IBM Unveils Information Server Blade to Help Enterprises Manage Information Overload

LINUXWORLD CONFERENCE AND EXPO -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today 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, 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, 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, and 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 2007. For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/integration/info_server/blade/

IBM Global Financing Improves Blade Server Financing

IBM Global Financing also announced today the IBM BladeCenter Flexible Choice offering through which a BladeCenter chassis can be leased for up to 60 months with low lease payments, eliminating the risk of technology obsolescence. Individual blades that are regularly updated or replaced with new technology can be leased for a shorter period -- 24 to 36 months -- so they can be conveniently refreshed to keep up with technology upgrades.