water. improve energy efficiency further by using the water to warm the facility. A lot of people say why warm water and it's because the warm water allows you to keep processors and memory in their ideal temperature range which is not cold but is warm. This technology is up to 40% more energy-efficient than the air cooled versions and you can get about 90% heat recovery, which then can be used in other parts of the facility for heating and warm water usage.
We’ve seen an explosion of growth in the areas of analytics and we’ve responded to that with a number of IBM innovations. You may have heard about eXflash, our exclusive SSD technology that delivers incredible performance on eX5 systems. I am happy to tell you that this same technology is now available on our #1 selling x3650 M4 server which we are introducing today. The next thing we see is that analytics workloads can use all the memory available to them. Our new systems support up to 4 times the memory of previous generations. 768GB! The new Intel Xeon processors in these systems deliver up to 80% better performance than previous generations. Analytics workloads are all about analyzing data. When that data is stored remotely, clients need to get to it fast so the systems can do the work. Our new systems with IBM Virtual Fabric support FCoE and iSCSI for high speed connectivity to stored data.
Now I want to talk to you about another client, one that has had great success with IBM Smart analytics System running on IBM System x with IBM SW and Storage. GS Retail was able to achieve 30% lower TCO by improving the performance of their analytics workload. They did this by 2.5x faster batch processing, and 60% reduction in data by compressing it using the IBM Smart Analytics System
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about solutions and innovation; and you may have been wondering, “where are the servers?” Well, we have a number of new systems that are the foundation for our solutions going forward. These 5 systems provide a solid foundation for your smarter computing efforts with: Industry-leading performance Innovative technology Designed for flexibility and growth Integrated 10Gb Networking (Virtual Fabric) High-capacity, high-performance memory New system management firmware Feature on Demand
Let’s look at these systems in more detail, starting with the IBM BladeCenter HS23. This new system has been optimized for performance and highly scalable I/O . This system can deliver up to 62% great performance over our last system so you can run more VMs or more workloads. clients in need of 10GbE can deploy with up to 30% lower cost because we’ve integrated our 10GbE Virtual fabric into the system. Because HS23 has IBM Virtual Fabric built in, it can also run storage protocols FCoE and iSCSI with a feature on demand upgrade. One of the things we are proud of with the BladeCenter portfolio is the complete investment protection clients have had with 10 years of support for this infrastructure. You can put an HS23 in the same chassis you’ve been running for years. No one else can say that. Let's take a look at the new System x 3650 M4. The 3650 is IBM's number one selling server. This is a great system for business critical application workloads And it’s a performance leadership system with 3 #1 benchmarks right at launch, for TPC-E, SAP, and Spec Virt. As our #1 selling system, we’ve designed it with tremendous flexibility in terms of memory, storage and networking. It will support up to 768GB of memory with 24 slots so you can maximize or you can optimize with lower cost dimms in more slots. In addition to 2.5” and 3.5” drives, eXFlash is available in this system for the first time, and you can not get better internal storage performance anywhere than you can with exFlash. It also has 4 1GbE ports and available integrated 10G virtual fabric. Virtual fabric means not only high performance 10GbE, but also the ability for Feature on Demand upgrades to Fcoe or iSCSI storage protocols. Without the need to add additional adapter to the system. Now let’s looks at the x3550. This system delivers all the performance of the x3650 but in a 1u form factor for dense environments. You get all the memory, support for 1G or 10G with Virtual Fabric, 2.5 or 3.5” drives, leadership reliability from IBM in a 1U system. Now ,the new System x iDataPlex DX360 M4. The DX360 M4 is part of the iDataPlex system and it just offers superb density and flexibility. Overall, iDataPlex is designed for data centers that require high-performance, yet are constrained on floor space, power and cooling infrastructure. However, I would like to note that the DX360 M4 is perfectly capable of fitting into any standard rack and with its shorter depth will offer a lot more cooling and space for components of the backside of the rack. So it's good for either environment or either situation. The iDataPlex DX360 M4 is often used in high-performance computing situations and intelligent clusters, and it offers a lot in these areas. It has optional integrated InfiniBand for HPC environments. LRZ is deploying warm water cooling technology, but this system is available with standard cooling as well. Additionally, the DX360 supports up to four graphic processing units per 2U chassis, which gives it a lot of computing power for high-performance workloads and environments. The new System x 3500 M4 is perfect for distributed branch offices or medium business. It has just a tremendous amount of expandability and room for growth. it can hold up to 32-2 .5” hard drives which give you plenty of room for growth before you have to go to external storage. The 3500 M4 also supports virtual fabric and it too has four integrated gigabit Ethernet ports. So it just has a lot of connectivity for that is so important to today’s workloads.
