IBM has launched a new set of solutions designed to tackle the challenges of improving security, managing and analysing vast amounts of data, cloud-computing utility and mainframe technologies billed as a new addition to the enterprise Power Systems family. Spending over $1.4 billion on research and development per annum, IBM has developed its enterprise Power Systems with new hardware and software innovations designed to help customers gain business insights fast and securely. The System and Technology Group Manager at IBM Egypt Ahmed Bourham said “this announcement reflects the continued focus of IBM on smarter computing systems, aimed at solving the varied and intensifying challenges organisations are facing." Power 770 and Power 780 servers now the feature Power7+ microprocessor, offering a performance boost of 30 to 40 per cent on application workloads compared to previous issues; at the top of the Power line, the Power 795 server has been enhanced to enable customers to run very demanding applications, such as business analytics. IBM has added several new capabilities to its family of Power Systems servers, dubbed the Elastic Capacity on Demand for Power Systems Pools, in order to enable the sharing of resources across multiple servers. “When managing a cloud-based infrastructure with IBM PowerVM virtualisation software, customers can now more easily move individual server partitions to quickly balance resources in reaction to changing business needs. Single virtual machines can be moved three times faster and concurrent migrations can occur up to 4.7 times faster than with previous versions,” IBM said in a statement. The average corporate IT infrastructure is cyber-attacked nearly 60,000 times every day and the average total organisational cost of a data breach is $5.5 million, making security one of the top priorities of enterprise organisations. On the other hand, IT managers have been facing continuous dynamic challenges because of the massive data volumes, which do not only stress system performance and manageability, but also affects security as well. The IBM System Storage DS8870 is the newest member of the company's DS8000 family of “high-density" enterprise class storage systems; it delivers up to three times more performance for transaction processing applications than the current DS8800 model. IBM also had updated the IBM Virtualisation Engine TS7700 Release 3, which is a system that melds virtualisation with magnetic tape; this system is an update of the TS7700 Enterprise Virtual Tape Library System. The new solution of Big Data Technical Computing includes IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS), an advanced file management platform often used in high performance computing environments for storing and delivering large volumes of data for weather modelling, oil exploration and digital media production. Moreover, IBM announced software offerings for IBM's newest mainframe – the “zEnterprise EC12" which helps clients operate their IT more efficiently and make good use of critical information to extract statistical data concerning their activities, and to provide better service to clients.
