IBM Rolls Out New Integrated Data Protection Solutions
IBM has announced a new suite of integrated data protection solutions intended to provide customers with improved business continuity and recovery of data and applications, as well as the ability to address compliance across customer data centers and remote offices. The new Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack software is based on technology acquired in IBM's acquisition of FilesX earlier this year. Part of IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager line, the new software expands IBM's existing enterprise data protection solutions with capabilities to help protect data that resides outside managed servers, on remote networks.
The TSM Fastback delivers "great complementary technology" to the IBM data protection portfolio, which already includes Tivoli Storage Manager, IBM's flagship enterprise product, as well as the Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files, which is targeted at SMB customers as well as laptop and desktop users, John Connor, product manager for TSM and TSM Fastback, IBM, told 5 Minute Briefing. TSM Fastback "fits very well" between those two for smaller companies as well as the remote branch offices of enterprises. "We really feel now we have got a great end-to-end story," he noted.
The new products include IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for continuous data protection and near-instant recovery technology for Windows file servers and applications including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, Lotus Domino, Oracle, DB2 and others; IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Microsoft Exchange for quick restore of individual Exchange objects such as email messages and attachments, contact lists, calendars, tasks and journal entries; and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Bare Machine Recovery to help users easily recover entire systems to a comparable server, to a new server with different hardware or to a virtual machine. A fourth offering, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack Center, combines the three Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack products into a single bundled offering for ease of sale and deployment, said Connor.
IBM System Storage DS4000 and IBM System Storage DS3000 select models have been added to the suite of storage products intended to integrate with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack to provide SMB customers with comprehensive data recovery and business continuity solutions. The new IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack solutions will be available August 15, 2008. For more information on the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager family, go here.
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Rackable Taps IBM Blades for “Rugged” Data Center Deployments
Rackable Systems and IBM announced that Rackable would offer IBM's BladeCenter servers inside Rackable's ICE Cube modular data centers. The ICE Cube will be outfitted with IBM's most rugged, high performance BladeCenter systems, designed for harsh environments and demanding conditions. IBM BladeCenter integrates servers, networks, storage, and business applications in a single efficient system making it suitable for packing large amounts of computing power into portable data center environments. As part of this agreement, IBM BladeCenter will be the only blade server platform available for custom ICE Cube implementations globally.
The ICE Cube modular data center solution will be outfitted with IBM BladeCenter T or HT systems, which meet Network Equipment-Building System (NEBS) Level 3/ European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) requirements, so are "ideal" for use in telecommunications environments and carrier facilities, according to the companies. The blades are designed to withstand extreme environments where modular data centers are often deployed.
"IBM offers a number of different types of blades and a number of chassis that those blades go into - like books on a bookshelf. The type of blade chassis that has been selected here are those that are termed 'NEBS-compliant' or 'ETSI-compliant' - but what that really means is that they have been ruggedized," Tim Dougherty, director of BladeCenter strategy for IBM, told 5 Minute Briefing.
They are intended to withstand jostling and high temperature variations and are well suited to a container type of environment that could include transport on a truck or ship and deployment in an oil field or a mining area, Dougherty explained. With those attributes, Dougherty noted IBM has had "good success" selling this particular type of blade to both telecommunications companies and the military. They also fit "very nicely" into the environment that Rackable is already creating. "They have their container already, they do sell their own servers within the container - and it turns out our blades fit very nicely into there," said Dougherty. The selection of the IBM blades for the ICE Cube also gives Rackable "a new tool in their sales kit," he added.
The ICE Cube is available in 20- or 40-foot container sizes. BladeCenter-specific configurations of ICE Cube will allow Rackable Systems' enterprise customers to reach densities up to 1,344 dual socket, Quad core Intel Xeon blades, or 672 quad socket, dual core AMD Opteron blades. For more information on Rackable Systems' ICE Cube with IBM BladeCenter, go here. For more on IBM BladeCenter, go here.
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Emulex LightPulse HBAs Certified for VMware Environments
Emulex Corp. announced that its LightPulse family of 8Gb/s host bus adapters (HBAs) is now certified for use with the VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors. Emulex 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs are intended to offer the I/O bandwidth and scalability to support an increase in the number of applications running on the VMware platform, while enabling transition to next-generation SAN technology. Emulex HBA drivers are included with VMware ESX and ESXi, providing customers with a supported configuration. VMware had supported Emulex's previous-generation 4Gb/s products as well.