We’ve talked a lot today about solutions and innovation. IBM has had and will continue to expand on the number of targeted solutions to help our clients deeply the right workloads for smarter computing. And last week we announced a new and exciting program that encourages our Business Partners to deliver these solutions to clients, for our Business Partners, more information on that can be found on IBM Partnerworld’s web site
We want to leave you with a few closing thoughts before our Panel discussion. Everyone likes to say that their products are the best. The question is who can back that up with things like: - being #1 in customer sat for the last 10 straight quarters, - having the most x86 systems in the top500 supercomputing list, - 23 leadership benchmarks in 2011 alone, to have 80% of Fortune 500 companies using your cloud technology and with a leadership networking portfolio? No one can. Except IBM. IBM is proud to be continuing our commitment to innovation and quality in this segment and we are confident these offerings will continue to lead the market in terms of performance, reliability and quality. Now, I’d like to introduce our special guests to share their insights with us.
Dr Herbert Huber is head of the Group Compute Server at LRZ that we spoke of earlier and (Scott will complete and confirm with Dr Huber) Lisa Graff is Vice President in the Intel Architecture Group and General Manager of the Platform Engineering Group in the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. She is responsible for engineering for data center platform-level components, technologies, initiatives and standards as well as cross platform execution management, operations, and customer technical support.
One of the things we are really proud of is that we have a set of solutions here that can fit the needs of clients whatever the level of cloud infrastructure they want, and we’ve made it easy for clients to transition if and when they choose to do so. Some clients hear a lot about the benefits of cloud, but what they really want is a comprehensive virtualized infrastructure that they can easily deploy. For a simple virtualization deployment, we offer a comprehensive set of components that includes the systems, networking, storage, and integrated management that will allow clients to quickly and easily deploy. And, with BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud we’ve even made the ordering process simple. Clients that want a true private cloud environment can look to our SmartCloud software. Even here we have different levels based on how deeply clients want to deploy cloud. SmartCloud Entry, which is available on System x or BladeCenter servers, provides the basic cloud administration and is perfect for clients that want to take advantage of the benefits of cloud. For clients that want all the bells and whistles of advanced cloud stack with service orchestration and scheduling, we have that covered as well.
The first system we’re going to look at is the IBM BladeCenter HS23. This new system has been optimized for performance and highly scalable I/O . In fact, clients in need of 10GbE can deploy with up to 30% lower cost because we’ve integrated our 10GbE Virtual fabric into the system. This system can deliver up to 62% great performance over our last system so you can run more VMs or more workloads. One of the things we touched on earlier is the new Fast Setup tool which is going to make deployment times easier and faster. Because HS23 has IBM Virtual Fabric built in, it can also run storage protocols FCoE and iSCSI with a feature on demand upgrade One of the things we proud of with the BladeCenter portfolio is the complete investment protection clients have had with 10 years of support for this infrastructure. You can put an HS23 in the same chassis you’ve been running for years. No one else can say that.
Let's take a look at the new System x 3650 M4. The 3650 is IBM's number one selling server. This is a great system for business critical application workloads And it’s a performance leadership system with 3 #1 benchmarks right at launch, for TPC-E, SAP, and Spec Virt. As our #1 selling system, we’ve designed it with tremendous flexibility in terms of memory, storage and networking. It will support up to 768GB of memory with 24 slots so you can maximize or you can optimize with lower cost dimms in more slots. In addition to 2.5” and 3.5” drives, eXFlash is available in this system for the first time, and you can not get better internal storage performance anywhere than you can with eXflash. It also has 4 1GbE ports and available integrated 10G virtual fabric. Virtual fabric means not only high performance 10GbE, but also the ability for Feature on Demand upgrades to FCoE or iSCSI storage protocols. Without the need to add additional adapter to the system.
Now let’s looks at the x3550. This system deliver all the performance of the x3650 but in a 1u form factor for dense environments. You get all the memory, support for 1G or 10G with Virtual Fabric, 2.5 or 3.5” drives, leadership reliability from IBM in a 1U system.
the new System x 3500 M4 is perfect for distributed branch offices or medium business. It has just a tremendous amount of expandability and room for growth. it can hold up to 32-2 .5” hard drives which give you plenty of room for growth before you have to go to external storage. The 3500 M4 also supports virtual fabric and it too has four integrated gigabit Ethernet ports. So it just has a lot of connectivity for that is so impotent to today’s workloads.
Now ,the new System x iDataPlex DX360 M4. The DX360 M4 is part of the iDataPlex system and it just offers superb density and flexibility. Overall, iDataPlex is designed for data centers that require high-performance, yet are constrained on floor space, power and cooling infrastructure. However, I would like to note that the DX360 M4 is perfectly capable of fitting into any standard rack and with its shorter depth will offer a lot more cooling and space for components of the backside of the rack. So it's good for either environment or either situation. The iDataPlex DX360 M4 is often used in high-performance computing situations and intelligent clusters, and it offers a lot in these areas. It has optional integrated InfiniBand for HPC environments. This is the system LRZ is using. LRZ is deploying warm water cooling technology, but this system is available with standard cooling as well. Additionally, the DX360 supports up to four graphic processing units per 2U chassis, which gives it a lot of computing power for high-performance workloads and environments.