An increasing number of companies are adopting server virtualization technologies - and in particular the VMware ESX platform - in their data centers as they try to maximize utilization of their server resources, Scott McIntyre, vice president of customer marketing, Emulex, observed to 5 Minute Briefing. The increase in virtual machines is resulting in higher workloads on each server, driving much more demand for I/O bandwidth on those servers and higher speed I/O connectivity technologies such as 8Gb fibre channel, he said.
As companies try to maximize utilization of their servers through storage networking technology, an important consideration is having an I/O connection that is efficient in terms of the way it utilizes CPU resources, McIntyre said. "That is one of the great things about fibre channel – most of the processing is done on the Emulex HBA and that frees up server resources for application processing," he said.
Emulex LightPulse HBAs include advanced Virtual HBA technology with support for industry-standard N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), which enables customers to "virtualize" SAN connections so that each virtual machine has independent access to its own protected storage. Benefits of such a configuration include the ability to track and chargeback the I/O throughput, storage traffic and utilization at the user and virtual machine level.
"Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs deliver significantly higher I/O performance to better accommodate increased storage networking traffic," said McIntyre. "By providing greater bandwidth, Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs enable VMware customers to more fully realize the benefits of server virtualization, including higher processor utilization and lower power and cooling costs." For more information, go here.
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FalconStor Certifies Solutions with QLogic
FalconStor Software, provider of TOTALLY Open data protection solutions, and QLogic Corp., a high-performance computing networking vendor, announced that FalconStor has certified QLogic 8Gb fibre channel adapters and SANbox switches for use with the FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL), FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP), and FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) solutions. The combination of these solutions will help improve the performance and scalability of FalconStor storage virtualization, data protection, and disaster recovery solutions, the vendor said.
QLogic 8Gb fibre channel solutions are designed to address the increasing need of enterprise-class business applications for maximum performance. The quest for higher performance "seems to be a never-ending battle," Peter Eicher, product-marketing manager for FalconStor, told 5 Minute Briefing. "Whenever you get to one level it seems the applications grow to the point that you need another level." Major data centers "are always trying to squeeze out another ounce of performance - and this is fairly significant since it is a doubling of throughput speed," he added. 8Gb fibre channel doubles the performance of existing 4Gb fibre channel products while maintaining backward compatibility with the installed base of 4Gb and 2Gb fibre channel solutions.
The FalconStor VTL provides large organizations with high-performance enterprise-level disk-based data protection to meet backup demands, simplify tape management, and enhance tape security. According to FalconStor, by using an 8GB fibre channel SAN, FalconStor VTL shrinks the backup window and improves the speed and dependability of data backup and recovery, as well as SLAs.
FalconStor CDP provides disk-based data protection to enable continuous application availability for physical and virtual environments. The 8GB fibre channel support allows for more effective data replication and recovery, while enabling FalconStor Software's backup acceleration features to shrink the backup windows by eight times. The faster speed also improves SLAs and enhances the FalconStor MicroScan replication and compression feature within FalconStor CDP and NSS, to minimize network bandwidth requirements.
FalconStor NSS storage virtualization solution offers enterprise-class performance and heterogeneous storage management, the vendor said. By taking advantage of an 8Gb fibre channel SAN; application performance speed and SLAs are enhanced. "We were able to certify three products in one shot because we are built on a common platform," said Eicher. For more information, go here.
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IBM Plans to Acquire Business Rules Vendor
IBM and ILOG have signed an agreement for IBM to acquire ILOG, a business rules management systems vendor, for about $340 million. Through the proposed transaction, IBM will combine its business process management (BPM), business optimization, and service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies with ILOG's Business Rules Management Systems software.
ILOG's board of directors has approved the transaction between the two companies and is expected to give a final recommendation prior to September 15, following which the offer should be filed with the French stock exchange authority (AMF).
According to IBM, the acquisition of ILOG will strengthen IBM's BPM and SOA position by providing customers a full set of rule management tools for complete information and application lifecycle management across a comprehensive platform including IBM's WebSphere application development and management platform. ILOG offers tools and technologies for business managers, analysts, architects and developers to use as they analyze, plan, track and improve business processes.
ILOG technology has the potential to add "significant capability" across IBM's entire software platform and bolster its existing rules management offerings, the company said. This includes improved rules and business optimization capabilities for Information Management offerings, better visualization for Lotus products, enhanced optimization within Tivoli solutions, and efficient supply chain management assets for planning and scheduling.
"Companies across all industries are looking for technologies to help them manage their processes with more flexibility so they can keep up with changing business conditions," said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM WebSphere, in making the announcement. "ILOG's software allows businesses to more effectively manage and automate the decision-making process, giving companies an opportunity to react with incredible speed and accuracy." IBM has partnered with ILOG for over a decade, Rosamilia said. For more information about ILOG, go here.
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